Co-op City, in the northeastern Bronx, already has one of the city’s biggest malls at Bay Plaza Shopping Center. Now reader Mike Giuliani has sent along photos of new retail headed for 500 Baychester Avenue, at the corner of Bartow Avenue near the mall.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission has begun its public hearings for dealing with its backlog of items proposed for designation. It started on Thursday with the items in the Bronx. Among them was the Immaculate Conception Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary and its convent and priests’ residence located, respectively, at 378 East 151st Street and 375-395 East 150th Street. While advocates support designating the campus as an individual landmark, the church itself says it wouldn’t be able to handle it.
Thanks to Fordham University at its northern edge and a relatively stable community of Italians, Albanians, and Puerto Ricans, Belmont remains an attractive place to develop market-rate housing in the Bronx. YIMBY has noticed a handful of new rental projects there in the last year, and now we can add another one to the list.
Rego Park-based Borough Realty Holdings has filed applications for a single-story, 11,422 square-foot commercial development at 3917-3919 Baychester Avenue and 1217-1223 East 233rd Street, in the North Bronx neighborhood of Edenwald. The project is being broken up into six small buildings, and though the type of commercial space is not specified in filings, retail or offices are likely. Iljoong Kim’s Flushing-based Choi Design is the applicant of record, and permits were filed last February to remove an existing gas station on the site.
The struggling central Bronx neighborhoods of Mount Hope, Tremont, and West Farms are ripe for new construction, and the borough’s small developers are finally starting to take notice. One developer hopes to build a little four-story residential building at 1779 Weeks Avenue, just north of the Cross Bronx Expressway in Mount Hope.
