Come For The Karts, Stay For The Cocktails

A once-abandoned warehouse in a prosperous community in Westchester County is being transformed to serve a highly unusual dual function: kart raceway and conference center.

A drawing of the track at Grand Prix New York Racing, which is to open Dec. 1 in a renovated warehouse in Mount Kisco, N.Y.

Grand Prix New York Racing, one of only a handful of such operations in the nation, is to open Dec. 1 at 333 North Bedford Road in Mount Kisco, N.Y., on a 38-acre site that was a distribution center for Grand Union grocery stores.

Corporate warriors will be able to race against their co-workers in Sodi RX7 European racing karts able to reach 40 miles per hour on two narrow speedways with hairpin turns and elevation changes, all inside the 118,000-square-foot complex.

Participants can also take advantage of 20,000 square feet of event space, a bar and lounge, a restaurant and a game room.

The concept of a kart raceway with amenities is popular in Europe but has not yet caught on in the United States. The closest kart speedway and conference center to New York City is in Braintree, Mass., near Boston.

Indoor go-kart tracks have existed for a while, said Sy Aryeh, a racer of open-wheel race cars and a managing member of Grand Prix New York. He said that about 20 years ago, in Europe, the tracks added amenities to encourage people to stay longer, creating full-service corporate entertainment facilities. And about 10 years ago, with the Boston site, the idea came to the United States.

That was where Mr. Aryeh, a real estate developer, and his partners first saw the concept.

He said he became determined to open his own kart speedway in the New York area as a seven-day-a-week business where individuals and families could race for fun and where companies could bring employees for team-building activities. The charge for individuals is expected to be $25 a race as well as a daily or yearly membership fee, $10 or $50.

Besides competitive racing featuring 10 to 15 karts at a time and pit crew activities, like refueling and tire changes, the complex could offer cocktails in the lounge or even a black-tie dinner. The conference center can accommodate 1,200 people.

His initial problem, Mr. Aryeh said, was finding a site. We started looking about six years ago, he said. We looked at every rooftop in New York City, and every huge building that had large vacant space. We went to all the piers; we went to Randalls Island.

Then we went to the Bronx and the boroughs. We looked at every building in Connecticut, from Bridgeport to Westport to Stamford to Danbury; in Northern New Jersey; on Long Island; and in Westchester.

During this period, Mr. Aryeh said, he ran into about 20 other groups, including the owners of the Braintree complex, that were trying to find a location for a kart raceway in the New York area.

We are the first and only facility of this kind to be approved in New York State out of the 20 groups that have been trying to do it, he said.

Mr. Aryehs real estate broker, Annette Healey, a senior vice president at the commercial brokerage firm CB Richard Ellis, said the enormous warehouse in Mount Kisco had been bought by Diamond Properties, an owner of properties in northern Westchester County, in February 2005. It is about 40 miles from Midtown Manhattan and had been forsaken for a decade after trucks were banned from the Saw Mill River Parkway.

Formerly owned by the billionaire financier Carl C. Icahn, the property was not zoned for multiple tenants, Ms. Healey said. When I called the new owners, they said, No, no, no, we cant subdivide the lot, and its too wacky a concept, she said. But I was just determined.

Eventually, Diamond Properties had the property rezoned and gave Grand Prix New York a chance. It has bookings scheduled over the next two years, many of them bar mitzvahs.

Annual asking rents for industrial space in the area are $12 to $15 a square foot, Ms. Healey said, and Grand Prix New York is paying market rents. The building also has more conventional warehouse tenants, like a heating and air-conditioning distributor, an electronics distributor and a self-storage facility.

Its owners are also negotiating with the Mount Kisco Athletic Club and a sports arena, which may eventually transform the formerly deserted warehouse into a sports complex, she said.

The building is about 93 percent leased right now, said Mark Blandford, a senior vice president of Diamond Properties. This is a good example of adaptive reuse of an existing building — taking a big space and coming up with a use that doesnt involve a lot of trucking that can be disruptive for the community around it.

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