Folks who live near the Franklin Avenue C train stop in southern Bed-Stuy are probably familiar with an oddly shaped vacant lot on the corner of Fulton and Spencer streets. Recently, it’s been full of painted Airstream trailers and vans. Now, it will become apartments.
The World Trade Center’s Liberty Park is now receiving its finishing touches for its grand opening today. The Financial District’s new, one-acre public park is 25 feet above street level and measures 336 feet along Liberty Street between West and Greenwich streets. It will feature 19 planters, a half-dozen species of plants, seating made out of recycled teak, and a 300-foot-long “Living Wall” of greenery along its northern base. Pictures of it ahead of its opening can be seen in a New York Times report. It will be open to all from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. each day. Aecom’s Joseph E. Brown is the landscape architect, and the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey is behind the project. The Santiago Calatrava-designed St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church can also be seen taking shape on the site’s eastern end. That portion of the project is expected to be complete in 2017. YIMBY last brought you an update on Liberty Park when construction was in its final phases in May.
Mayor Steven Fulop, with the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency (JCRA) and other officials, held a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Saturday for the 17.5-acre Berry Lane Park, located in the Bergen-Lafayette section of Jersey City. It is the both the city’s largest municipal park and the first new one in decades. The public park is the site of a former brownfield property bound by Garfield Avenue to the west, NJ Transit’s rail tracks to the south, and Woodward Street to the east. It features two basketball courts, two tennis courts, a baseball diamond, a soccer field, bike paths, and two plazas (one with a splash pad). Over 600 new trees have also been planted. The Department of Recreation is in charge of hosting community events and games in the park. The site once consisted of abandoned and underutilized industrial properties, although the city demolished many of the structures, then remediated and graded the land by 2014. Multiple concrete silos were preserved and utilized for the splash pond. Berry Lane Park is right across the street from NJ Transit’s Garfield Avenue Hudson-Bergen Light Rail station.
Stefan Solakiewicz, doing business as a New Jersey-based LLC, has filed applications to convert the six-story, 55,000-square-foot office building at 92-32 Union Hall Street, in Downtown Jamaica, into a 110-key hotel. The structure will remain the same size, featuring 52,241 square feet of commercial space, although the property boasts 24,500 square feet of air rights. The ground floor will host the hotel’s lobby as well as an unspecified amount of retail space. The hotel rooms will be located on the second through sixth floors, with 22 units per floor. Chelsea-based C3D Architecture is the architect of record. The building is located three blocks from the Jamaica Center-Parsons/Architect Station on the E, J, and Z trains. The property was acquired for $1.1 million in 2013.
East Harlem-based Morrison Zhu Goodman Realty Group has filed applications for two eight-story, 12-unit residential buildings at 1525-1527 Bryant Avenue, in the West Bronx’s Longwood section. Each of them will measure 14,325 square feet, and across both, their residential units should average 715 square feet apiece, indicative of rental apartments. Amenities include bicycle storage, laundry facilities, recreational rooms, and rooftop terraces. Midtown South-based Node Engineering & Consulting is the applicant of record. The 50-foot-wide, 5,000-square-foot plot consists of a vacant plot and a two-story townhouse, for which demolition permits were filed in May. The developer is in the process of subdividing the site into two tax lots. The Freeman Street stop on the 2 and 5 trains is located five blocks away.