Newark’s Broad Street used to be the place to go to buy a piano. The Griffith Piano Company had one of the best remembered showrooms and its former 17-story headquarters, listed on the National Register, has just reopened as apartments after a long-awaited renovation.
After decades left vacant, the building’s current owners — Park Developers & Builders — are finally leasing out the 78-unit apartment building. The project is also one of the city’s most expensive office-to-residential conversions alongside projects like 1180 Raymond Boulevard and the Walker House.
“It’s been a long time coming that this building got done,” said architect Patrick Lesbirel, principal at Brick City Reconstruction, the firm that has worked on the project since 2018. “This was one of the hardest buildings to get done because of its shape and size. Many developers don’t want to do this work — it’s very labor intensive.”
The building is opening at a time when Military Park is suddenly flush with new units — another 333-unit building at 930 McCarter Highway is leasing and both NJPAC’s 350-unit ArtSide project and the 250-unit Museum Parq are under construction. It has created a war among property management firms competing for tenants, according to Mayra Revelo, a leasing agent for MIG Real Estate.
“We keep checking Zillow throughout the day and adjusting our prices,” Revelo said.
However, Anthony Marin, CEO MIG Real Estate, believes the 98-year-old building offers something unique in downtown Newark.
“We’re selling the history of the building,” Marin said.
The Griffith Piano Company was founded in 1917 and had locations in Paterson, Passaic, and Newark. The firm — owned by Parker Griffith — opened in Newark that year on a building on the same lot. Lauter, Wissner, and Standard Piano were all located nearby on Broad Street. In 1928, the new building opened for business — making it just shy of 100 years old — and was designed by architect George Elwood Jones, who is responsible for some of Newark’s most iconic buildings like the Riviera Hotel.
Not only did the Griffith Piano Company occupy the building but athe Wurlitzer Piano Company, known for its organs, also had offices at 605-607 Broad Street. Griffith’s office was located in the penthouse, where MIG Real Estate held a mixer last week, which is one of the 78 units available for lease and has panoramic views of downtown Newark.
In 1938, Griffith’s wife, Lena Griffith, founded the Griffith Music Foundation and was responsible for booking some of the greatest talents of the day that performed at the 300-seat performance hall in the building and at Symphony Hall, known as the Mosque Theater at the time. The raised stage on the building’s second floor still exists and Marin said there are talks of reviving Newark Boys Choir in the form of a charter school inside the building’s commercial space.
In the 1970s, many of the city’s landmarks were falling into foreclosure. This included the Military Park Hotel, the Broadmark Building, and the Griffith Piano Building, which was finally sold for $10,000 at a public auction that only had one bidder — an indication of downtown Newark’s real estate market at the time and the amount of repairs the building needed.
The property changed hands many times — that has been the one constant in the building’s history — and in 1985, the building briefly reopened as a commercial space owned by the Mike Brother’s Development. Developer Miles Berger and the Berger Organization, which also owned the Hahnes’s building next door, had plans to restore the building, but in 2021 the building was sold to Park Developers & Builders.
Architect Lesbirel, whose firm was hired in 2018, said that he believes the fortunes of the Griffith Building serves as a bellwether for the city’s fate.
“I always believed that when this building got done, it means Newark has turned,” he said.
