Cypress Hills Non-Profit Plans an Expansion, 2581 Atlantic Avenue

2581 Atlantic Avenue, image via Google Maps2581 Atlantic Avenue, image via Google Maps

The Institute for Community Living, a Cypress Hills non-profit that offers mental health services to low-income families, plans to dramatically expand its building at 2581 Atlantic Avenue near Broadway Junction.

Alteration applications filed yesterday reveal that the clinic will grow from 9,000 to 35,754 square feet. ICL occupies an attractive turn-of-the-century building with a cornice and tin facade detailing, but they plan to expand a single-story garage at the back of the property.

Clinical rooms, offices, a meeting room, art studio, and library will fill the first floor, and group therapy rooms and more clinic space will occupy the second floor. The third floor will have more offices and conference rooms, and there will be laboratory and sterilization area in the cellar.

The facility sits on Atlantic between Georgia and Alabama Avenues, a block south of the Alabama Avenue J/Z stop, and a 10-minute walk from all the trains at Broadway Junction. The neighborhood is industrially zoned and rather desolate, hemmed in by the elevated and highway-like Atlantic Avenue, an MTA yard, and two elevated subway lines, the J and the L. Besides warehouses and car repair shops, this area is populated with facilities that can’t afford the rent in any other transit-rich part of Brooklyn—homeless shelters, halfway houses, funeral homes, and rehab facilities.

This particular M-1 zone will remain, even after the controversial East New York rezoning is approved. The rezoned area will begin only a block east of ICL at Sheffield Avenue.

Dattner Architects, who are behind some of the city’s highest profile affordable and supportive housing developments, will design the expansion.

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