Development Watch: 1311 Pacific Street
A reader sent in this photo of a new development on her block. The 32-unit, six-story building at 1311 Pacific Street in Crown Heights was designed by Loadingdock5 Architecture, the same firm that did most of the new projects for Eli Karp to the west on Pacific between Washington and Grand Avenues. In particular, the…
A reader sent in this photo of a new development on her block. The 32-unit, six-story building at 1311 Pacific Street in Crown Heights was designed by Loadingdock5 Architecture, the same firm that did most of the new projects for Eli Karp to the west on Pacific between Washington and Grand Avenues. In particular, the balconies and exterior staircases echo those of 957 Pacific. Waddya think? Update: There’s listing information here. One-bedroom for $299,000. GMAP DOB
I like the idea of letting the buyer choose the fixtures and customize the interior, or choose to install their own and get cash back, and I think the location is pretty good — A-train on Nostrand is right there, as well as the good part of Fulton.
However, all of these units are 600 square feet, making them kind of unattractive to families. Why do developers make new construction so small? If these were only a little larger, I think they’d be much more viable.
Thanks, MM.
These developers and their architects have evolved an interesting housing “type” at this site and others down Pacific Street.
Brownstoners may recognize the historic “open-stair” Home and Tower Buildings elsewhere in Brooklyn, built during the 1870s, and their translation here, which makes for an unusual, and potentially lively, facade.
And 32 units should bring some welcome pedestrian activity to that side of Pacific Street, which I remember as rather dark and lonely due to the parking lot.
Regards to BxGrl and Amzi Hill.
NOP
NOP, wonderful, as always. I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments, and hope the entire block does become the best it can be once again.
PS:
The last image of one of the lofts’ interiors looks toward my old apartment through its big plate glass windows. As a boy, I’d sit in our window seat and watch the street. The photo-shopped rendering brings me back half a century!
Hope these units are able to sell, although even at $300,000, given these times and the project’s location, that seems high.
NOP
Brownstoner:
These condos are rising on the empty lot that sat opposite my family’s apartment on Pacific Street, where we lived during the 1950s and early 1960s.
I was shown them on a recent walk through Crown Heights and was happy to see them.
Although the old lot opened a view from our place all the way to the tower of the old Boys High School in Bedford Stuyvesant, it was always a kind of forlorn place, a big gap in a row of architecturally interesting buildings. An old slate parapet wall at its edge made me think it may have been the site of a free-standing mansion, similar to the one next door to us (a former “house of the day” on Brownstoner).
Pacific Street was then, and still is, a mixture of row houses, tenements, and walk-up and elevator apartment buildings. The Tuscan-inspired building next to the new condos, seen to the left in the photograph, was the first harbinger of change on our block. It turned from a stable apartment house to a transient place where young single men and women (some of the latter prostitutes, according to my parents) would hang out on the street and trouble passersby, prelude to the kind of block-busting that raced through Crown Heights during the 1950s and early 1960s, turning our building, 1280, into a rooming house where suspicious fires encouraged the remaining families to leave.
It was good to see that the building appears recently renovated, along with several others on the block. My own building, after near abandonment, has been renovated, too, although a number of its beautiful features, like our leaded-glass French windows and the wrought-iron lobby doors have disappeared.
Once the condos are opened, there’ll be only one eyesore on the block, a tall, handsome house currently abandoned and surrounded by chain-link fencing and a pack of guard dogs. As New York eventually gets out of the recession, there’ll be pressure to fix this building. Then Pacific Street between Nostrand and New York Avenues, which I remember as a racially-integrated block of working, middle-class, and professional people, will finally be complete. And with the introduction of modern architecture, visually refreshed.
Nostalgic on Park Avenue