Domino Sugar Taps Cushman & Wakefield To Sell 33-Acre Waterfront Refinery Site
Less than a year after shutting down its refinery along the Hudson River, Domino Sugar's parent company is looking to sell the property to kick off a massive waterfront development just north of New York City.
American Sugar Refining tapped Cushman & Wakefield to market the 33-acre site at 1 Federal St. in Yonkers as “The Refinery District,” the brokerage announced this week. The land can accommodate more than 2,600 residential units across 2.6M SF of development, as well as support retail, commercial and community uses.
“This is a great opportunity to acquire the last significant development parcel along the Yonkers waterfront,” Cushman & Wakefield Managing Director Ryan Dowd said in a statement. “With its unmatched scale, recent rezoning to allow for mixed-use development, and the ongoing public and private investment along the waterfront, this site is uniquely positioned to support a dynamic, transit-oriented destination that will shape the next chapter of Yonkers’ evolution.”
Dowd, Gary Gabriel, Niko Nicolaou, Matt Torrance, Michael Flynn and JP Hohl are marketing the site.
The parcel sits between the Yonkers and Ludlow stations on the Metro-North Railroad's Hudson Line, less than a 45-minute ride to Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan. It's roughly a mile from the Bronx's northern border.
Domino Sugar acquired the cane sugar refinery in 1990, but it was in use for more than 130 years, The Journal News/LoHud reported. As of 2020, it processed more than 4 million pounds of sugar a day.
West Palm Beach-based American Sugar Refining announced in June it planned to shutter the refinery by the end of 2025 and relocate its operations to its plant in Upstate New York. Roughly 300 workers were laid off. Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano, while expressing disappointment at the loss of jobs, said he was excited about the refinery's real estate potential.
In a post on Facebook at the time, Spano said the site “is one of the most valuable properties from here to Albany.”
“We see this as another opportunity to continue the transformation happening in Yonkers,” Spano wrote. “Housing and recreation are the best uses for the Hudson waterfront these days, and our role will be to see that the interests of all Yonkers residents are met going forward.”
More than 2,000 apartments have been built along the Yonkers waterfront since 2018, according to Cushman, part of a development wave across Westchester County's biggest cities in recent years. Approximately 9,400 units were delivered between 2021 and 2024 in the four largest cities in the county — New Rochelle, White Plains, Yonkers and Mount Vernon — while just 3,100 were built in the rest of the suburban jurisdiction, according to an RM Friedland report.
Whoever develops the former refinery will be following in the footsteps of Two Trees Development, which acquired the shuttered Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg and converted it into a 19-story office building to anchor a $2.5B mixed-use campus with roughly 2,800 apartments and a 5-acre park.
