The biggest church-to-residential conversion going on in Brooklyn is 626 Bushwick Avenue, a Cayuga Capital project to append a seven-story, 99-unit apartment building onto the old St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bushwick, with its distinctive green spire.
But it isn’t the only project planned for the neighborhood. Near the border with Ridgewood, a smaller project at 198 St. Nicholas Avenue is planned to convert a modest prewar church, last used by a Romanian Pentecostal congregation, into what appears to be six large apartments, adding two stories on top of the existing one-story structure. (The site is not to be confused with the larger Ridgewood Pentecostal Church next door on Harman Street, which will not be altered.)
The tiny 1,344-square foot church would turn into a 3,945-square foot apartment building, according to the permit, which makes reference to another application, apparently not yet filed, to build another similar building also on the same property, whose tax lot has been subdivided.
Each three-unit building would have one apartment each on the first and second floor, with a duplex spanning the third and fourth. It’s unknown how much of the handsome one-story structure, which city data (often inaccurate) dates back to 1917, will be retained.
The church, which technically lies on the Brooklyn side of the border but catered primarily to Romanians from Ridgewood and elsewhere in Queens, was sold earlier this year to the developers – an LLC led by Noam Amos and Yishai Antebi-Saka – for $725,000. It sits just a few blocks from the DeKalb Avenue station on the L, a part of Bushwick booming in populairty in recent years.
Melamed Architect, led by Yosef Melamed, is listed as the designer.
Talk about this project on the YIMBY Forums
For any questions, comments, or feedback, email [email protected]
Subscribe to YIMBY’s daily e-mail
Follow YIMBYgram for real-time photo updates
Like YIMBY on Facebook
Follow YIMBY’s Twitter for the latest in YIMBYnews
