Brooklyn Life

Sunset Park Library Preps to Open in New Building With Affordable Housing

A peek through the windows showed workers are busy unpacking boxes and furnishing and decorating the interior.

sunset park library - the new building with housing above the library

Photo by Susan De Vries

by Cate Corcoran

11/06/2023 3 minute 0

The remake of the Sunset Park library is close to opening.

A peek through the windows showed workers are busy unpacking boxes and furnishing and decorating the interior. November is the debut month, a banner in the window makes clear.

A leafy artwork extends along a deep blue wall, and a wooden ceiling shows off mid-century modern style pendent lights.

In the works since 2014, the two-story plus cellar library at 5108 4th Avenue is twice the size of the old one at 20,000 square feet and is a condo at the base of a new mid-rise building. The eight-story building, which closely matches its renderings, replaced a one-story library built in 1972.

The building’s six upper floors hold 50 units of genuinely affordable housing for households earning 40 percent to 80 percent of Area Median Income. The lottery for 372 51st Street took place in 2021.

The new library space includes a recording studio, teen room, meeting and event spaces, tutoring room, and staff offices, floor plans show.

The redevelopment plan by the library and partner Fifth Avenue Committee, which owns the building apart from the library, was controversial. “It smells like gentrification,” said one of the more than 75 locals who attended a 2014 hearing on the proposal, DNAinfo reported at the time.

At the time, the library was mulling selling off some of its properties to fund capital improvements, which eventually resulted in a new Brooklyn Heights condo branch at the base of luxury condo tower One Clinton. A new Fort Greene branch was promised for the bottom of skyscraper 300 Ashland but has not yet materialized.

The first Sunset Park library branch was a neo-Classical Carnegie library that opened in 1905 at 5108 4th Avenue. An interim Sunset Park branch at 4201 4th Avenue closed in September to prepare for the move.