Last year, the city’s housing authority announced plans to renovate Randolph Houses in Harlem, a block-long stretch of old law tenements on 114th Street between Frederick Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevards. Now NYCHA has filed alteration permits to combine 14 of those buildings into a single structure.
The five-story Renaissance Revival tenements date back to the 1890s, and the city acquired them in the 1970s, according to the Times. The city emptied out all of the buildings on the south side of the street in the mid-2000s, relocating 159 families to other public housing with plans to demolish and rebuild. Meanwhile, 159 tenants on the north side have remained in their leaky, decrepit homes, waiting for NYCHA to start renovations on their apartments. Now the city is finally moving forward with plans to modernize and consolidate those 210 apartments on the north side at 251-277 West 114th Street.
The revamped structure will remain five stories and host 23 apartments per floor. The cellars will have storage, laundry community space, gyms, bike parking, and there will be a backyard garden for tenants.
Ultimately, the development’s 452 apartments will be reconfigured into 314 units, creating much larger apartments for families. 147 apartments will remain public housing, and NYCHA is renovating those first. The remaining 167 units will be “private apartments”—presumably rented through a lottery—and they’ll be set aside for families making no more than $68,700 for a family of four, the Times reported last year.
NYCHA chose Boston-based Trinity Financial to develop the project, and they plan to preserve the tenements’ 19th century stoops and facades. SLCE Architects are the architects of record.
The renovation is expected to cost $146 million and happen in two phases over the next three years.
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