Booming Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood is closer to seeing another development come to fruition. Exterior work is nearing completion at the Boerum, located at 265 State Street (a.k.a. 140 Schermerhorn Street).
Midwood’s Orthodox community continues to grow, and developers keep searching for property along the neighborhood’s main streets, which are generously zoned. Last week, one of those developers filed plans to erect a seven-story apartment building at 1266 Ocean Parkway, between Avenues L and M.
North Bergen, N.J.-based Nehalkumar Gandhi has filed applications for a 13-story, 48-key hotel at 79 Eldridge Street, on the Lower East Side. The structure will measure 19,279 square feet. The ground floor will host the hotel lobby and a reception area, and hotel rooms will be located through the 12th floor. Individual hotel rooms should average 310 square feet apiece. On the 13th floor, there will be 1,243 square feet of space for a community facility. Amenities include a fitness center and bike storage. Michael Kang’s Flushing-based architectural firm is the architect of record. The filings come after a different developer submitted plans in March for a slightly smaller hotel. That one would have contained 10 stories and 38 hotel rooms. The 25-foot-wide, 2,500-square-foot property is currently vacant.
Since being five stories up roughly two months ago, the 11-story, 44-unit mixed-use building under development at 613 Baltic Street, in northern Park Slope, has now now topped out at 119 feet above street level. The construction progress can be seen thanks to a photo shot by Tectonic. The 83,154-square-foot project is being dubbed Baltic and its residential units will be condominiums. Those currently available come in two- and three-bedroom configurations. The average unit should measure 1,339 square feet. The ground floor will include 3,157 square feet of retail and 2,163 square feet of space for a community center. The known amenities are listed in YIMBY’s previous update. JDS Development Group is the developer, while VOA Architecture is serving as the design architect. Completion is anticipated for 2017.
What is Brooklyn? For many, the borough is associated with new buildings populated with young professionals fleeing Manhattan, where the cost of living rises as high as the skyscrapers. Some prefer to dismiss them as silver-spoon suburban transplants wishing to emulate some fantasy starving artist lifestyle, which they would assert is long-gone from the borough. Others would disagree, pointing at the “authentic Bohemians” living in rundown, graffiti-covered, and sometimes illegally-run lofts on the fringes of industrial districts, not yet touched by true gentrification. In contrast to another stereotype, which presumes that manufacturing has also left the borough, these pockets of industry still teem with activity, whether in dusty cement-mixing lots, in auto shops that clog the sidewalks in front of them with rides-in-progress, or in manufacturing plants where they are rightfully entitled to slap a “Made in Brooklyn” label onto their wares.
