It was back in October of 2014 that YIMBY reported on developer Jeffrey Gershon acquiring the property at 906 Prospect Place in Brooklyn. It was in late November of 2015 that his design team went before the Landmarks Preservation Commission with their proposal for a new apartment building on the site. On Tuesday of this week, the team went back before the LPC and got approval for their revised design.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission has given approval for the partial conversion and refurbishment of a portion of a landmark building in Chinatown. The building in question is 66 Allen Street (a.k.a. 315 Grand Street). Though the upper office floors will all become residential, totaling eight units, the existing ground floor retail will be retained. The approval was granted at the LPC’s session on Tuesday.
It’s hardly uncommon for an application to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, if it warrants a public hearing, to not get approved the first time it is presented. Usually, the second presentation comes a month or more later. Not this time. The revised proposal for one Brooklyn residential building came back to win approval just one week later.
As 2016 will prove to be a pivotal year for the Manhattan skyline, a neighbor across the Hudson River is also seeing amazing growth. Just last month, ground was broken for the LeFrak Organization’s 444-foot-tall, 43-story, 376-unit tower in the Newport section of Jersey City. Now, we have word of an important step in the process constructing a much taller tower to the south near Exchange Place.
The rowhouse at 48 Downing Street is part of a very intact block between Gates Avenue and Putnam Avenue in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill Historic District. Its owner wants to make it bigger, both on the rear and the roof, but the Landmarks Preservation Commission, at its public hearing last Tuesday, did not approve it, citing concerns of size, intervention, and visibility.
