Since New York’s earliest days, church organizations have held a considerable amount of the city’s real estate, which they use not only for direct religious services, but also as a means of generating income. Over the past year, we witnessed the destruction of one of the oldest properties of the kind, as the 119 year old Bancroft Building has been reduced to a pile of red brick rubble.
The New York City Fire Department has filed applications for a two-story, 19,082 square-foot facility at 1815 Sterling Place, in Ocean Hill. The building will stand 46 feet tall, boasting very high ceilings for the ground-floor fire house. The facility will include offices, storage, a kitchen, dormitories, and fitness and training rooms, per the Schedule A. The facility is associated with the multi-building Prospect Plaza residential development, located on the same and surrounding blocks. As for the fire house, Jeanne Gang’s Chicago-based Studio Gang Architects is designing.
Shorenstein Properties is renovating the 43-story, 1.1-million square-foot office building at 1407 Broadway, between West 38th and 39th Street, according to Real Estate Weekly. The updates will include a new lobby, entrance and retail space, as well as façade improvements on the rest of the building. Roughly 33,000 square feet of retail space will span the ground floor, and Fogarty Finger is leading the design process. Shorenstein acquired the building for $330 million this past spring.
Anup Misra, head of East & Hudson New Rochelle, LLC, is planning to develop a six-story, 71-unit mixed-use building at 165 Huguenot Street, in downtown New Rochelle, a few blocks from the town’s Metro North station. The building will measure 64,000 square feet, and will include 3,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor. Units will be rentals, and will range from 500 to 975 square feet. A two-story warehouse must first be demolished, but construction is expected to begin next spring, with completion in 2017. Manhattan-based Magnusson Architecture & Planning is designing.
Arkady Zirkiev, doing business under an LLC, has filed applications for four two-family residential buildings at 147-30 – 147-38 Springfield Lane, in Springfield Gardens, immediately northeast of JFK Airport. Each building will be two stories and measure 2,520 square feet, which means the full-floor units will average a spacious 1,260 square feet each. Robert Nasimov’s Rego Park-based R&O Engineering is the applicant of record, and the land is currently vacant.
