Developer Plans to Demolish Two Brooklyn Heights Buildings
The wrecking ball is coming for a five-story apartment building and a nine-story office building on adjacent properties on Pierrepont and Montague Streets in Brooklyn Heights. Developer Jonathan Rose Companies filed demolition applications last month to take down 189 Montague Street and 146 Pierrepont Street (pictured above). Situated between between Cadman Plaza West and Clinton Street, the buildings are some of the…
The wrecking ball is coming for a five-story apartment building and a nine-story office building on adjacent properties on Pierrepont and Montague Streets in Brooklyn Heights. Developer Jonathan Rose Companies filed demolition applications last month to take down 189 Montague Street and 146 Pierrepont Street (pictured above). Situated between between Cadman Plaza West and Clinton Street, the buildings are some of the few in the Heights that are not landmarked.
A hotel may be in the works, but no new-building applications have been filed under these or any other addresses that we could find. Last year, the Eagle wrote there was talk of a hotel coming at 189 Montague, pictured after the jump.
146 Pierrepont currently houses seven apartments and ground floor commercial space, which used to be a Quest Diagnostics lab. The building is only 6,775 square feet, but zoning allows up to 24,830 square feet of development on the site. Jonathan Rose snapped up the site in January for $5,750,000, public records show.
Meanwhile, 189 Montague is a 75,000-square-foot office building that stretches all the way through the block to Pierrepont Street, and it has 25,000 square feet of unused development rights, according to PropertyShark.
Air rights from 146 Pierrepont were transferred to 189 Montague back in 2000, according to public records, as the Eagle also noted. Tenants in the two buildings were asked to move or their leases were not renewed last year, said the Eagle.
We reached out to the developer for comment but have not yet heard back.
Photos by Nicholas Strini for PropertyShark
Correction: it seems the building was built in 1891. While it was considered a behemoth at the time because it rose more than twice the height of neighboring buildings, time caught up and it fits in nicely at that height now. If only it could be returned to its original appearance…
It’s a shame 189 Montague can’t be restored. From the Pierrepont side you can still see what is most likely underneath all the hideous metal cladding that was added to the Montague side. It’s still got good bones and would help bring a bit of history and period-appropriate aesthetics back to that block. Likely constructed in the 1880s, it’s actually one of the oldest buildings on that block, if not the oldest. It was a Romanesque Revival building known as the Real Estate Exchange Building. You can see a nice image of it here: http://collections.mcny.org/Collection/%5BReal%20estate%20exchange,%20Brooklyn%20Library.%5D-2F3XC5IKFE8I.html
Or here: http://catalog.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/articles/11300880.011130/1.jpeg