A corner lot next to an off-ramp for the Queensboro Bridge seems like an unusual place to build a school or medical center, but one developer intends to do exactly that. New building applications have been filed for a seven-story community facility building at 328 East 62nd Street, on the corner of a four-block-long street that shuttles cars off the bridge between First and Second Avenues.
The 175-foot-tall development will have 69,741 square feet of community space, and it will be split between two towers. However, the owner hasn’t leased the property to a specific tenant yet, and the filing doesn’t offer many details, The first floor will have a lobby, and the remaining stories will host “open community facility office space” and several shared terraces.
The developers, Maddd Equities and Joy Construction, are marketing the building to nearby medical schools and hospitals. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, and Rockefeller University are all located within six or seven blocks of the site, and it would be a relatively easy walk for medical students or researchers. The project could become a dorm, a treatment facility, office space, or some combination of the three.
328 East 62nd Street, rendering by Karl Fischer
This development also benefits from relatively generous R8B zoning, but this isn’t exactly an ideal place to build residential. Still, one builder who doesn’t mind the traffic recently finished a seven-story condo project across the street.
Karl Fischer applied for the permit.
The through-block property is currently home to an aging six-story brick building that was built in 1907, while the Queensboro Bridge was under construction.
For over a century, the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help occupied the lot between East 61st and 62nd Streets. Built in 1887, the Catholic church catered to a large Czech community in Midtown and the Upper East Side. The Romanesque-style structure stood on 61st Street until 1998, when the Archdiocese demolished it to make way for a retirement home for elderly priests. The retirement home was never built, and the lot has remained vacant ever since. The hulking building on East 62nd Street was originally a school, and more recently housed the New York Center for Child Development.
The church ultimately sold the 13,700-square-foot plot for $21,000,000 last year.
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