The Third Avenue Elevated once ran through East Tremont, linking it with Manhattan all the way down to Chatham Square, in what is now Chinatown. The decaying wooden house at 772 East 182nd Street was likely built around the same time as the elevated, in the first few years of the 20th century. After the city suspended the elevated service in the 1950s and ’60s, the area began to slide into abandonment and poverty. But the neighborhood is slowly rebounding with the arrival of small, market-rate construction projects.
Yesterday, new building applications were filed for one of those small buildings, a seven-story, 18-unit development that would replace the old house at 772 East 182nd Street, just west of the Bronx Zoo. Those apartments would be spread across 15,511 square feet of residential space, yielding average units of 861 square feet.
Each floor would have three units, except for the sixth, which would have one smaller apartment and two duplexes. The building would also have a roof deck, but the filing doesn’t specify whether it’s shared or private.
Jamaica-based engineer Pirooz Soltanizadeh applied for the permit, and the developer is Bimla Devi, who’s based out in Valley Stream, N.Y., just east of the Queens border. Devi’s LLC picked up the 3,900-square-foot property for $300,000 last year, or just $22 per buildable square foot.
The city even rezoned the western and southern borders of East Tremont in 2010, to encourage mixed-use development in areas where the old zoning had only allowed auto shops and warehouses. But the neighborhood has still seen very little new construction, except for two large affordable developments on its western edge—at 4261 Park Avenue and 407 East Tremont Avenue.
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I would look at a historic map before asserting that this building is from the early 20th C. I would guess that it’s a lot older, by at least 50 years.
Wasn’t this part of the Bronx mostly farmland during the mid-19th century? Honestly, determining the age of older buildings in NYC can be quite tricky, because the DOB records are terrible, and the insurance maps for the Bronx are pretty spotty pre-1900. It looks like there may have been something standing on this lot as of 1901 (per the Sanborn map), but it’s a little hard to tell.