Rockrose To Buy Shuttered Brooklyn Hospital For $100M
The site of the former Long Island College Hospital is being sold to a new developer after a previous attempt to redevelop the Brooklyn property collapsed.
Rockrose is under contract to purchase the full-block Cobble Hill site, which spans 363 Hicks St., 365 Hicks St., 97 Amity St. and 340 Henry St., for $100M, according to a letter from the New York State Attorney General's Office approving the deal.
The State University of New York agreed to sell LICH, which opened in 1858 as a hospital and medical school, to a trust beneficially owned by Rockrose co-founder and CEO Henry Elghanayan and his wife, Nancy, according to the filing from the AG, which was first reported by PincusCo.
Rockrose President Justin Elghanayan declined to comment. There is no indication in the filing of plans for the site.
SUNY had agreed to sell the property to Fortis Property Group in 2014 for $240M after shuttering the hospital, which had been in dire financial straits for years, The Real Deal previously reported.
Despite public opposition to the plan to close the hospital in 2013 and redevelop it, SUNY struck the deal on the condition that Fortis include a medical facility in its development, which a New York University affiliate would build.
Fortis planned to build a billion-dollar complex dubbed River Park, featuring six high-rise apartment buildings and eight townhouses.
But while NYU opened a 165K SF ambulatory care center in 2023, Fortis never proceeded with River Park. SUNY terminated the deal in 2023 and sued Fortis, claiming that the Louis and Joel Kestenbaum-run firm hadn’t made its third and final payment for the site.
Brooklyn-based Fortis has already had to let go of two other pieces of the River Park project, selling them to its lender, Madison Realty Capital, in October 2022 to prevent a UCC foreclosure that MRC had filed for a month earlier. Rockrose bought those sites from MRC in 2024 for $65M.
In addition to SUNY's suit against Fortis over the stalled sale, a Fortis affiliate filed a lawsuit last year against SUNY's LICH holding company over its attempts to sell one of the hospital buildings.
Fortis claimed SUNY had engaged Newmark in 2024 to broker a sale of LICH, but the brokerage allegedly kept Fortis “in the dark” about the sale rather than including it in the list of prospective buyers — despite a 2020 zoning amendment that gave Fortis the “rights to determine whether and how that property may be developed.”
Neither lawsuit is expected to get in the way of the sale to Rockrose, according to the filing from Assistant Attorney General Michele Abeles. Abeles didn't identify the broker who arranged the deal but did note a broker fee of $759K.
Fortis and Newmark didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
After closing costs, SUNY will receive nearly $98M from the deal — less than half what Fortis agreed to pay. It plans to place roughly $88M into a segregated fund to support SUNY Downstate healthcare facilities, including the University Hospital at Downstate in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, according to the AG filing.
