A fire burned downed the low rise storefront building on public housing land at 1440 Amsterdam about two years ago and now activity has been seen on the site at 131st Street. We walked by this section of West Harlem yesterday and noticed a digger at work and a new building rendering on the plywood. There is a lot of unused airspace within the housing projects and the city has now been selling off available parcels of land to developers so that more residential units can be added on. The rendering of the new apartments above a modern commercial space can be found after the jump.
Permits filed online show that a mixed use building has been planned within a 7-story complex. A grocery store that was lost during the previous blaze apparently will be replaced on the lower level and the top floors will have 48 dwelling units altogether. We assume that these will all be market rate since the affordable poster has not been place out front but a planned finished date of spring 2016 has been revealed. For more on that past fire, check out our post from 2013:
LINK
It's good to see more intensive use of the space as a result of the rebuild -- but if NYCHA is going to avoid a complete meltdown, they've got to get serious about embracing infill development on a much larger scale than they have to date.
ReplyDeleteI'm happy to see that a new grocery store will be built as well as housing, but this building needs to be mixed-income.
ReplyDelete