The public component of the Broadway Triangle rezoning – designating the land bounded by Broadway, Union, and Flushing avenues for residential development – may have been halted amidst controversy over whom the plan benefits, but private construction within the rezoned area has begun in earnest, and some of the first projects built under the new zoning are finishing up construction.
And among the first buildings to go up are a group of apartment buildings on Wallabout Street and Throop Avenue, where contractors are currently putting the finishing touches on a group of classically styled homes.
While the area’s R7A zoning would normally yield large, multiunit apartment buildings, the demand for large units on behalf of large Hasidic families mean these buildings only have three apartments each, where a building on a 25-foot-wide Northside Williamsburg lot might have two or three times as many.
The eight buildings – from 390 to 398 Wallabout Street, and around the corner at 68 to 72 Throop Avenue – are each identical in size, clocking in at 8,125 square feet apiece. This yields enormous apartments, even by Hasidic standards, averaging 2,700 square feet in size. (In reality, there are some smaller units and some larger ones, with each structure having a duplex penthouse on the third and fourth floors.)
And while all modern Hasidic architecture is traditionally styled, architect Panos Vikatos went the extra mile with these buildings, with their faux mansard roofs and white, crenulated cornices. (Though of course the buildings still have the heavy balconies, reinforced to handle the Sukkot loads, and caged windows that characterize Hasidic developments.)
The very large unit sizes combined with the high quality architecture suggests to us that these units will be priced for the upper tier of the Hasidic market, shooting for the most financially successful members of the community. (Though even the high end of the Hasidic market, where condos normally in the $300s or $400s per square foot, is much more affordable than the market for the artisten – that is, the typical buyers in the trendier parts of Williamsburg, where condo prices start around $1,000 a foot.)
The developer is Simon Dushinsky, who operates under the moniker of the Rabsky Group when developing outside of the Hasidic community, but uses North Driggs Holdings LLC for at least some of his Hasidic projects, including one that we featured yesterday just outside of the Broadway Triangle.
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