Hasidic developers are slowly transforming the semi-industrial wasteland between Bed-Stuy and Williamsburg into a mixed-use residential neighborhood. The latest evidence comes from building applications for a hotel and synagogue at 484 Park Avenue, designed by ubiquitous architect Karl Fischer.
The five-story building will rise 70 feet between Bedford and Skillman avenues. The ground floor will have a 15,400-square-foot synagogue with an upper mezzanine for extra seating. Four floors of hotel rooms will follow. There will be 13 rooms apiece on the second through fifth stories, spanning 23,510 square feet. The average room will measure about 450 square feet.
The cellar will include support spaces for the synagogue, such as lecture halls, a mikvah (ritual bath), storage, and an emergency generator.
The developer listed on the permit is Juda Klein of Parkview Management, but the filing indicates that he’s the buyer, not the owner, of the property. He clearly plans to lease the building to a local synagogue, which will likely rent the rooms to Jews who are travelling to New York to study or volunteer.
Unlike most of the surrounding blocks, this piece of Park Avenue is zoned for residential development. But Parkview evidently chose to build a house of worship and hotel instead.
Jack Prezant has owned the property since 1978 (the earliest date available in public records), and tax photos show he’s run a car repair business there since the mid-1970s. The property hasn’t changed hands recently. A single-story garage occupies most of the 12,757-square-foot lot on the corner of Bedford and Park avenues.
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This is nice, but the area wasn’t ever really a wasteland. April is the cruelest month.
Maybe it’s a little bit uncharitable to call it that, but I always thought it was kind of an odd area. Much of the neighborhood east of the Navy Yard is zoned industrial, and I think this area—which may have been a pleasant residential neighborhood before the BQE was built—suffered for a while because of the highway.