Fourth Avenue’s development boom is moving south from Park Slope into Greenwood Heights. Developer Steve Cheung filed plans on Friday to erect a 12-story, mixed-use building at 685 Fourth Avenue, on the corner of 22nd Street. The 120-foot-tall project will bring 81 apartments and 6,400 square feet of retail space to a parking lot a couple blocks south of the Prospect Expressway.
The six-story, 69-foot-high walk-up at 211 West 28th Street has been reduced to two floors, as part of a vertical enlargement that would extend the building to 14 stories. Given the proposed 150-foot height, individual floors will average a generous 10’-9” from slab to slab. The new building would nearly double the 13,332 square feet of the original, bringing the figure up to 24,563 square feet. The former office floors would be replaced with 37 residential units. The project is being developed by Arker Companies, with Aufgang Architects as designer.
The Bronx is booming across all corners, and now in East Tremont, the city has officially broken ground on a major new mixed-income affordable housing development, dubbed Tremont Renaissance, at 4215 Park Avenue. Bound by Webster, East Tremont, and Park avenues, the building will rise on a 60,000-square-foot lot, containing 40,000 square feet of ground floor commercial space and 256 residential units above. Apartments will rent to individuals making between $38,100 and $76,200, and families of three making between $48,960 and $97,920; half of the units will rent to low-income families, while the other half will go to moderate-income tenants. Mastermind Development is behind the project, alongside HPD and HDC, and Joy Construction will be building it.
It took over a decade and nearly $4 billion, but the main concourse of the Santiago Calatrava-designed World Trade Center Transportation Hub, known as the Oculus, opened in early March. It’s located along Greenwich Street, in between the nearly topped out 3 World Trade Center and the site of what will be 2 World Trade Center. We now have a new look at its construction, via a time-lapse produced by EarthCam.
As this month got underway, we brought you the unfortunate news regarding the landmark Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava at 15 West 25th Street, designed by Richard Upjohn, the architect of the Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan. The 1855 building, which was the city’s only house of prayer servicing the Serbian Orthodox community, was reduced to a charred stone shell on the evening of May 1, just hours after the Orthodox Easter celebration. While the church is collecting donations for reconstruction, the authorities are investigating the fenced-off site for the cause of the conflagration, while engineers keep an eye on the ruined building’s stability. The building is a New York City landmark and is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. Although the city’s laws protect the building from further demolition, the stone shell may be torn down if ultimately deemed dangerously unstable. Fortunately, the walls appear to be structurally sound for the time being, though serious reinforcement work would be permitted only after the investigations are complete.
