A year ago, the Daten Group paid $24 million for eight properties on Fourth Avenue between 16th Street and the Prospect Expressway in South Slope. Now we have a look at the 11-story condo building headed for the site at 581 Fourth Avenue.
The Karl Fischer-designed development will rise 118 feet into the air and wrap around the corner of Prospect Avenue, facing the elevated highway. It will hold 70 apartments spread across 80,925 square feet of residential space, creating spacious, condo-sized units averaging 1,156 square feet.
There will be a 4,633-square-foot retail space on the ground floor, followed by nine or 10 units each on the second through fifth floors, six units per story on the sixth through eighth floors, and just four units apiece on the top three stories. Several apartments will get private balconies, and two second-story apartments will be duplexes with space on the ground floor.
Future residents will also have access to a 2,500-square-foot outdoor recreation space on the ground floor, a recreation room in the cellar, and bike storage on the first floor. A 38-car garage will also take up valuable ground floor space, creating an inhospitable blank wall on an avenue where ground floor parking in new buildings is slowly ruining street life for pedestrians. The parking is required by city zoning rules, but it’s frustrating, from a design and urban planning perspective, that a developer would choose to put the garage on the ground floor.
The development site includes 575-581 Fourth Avenue and 189-195 Prospect Avenue. Three small townhouses, a check cashing business, and two auto repair shops occupied the site, but the Department of Buildings recently issued permits to knock down all of those buildings.
Rabsky Group was the original developer of the project. The firm, led by Simon Dushinsky, filed plans for a 129-unit building back in December 2014.
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I thought the City outlawed not having retail on the 4th Avenue new buildings at street-level. It was a do-over after the faulty re-zonings of Park Slope & the South Slope(‘Greenwood Heights’). It was in all the newspapers as I remember. A great embarrassment to City planners but a gift to developers.
Tell me, how many affordable units are being lost here? I’m on Community Board #7 which covers this site so we will now have beg for an off-setting number of new affordable units to accommodate these now homeless residents. We never get asked about the loss of affordable housing units only the inherited needs.
There does appear to be retail on the Fourth Avenue side, and, according to this Patch article (http://patch.com/new-york/parkslope/demolition-underway-ahead-new-condos-4th-avenue#email-in-article-id), only one long-vacant residential building on Prospect Avenue is being demolished. The “blank wall” of parking appears to be on that side, near the expressway exit. That said, I agree about the faulty rezoning along Fourth Avenue that created one after another apartment building with no retail on a street that has a lot of pedestrian traffic due to the subway. Poor planning!
wow i hadn’t seen this, thank you!
the rule is that street level has to be at least 50% retail or community space. the rest can be parking or whatever.
Money made much more development than it really is, and designed made building for using on condo.
If you choose Karl Fischer as your architect there is a 90% chance your development may look like garbage and your neighborhood adding more hideousness to the skyline