Park Avenue in Brooklyn begins underneath the elevated, dark Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Clinton Hill and runs east into Bed-Stuy, where it transitions into an odd mix of warehouses, little brick apartment buildings, and aging 19th century wood frame houses. Much of the avenue was originally developed for workers at the Navy Yard, which sits a block away, but Orthodox Jews have settled the area over the last few decades. And now, even the once-desolate industrial blocks just east of the highway are becoming populated with new residential buildings.
Yesterday, applications were filed for a five-story building there at 446 Park Avenue, between Kent and Franklin avenues. It would rise on a 40-foot-wide lot, half of which was once filled by a decrepit wood frame. The skinny three-story house was torn down in 2014, and the property has awaited development ever since.
The new building will be a condo, according to the permits. It’ll have five units – one per floor, except the first floor apartment, which will be a duplex with a lower level in the cellar.
No parking is included on permit, but there will likely be a surface parking lot behind the building.
Flatbush-based Garfinkel Architects applied for the permits, and the developer is Yoel Horowitz. Horowitz’s corporation picked up the site for a combined $505,000 in July 2014.
This block is zoned exclusively for manufacturing and commercial uses (M1-1), and city rules typically wouldn’t allow new apartment buildings here. But we expect the developer will get a variance from the Board of Standards and Appeals, which will allow him to build residential. Unlike most industrial zones, the city has a history of greenlighting new residential projects here in northeastern Bed-Stuy. There’s already one on the corner—a five-story brick development built in 2006.
Although Robert Moses blighted this area when he decided to build the BQE, it’s encouraging to see it return, however slowly.
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