The Hotel Bossert Is Becoming Brooklyn's First Ritz-Carlton Residences
The Hotel Bossert reopens in 2029 as The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Brooklyn Heights: sixty-one homes inside a 1909 landmark at 98 Montague Street that has stood empty for more than a decade. It is the brand's first residence in Brooklyn and the fiftieth standalone residence in its global portfolio.
Brooklyn is the new part, not New York. The Ritz-Carlton Residences, New York, NoMad has been selling penthouses in Manhattan since 2023. What has not existed before is a branded residence of any kind in the borough.
The residences
Sixty-one homes in a building that ran as a hotel with three hundred and seventy-five rooms, which works out to roughly four per floor rather than twenty-six. Public plans describe the mix as primarily three and four bedrooms.
The building comes with a twenty-four-hour attended lobby, dedicated residential services, and amenities for wellness, leisure and entertaining. Owners are enrolled in ONVIA, Marriott's recognition programme for residence owners, which carries benefits across the group's portfolio. SERHANT. New Development is handling sales, led by Ravi Kantha and the Kantha Team.
Union Square Hospitality Group takes roughly three thousand two hundred square feet at street level for its first full-service Brooklyn restaurant, expected to open around 2028. Danny Meyer's group has been building restaurants in New York for forty years and has not put a full-service one in the borough until now.
The building
Louis Bossert made his money in Brooklyn lumber and opened this corner in 1909. Helmle & Huberty gave him fourteen storeys of Italian Renaissance Revival in cream brick and terra-cotta, with a granite and limestone base, arched openings at street level, cast-iron balconies and lion's-head keystones. It took both transient and permanent guests, and Brooklyn called it the Waldorf-Astoria of Brooklyn.
The rooftop was the reason. The Marine Roof opened in 1916, a two-level restaurant built to resemble the promenade deck of a ship, fourteen floors up with views across the East River to Manhattan. Freddy Martin's band played there through the early 1930s, and some of his earliest recordings were credited to the Hotel Bossert Orchestra. It closed in 1949. Several Brooklyn Dodgers lived in the building during the 1950s, and when the team beat the Yankees in the 1955 World Series, fans gathered in the lobby and serenaded the manager, Walter Alston.
The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society leased space from 1983 and bought the building in 1988. The restoration they finished in 1991 won a Preservation Award from the New York Landmarks Conservancy: they rebuilt the collapsed Marine Roof structure and re-laid more than two thousand five hundred square feet of the marble lobby, going back to the original Italian quarry for the stone. The building sold in 2012 for eighty-one million dollars to buyers who planned a three-hundred-and-two-room hotel. It never opened, and the building went through delays and then foreclosure. SomeraRoad acquired it in May 2025 for one hundred million dollars and partnered with Marriott International on the conversion. The firm's founder and managing principal, Ian Ross, is a Brooklyn Heights local.
What Landmarks approved
Brooklyn Heights became New York City's first historic district on 23 November 1965, and the Bossert sits inside it, so every exterior change needs the Landmarks Preservation Commission's approval. The commission sent the proposal back for revisions in June 2026 and approved the revised version unanimously on 1 September 2026.
A fifteenth floor with a courtyard goes on the roof, with the thirteenth and fifteenth floors pushed back and the cladding darkened so the addition reads as secondary to the historic mass. The upper cornice was simplified, the new windows regularised to match the existing pattern, and the mechanical equipment relocated to reduce its visibility from the street. At ground level a blind opening becomes a window, and the glass balconies in the earlier scheme give way to black metal slabs and picket railings. The facade restoration covers the brick, the terra-cotta cornice, the granite and limestone base, the arched windows and the ironwork. SLCE Architects is the architect of record, with Higgins Quasebarth & Partners advising on preservation.
The block
Montague Street ends two blocks west of the building at the Promenade. The district around it has been brownstone and low-rise by law since 1965, and the Bossert stands several storeys clear of its neighbours, with sightlines to the harbour and Lower Manhattan.
Court Street and Borough Hall sit a few minutes east with the 2, 3, 4, 5 and R. Clark Street is two blocks north on the 2 and 3. High Street on the A and C is a short walk toward the bridge, and Jay Street MetroTech adds the F. Lower Manhattan is one stop. Brooklyn Bridge Park and DUMBO are downhill and north.
Construction begins in late 2026. The restaurant is expected around 2028 and the building completes in 2029.
