Park Avenue is about to get its first new office tower in decades as the 1957 office tower at 425 Park Avenue (catty corner to Rafael Viñoly’s 1,396-foot-tall 432 Park Avenue), once the pinnacle of modernity, is being reinvented for the 21st century via a partial demolition and a dramatic, 893-foot-tall restructuring by developer L&L Holdings and architects at Foster + Partners.
The sixth floor is under construction at 410 Manhattan Avenue, an affordable housing complex next to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in northern Williamsburg. Fifty units will take up 43,055 square feet of the seven-story, 52,065-square-foot building. A community room and parking for about 50 cars and 26 bicycles is also included within the scope. Prominent Williamsburg developer Simon Dushinsky of the Rabsky Group is in charge of the project, with HLS Builders Corp attached as the general contractor. Curtis + Ginsberg is the architect of record, and Rodkin Cardinale Consulting are listed as engineers.
Ground floor work is currently underway for a six-story, mixed-use building at 387 Manhattan Avenue. The north Williamsburg project will feature retail, community, and residential functions. Upon completion, it will join the handful of similarly-sized buildings scattered around the rowhome neighborhood.
Another block in central Williamsburg is shedding its commercial past as a warehouse at 88-92 Withers Street is torn down. It is slated to be replaced by a 12-story residential building, developed by Caro Enterprises and JHG Holdings. The 12,500-square foot corner lot sits across from the small park at the Badame Sessa Memorial Square, sandwiched onto a small triangular block by the side of the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The cleared lot, situated within a residential-manufacturing M1-2/R6 zoning district, measures 125 feet along Withers Street to the north and 100 feet on Leonard Street to the east.
A residential complex is nearing completion at 498 Lorimer Street on the southern edge of Greenpoint. Though it stands as a single structure, it functions as three conjoined buildings at 498, 500, and 502 Leonard, where each one is accessed via a separate entrance for its eight units. The combined 24 unit complex rises four stories high, with a penthouse level above set back from the main façade. In terms of urban context, its design makes it a transitional component between the rowhome neighborhood to the east and a new cluster of mid-rises facing McCarren Park one block west.
