Over the last three years, the parking lot at 114 Mulberry Street has become the centerpiece of the Little Italy Street Art Project, a collection of murals and installations that stretches along Mulberry from Canal to Broome streets. Now, like seemingly every other vacant property in lower Manhattan, it will soon be filled with apartments.
Applications were filed with the Department of Buildings earlier this week to erect a seven-story, mixed-use building on the site between Canal and Hester streets. The plans call for 23 apartments stacked on top of 5,409 square feet of commercial space. The apartments would be divided across 17,150 square feet of residential space, creating an average unit measuring 745 square feet.
The ground floor retail would have an upper mezzanine, and each of the remaining floors would hold three or four units apiece. The cellar would have bike storage, laundry, tenant storage, and a pet spa, and there would be a roof deck on the top floor.
Koreatown-based Wonder Works Construction is developing the project, and they’ve hired the ubiquitous Karl Fischer to handle the design. Wonder Works is also working on an Upper East Side condo building, a mansion expansion in Chelsea, 287 East Houston Street and 117 West 21st Street.
It’s unclear whether Wonder Works owns the property. The long-term owner seems to be Nelson Ying, who has held onto the property since 1968, according to public records. The site changed hands in October for the relatively low price of $93,000. But the LLCs listed on the deed had identical addresses, implying that it was a tax transfer, rather than a sale.
For the past two years, 114 Mulberry Street also hosted the LoMan Arts Festival, which featured live painting, art for sale, and musical performances.
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
If the project does not work, the city may not have property for living with building well-being.
The purchaser entered into a 99 year ground lease
I didn’t see a lease in the public records. Has it been filed with DoF yet?
Why is a neighborhood that Italian-Americans happily fled years ago for the outer boroughs and the suburbs still called ‘Little Italy’?