A narrow lot at 1661 Madison Avenue, between East 110th Street and Tito Puente Way in East Harlem, may soon sprout a skinny 10-story apartment tower with ground floor retail, according to new building applications filed today.
Owner Wilfredo Aldebot plans to build a 119-foot-tall development with 15 apartments and 1,700 square feet of ground floor commercial space. Those apartments will be spread across 12,564 square feet of residential space, for an average rental-sized unit of 837 square feet. Every floor will have one or two apartments, beginning on the second floor, and there will be a roof deck on the top floor.
The 25-foot-wide property is currently home to a dilapidated, vacant storefront, and it last changed hands for an undisclosed amount in a tax lien sale back in 2009. Before that, an LLC snatched up the plot for $1,400,000 in 2005, shelling out roughly $98 per buildable square foot. The northern half of the block, stretching from Park to Madison, was upzoned from R7-2 to R8A in 2008, allowing owners to build much taller buildings on small plots like this one.
The development will hopefully bring new life to the block, which is dominated by a large and unsightly concrete apartment building from the mid-1970s.
Interestingly, the same owner also filed plans for second project about 60 blocks uptown, at 565 West 170th Street in Washington Heights.
565 West 170th Street in Washington Heights, image via Google Maps
Plans call for a 10-story, 16,250-square-foot building made up of community facilities. As you’d expect, it will all be medical offices (“ambulatory or diagnostic treatment health care”).
Aldebot, who runs a pharmacy next to Mount Sinai Hospital in the Upper East Side, paid $725,000 for this property in 2008. A boxy two-and-a-half-story brick apartment building currently occupies the 2,500-square-foot lot.
The architect of record for both projects is DeArch Architecture P.C., a firm headquartered in Midtown that mainly designs residential and commercial buildings in Flushing and Long Island City.
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April 2016, nothing happening yet…