Fuel Terminal Puts $136M of Debt on 14.7 Bronx Waterfront Acres

Sprague Operating Resources recorded a $136,430,000 mortgage and consolidation with Cooperatieve Rabobank’s New York branch on August 28, secured by five contiguous tax lots in Port Morris. Read against city land records, those lots are 641,483 sq ft, or 14.73 acres, of South Bronx waterfront, and they carry 54,189 sq ft of building between them.

Why it matters

Fourteen and a half nearly empty acres on a New York waterfront is the kind of site every land team in the city has drawn a tower on at some point. This mortgage is the clearest available answer to whether it is available, and the answer is no. A consolidated nine-figure lien from a relationship lender is a decade-scale commitment to the existing use, and it is recorded, which makes it a harder signal than any broker conversation. For a developer running South Bronx land, the practical effect is to take the largest privately held waterfront assemblage in the submarket off the board and push the search inland.

The numbers

The collateral is 939 East 138 Street plus 184, 220, 290 and 302 Locust Avenue, on Bronx blocks 2595 and 2597. The largest single lot runs 211,726 sq ft. All five are zoned M3-1, the city’s heaviest manufacturing designation, and all five carry a residential floor area ratio of 0.00, meaning no housing is permitted as of right without a rezoning. Built floor area across the whole assemblage works out to roughly 0.08 of lot area.

The debt has a history. The document references a $56,000,000 mortgage recorded in April 2015, a $56,000,000 agreement in July 2017, and a $130,760,000 consolidation in September 2024. Against that last figure, the August instrument adds $5,670,000 of new principal, which reads as a modest upsizing of an existing facility rather than a recapitalization.

What’s next

The number to watch is not another mortgage, it is a rezoning application. Nothing about a 14.73-acre M3-1 assemblage changes for residential developers until a land use action is filed, and this financing makes that less likely in the near term, not more. Watch instead for whether other Port Morris industrial owners follow with term debt of their own, which would mark the submarket’s operators settling in rather than selling. See the New York market for the rest of today’s records file.