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.
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.
RXR Realty and Westbrook Partners are in contract to purchase the nine-story, 700,000 square-foot former industrial building at 47 Hall Street, in northern Clinton Hill, for more than $160 million, Crain’s reports. Parts of the building are currently rented out as art studios and creative offices, but the eventual new owners plan to convert the structure into modern creative offices; renovations include ground-floor reconfigurations and new outdoor terraces. Landlord Ruby Schron and the Fruchthandler family are the current owners.
The neglected 4.5-story building at 109 Gates Avenue, in southern Clinton Hill, has been acquired by an unknown buyer for $2.9 million, according to Brownstoner. The buyer reportedly plans to renovate the landmarked building into luxury rental apartments, with a retail unit on the ground floor. Back in 2003, the LPC approved a restoration of the building to its current state, the first renovation since 1908.
A trio of affordable housing developers have been building the huge, mixed-income Navy Green project next to the Navy Yard for nearly a decade, and now the final piece—23 townhouses—is under construction. A crop of single-family homes is taking shape on Vanderbilt and Clermont Avenues between Flushing and Park Avenues, on the border of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill.
