Heritage Equities is trying to secure city approval for Williamsburg’s first new office building in decades, and now developers hope to build offices in another one of Brooklyn’s hot industrial zones – Gowanus. Plans were filed yesterday for a four-story office building at 84 14th Street, only a block and a half from the Gowanus Canal and the elevated Gowanus Expressway.
The building will rise 48 feet into the air on a low-slung industrial block between 2nd and 3rd avenues. It will span 16,073 square feet of commercial space. The first floor will have a lobby, and there will be offices on the top three floors.
A 25-car parking lot on the ground floor will round out the project. It will also satisfy the city parking requirements, which are quite high in manufacturing zones.
Permits list the owner as Eli Pavel of Ellipses Design, a South Williamsburg-based architecture firm. But he’s doing business under an LLC headquartered in Borough Park. Engineer Julien Flander applied for the permits.
The 8,000-square-foot property is currently a parking lot. It last changed hands for $1.1 million in September 2013, or roughly $68 for each square foot of the planned building.
Zoning rules generally don’t allow office development in industrial zones, but the mayor and the Department of City Planning want to change the outdated policies that govern manufacturing areas. The initiative quietly rolled out by DCP earlier this month would allow developers to trade light manufacturing space for extra office space.
However, it still has to go through several levels of city approval before it can become official. If the new policy – a kind of special district that could be mapped across the five boroughs – is approved, it would make office development in the outer boroughs much easier.
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