Another day, another new project in Flatbush. YIMBY recently stumbled across a rendering for a six-story apartment building coming to 45 Lenox Road, between Flatbush and Bedford avenues.
The Issac and Stern-designed development will fill a vacant lot between two pre-war apartment buildings, in a rapidly changing but still heavily Caribbean part of central Brooklyn. At the end of the block, the city plans to redevelop the colorful Flatbush Caton Market into an affordable apartment building with a new market and community spaces on the ground floor.
This project will bring 37 apartments and 26,807 square feet of residential space to Lenox Road. Average units will measure 724 square feet, which strongly suggests rentals. Tenants will get bike storage, a shared roof deck, and several units will have glassed-in balconies. There won’t be any parking, and none is required by the city.
In terms of design, the building will make few attempts to fit in with its neighbors. Big, floor-to-ceiling windows on the upper floors will offer views and light that pre-war apartments don’t usually get, and a setback after the fifth floor creates a relatively large roof deck.
However, the development will break the street wall, because it extends further out into the sidewalk than the block’s older apartment buildings. The limits of cost and zoning often force architects to design buildings that don’t mesh well with the neighborhood, and that includes modern rules about setbacks from the street and massing of buildings. The city’s new Zoning for Quality and Affordability changes aim to fix these issues, but we haven’t yet seen how they’ll affect design, particularly for smaller and lower-cost projects in the outer boroughs.
The developer is Ofer Prager, who picked up the lot for $500,000 back in 2014. He filed plans for 45 Lenox in February, but the Department of Buildings hasn’t approved them yet.
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For rendering showed me with the most stylish, that just about ready to serves buyer.
Crummy area, be careful around there.
It is *not* crummy around there, and nobody but racist bigots think that. We are happy to have scum leave Brooklyn and never come back, because you worthless trash aren’t wanted around our neighborhood. Stay out, ex-Brooklynite!
Yikes, this got nasty. I currently live on Lenox, two buildings down, and I have to say that it isn’t “crummy”. The fact that it’s still mostly West Indian and Carribean doesn’t automatically make it a shitty neighborhood. There is a wonderful community of mostly hard-working families who are very compassionate and lovely people. I personally am Venezuelan and my wife is Jewish, and though we have fair skin we have been received with nothing but kindness from our neighbors since we moved in two years ago. There are a few young kids that hang around playing music and smoking weed, but how is that any different from white suburbia? I come from Oakland, CA (the “crummy” side) and I see the parallels with the rapid gentrification here in Brooklyn.
45 Lenox Ave. is in the 70 Pct. Last year (see 2015 Historical Perspective) an average of 4.6 serious crimes per day. The West Indian/Caribbean homeowner is not the problem.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cs-en-us-070pct.pdf
Check several of the other comments on Flatbush or East Flatbush and you’ll see that exbrooklynite likes to just trash everything. He/she is not worth your time. Those of us who know how amazing the people/culture/neighborhoods are can enjoy while this fool wallows in their misery.
Having grown up in one if the small attached houses literally across the street, it is with fond nostalgia that I read this story. That site was a parking garage and the neighborhood was a microcosm of the middle class. Flatbush avenue was 200 feet away along which was any kind of store one needed. You passed the Chinese Laundry and Mr Dauber’s candy store on my side of Lennox before turning left at the corner toy store on the way to Erasmus Hall High School a quarter of a mile away. The new building could be viewed as a Phoenix rising by its neighbors.
Statistics is funny. 4.6 crimes per day? After living here for 20 years, it’s more like 1 crime every five years.