North Williamsburg is one step closer to getting its first new office building in half a century. Yesterday, the full City Council approved a special permit with a new kind of industrial and commercial zoning for the eight-story project at 25 Kent Avenue.
In 2006, a doctor involved in a bitter divorce destroyed his four-story townhouse on the Upper East Side. The explosion also killed the doctor, earning him the nickname “Dr. Boom.” Now, there is a new approved proposal for what will fill the vacant lot.
Willoughby Avenue between Central and Evergreen avenues in Bushwick used to be a reminder of the city’s worst years, with an odd mix of decrepit wood frame houses, vacant lots, and garages. But several new buildings have transformed the block in the last decade, and now another project is set to join the mix.
The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development (EOHED) have selected the team behind the Lowline proposal to lease the vacant, 60,000-square-foot Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal, located under Delancey Street between Clinton and Norfolk streets on the Lower East Side. This marks the first city approval for the project, bringing it significantly closer to reality. The public park would take up roughly 43,500 square feet of the abandoned terminal.
The first few glass panels have been installed on the lower levels of what will be the 90-story, 2.6-million-square-foot office tower known as 30 Hudson Yards, being built on the corner of Tenth Avenue and West 33rd Street. The structure appears to have also gained a story or two since YIMBY’s update earlier this month. The progress can be seen thanks to photos posted to the YIMBY Forums by user Robert Walpole. As previously reported, the tower will eventually top out at 1296 feet, 11 inches. The entirety of the building’s office space has already been reserved for tenants, including Time Warner Inc., Wells Fargo Securities, KKR, Related Companies, and Oxford Properties Group. The last two are the project’s developers. Kohn Pedersen Fox is the design architect. Completion is expected in 2019.
