Developers Buy Flatbush Wood Frame for $2.365 Million to Tear It Down and Build Apartments

Another in a long list of wood frame houses in Flatbush may soon disappear.

New owners of 319 Lenox Road, where a freestanding wood frame house now stands, filed plans to replace it with an eight-story apartment building. It is one of four wood frame houses that remain on the block.

The home was purchased in February by three LLCs as tenants in common — 141 Ml LLC, Hm Briggs LLC and 759 St Nicholas LLC — for $2.365 million, according to public records. It had previously been in the same family for 38 years. (Tenancy in common ownership is unusual in New York but common in California.)

Prolific Brooklyn architect Charles Mallea is designing. The firm is also modernizing 163 Court Street, the Cobble Hill Greek Revival shop front where Book Court used to be, and created a rendering for Bed Stuy’s 410 Tompkins Avenue, dubbed the “Bulgarian Neo-Goth Super-Villain Crack Lair,” that was jettisoned for a more traditional building after an outcry.

The new owners are planning 28 apartments, eight parking spaces at ground level, and terraces on the second and third floors, according to the DOB.

The sale of the home should come as no surprise: Wood frame houses are falling prey to development all over the borough, and activity is especially intense in Prospect Lefferts Gardens and Flatbush.

On this block alone, the changes have been swift: A generic red brick mid-size tower now stands at 331-333 Lenox, overshadowing the four remaining houses. Two of those houses — 323 and 325 Lenox — were purchased in 2015 by Eastern Lenox Estates 325 LLC. The company filed an application for a permit in June 2017 to combine the two lots and build a seven-story building, which was disapproved in January of this year.

The only remaining holdout on the block is 315 Lenox, which last changed hands in 1978 and has remained with the same owners ever since.

It also stands two blocks from the two freestanding homes at 94 and 100 Lenox Road, which were sold to a developer for a combined $9.95 million. Next door, a new eight-story condo building designed by architect Karl Fisher replaced three similar frame houses at 2100-2110 Bedford Avenue, which were demolished in 2015.

[Photos by Craig Hubert]

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