HAP Investment Developers has been very active across Upper Manhattan, developing small and medium-sized buildings across from East Harlem to Washington Heights (plus a skyscraper in Jersey City, for good measure).
Now, during the Great Dummy Permit Filing Frenzy of September 2014, comes an application for yet another apartment building in Washington Heights, this one much smaller than their 128-unit project at 4452 Broadway. A three-story pile of bricks at 284 Wadsworth Avenue, denuded of whatever ornament they may have once had, will give way to a new six-story, 10-unit residential building, wedged onto the 24-foot lot.
The average apartment size in the 9,500-square foot building is 775 square feet, suggesting it will be rentals.
HAP is one of the more innovative developers in Upper Manhattan, building in a range of modern styles and using a few different architects. They’re probably remembered best for the light blue and purple design by Karim Rashid at 329 Pleasant Avenue. But they’re equally capable of hiring architects with more staid designs, such as the Highbridge on West 167th Street, designed by Daniel Goldner. (He’s also doing an 11-story building for them in East Harlem, for which permits were filed on Friday.)
For 284 Wadsworth, the architect indicated on the permit is Design AIDD, led by Pratt graduate Andrea Harris.
The building will sit on a block that still has a number of semi-detached three-story homes, which somehow survived the frenzied tenement and garden apartment boom that occurred in Washington Heights a century ago as the subway opened it up for more intense development. And with Upper Manhattan now well into the throes of gentrification and these houses sitting on land zoned for tenement-scale density, its neighbors are not long for this world.
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