Reply With QuoteThere are tons of stuff in Queens as well. There are hundreds of new 12 story buildings in the outer-boroughs that have never been mentioned here.
Roscoe C. Brown, Jr. Apartments
3952 Third Avenue
11 floors
279 units
There is really an immense amount of new construction in the Bronx. I still find it incredible that such an enormous number of projects gets no publicity or notice.
There are tons of stuff in Queens as well. There are hundreds of new 12 story buildings in the outer-boroughs that have never been mentioned here.
Webster Commons
Here's an interesting one for the architecture, but maybe even more for the site. Webster Commons, which I just found on the website of the Jackson Development Group, will have 430 affordable and senior apartments and should be finished by June 2013. Check out where it's being built: 3556 Webster Avenue. It's tucked right in the narrow strip of land between Woodlawn Cemetery and Metro-North's Harlem Line.
Here's some more info from the Bronx News Network. (Notice how much space the reporter gives to one or two NIMBY cranks, including one who isn't even from the right community board!)
Originally Posted by TheInterloafer
The Wall Street Journal has an update:
[A] new Holiday Inn Express is now being built at the intersection of 146th and Exterior streets. The project is expected to be complete by mid-2013, with a total of 85 rooms, according to Sherry Telford, a spokeswoman for InterContinental Hotels Group.
Back in the fall of 2008, the owners of the Concourse Plaza strip mall on E. 161st Street posted some banners touting the arrival of a new five-story office "tower" on the property. As of May 2009 it was still an empty lot. Then in October 2009 it was in the early stages of construction (third photo). Here, at long last, is the moment we've all been waiting for. . . . [Drumroll] . . . the final product:
The building, at 820 Concourse Village West (Sheridan Avenue), has 69,000 square feet of office space on five stories, the top of which is set back from the street. It has curtain wall glass of green and white horizontal bands facing the street and on the opposite side toward the interior of the strip mall. The green/white banding is reminiscent of its big older brother at 198 E. 161st Street, Concourse Plaza Office Tower I, which has well defined green/white horizontal bands, as barely visible in this photo. The newer building's north and south facades also have sections of masonry. One tenant is the Social Security Administration. I'm not sure who else is in there as of now. This photo is taken from the southwest, at 158th Street and Concourse Village West. All in all I would say it is a satisfactory, serviceable effort.
East 153rd Street Bridge
The New York City Department of Transportation is building a four-lane, 511-foot-long cable-stayed bridge (pdf) that will span the Metro-North Harlem Line at East 153rd Street, connecting Concourse Village West to Park Avenue. It's going to be the first cable-stayed bridge in New York State, a huge iconic structure with twin 195-foot-tall central towers supporting cables that will descend diagonally toward each end of the bridge. To prepare the bridge's western approach to accomodate more traffic, DOT is apparently widening E. 153rd Street between the Grand Concourse and Concourse Village West. To do that, they have just demolished two former auto-service buildings at 670 and 676 Grand Concourse, across 153rd Street from Cardinal Hayes High School.
This "before" photo shows the buildings in February 2011.
Here's a detail of the vintage-looking sign that had just been uncovered when I took that photo.
Here are some "after" shots of the demolished buildings.
Last edited by TheInterloafer; January 29th, 2012 at 06:21 PM.
I don't know how I feel about this. It's weird that it will terminate into such a big bottleneck on the Park Ave side, since that isn't being widened like the other side is.
It is a good thing that The Bronx could revert its "detroitization" trend of the 70's and 80's. These Google Earth images from 2001 and 2011 show how it is has been redeveloped.
2001
Shot at 2012-02-18
2011
Shot at 2012-02-18
Yes, it's execllent news. The South Bronx is re-densifying.
There are tons and tons of midrises planned for the South Bronx. It will be an entirely new area 10-15 years from now.
Detroit and the South Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s would have appeared on the same trajectory of depopulation and decay. For Detroit, and plenty of other cities in the rust belt, that has trend continued but I think now is finally stabilizing. But the South Bronx began turning around c. 1990 and has been substantially repopulated. The populations of Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, St. Louis, Bridgeport, Conn., Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, Washington, Brooklyn, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis all peaked in 1950. In 2010, Detroit's population was 38.6% of its peak; Cleveland's was 43.4%; Philly, 73.7%; Boston, 77.1%; Chicago, 74.4%; St. Louis, 37.3%; Pittsburgh, 45.2%.
By contrast, the population of the Bronx continued rising for 20 years after all those cities peaked, a rarity for urban America. Its 2010 population was 94.1% of its all-time 1970 peak. If current growth trends continue, the borough's population would be on the cusp of surpassing its all time high in the next census. The Bronx population grew by 52,458 people in the 2010 census. That's more people than any county in New York State except Suffolk, which has 21.7 times more land area. It's twice as much as Westchester, or equal to Westchester and Rockland combined. A lot of that is owed to the resurgence of the South Bronx, shown so well in the photos above.
The best two books I would recommend on this - the decline and rebirth - are The Fires by Joe Flood and South Bronx Rising by Jill Jonnes. Best read in that order. The Fires goes into the "planned shrinkage" idea and the early, botched attempts to use "data" to guide public policy. This was implemented by the RAND Corp., which advised the City to reduce Fire Dept. resources in the South Bronx. The result was the decade that the FDNY vets refer to as "the war years." The second book tells a broader view of the entire period and after, with lots of coverage of housing advocacy efforts that turned the corner. Actually, the end of Jill Jonnes' book culminates in the beginning of the before and after images above.
New high school
Here is a new high school under construction at the northeast corner of East 144th Street and Park Avenue an L-shaped lot that continues back to 146th Street and Canal Place. The south side of the site used to be a parking lot. The north side was the former Chairmasters warehouse.
This may be the first building to be completed under NYC Dept. of City Planning's Lower Concourse rezoning. I say "may" because the other candidate is the 12-story hotel under construction at 146th and Exterior, but that one doesn't seem to be progressing as quickly as this one.
This is designed by Gensler. Does anyone know more about the project?
Here's a shot from yesterday of that new high school at 144th Street and Park Avenue that I was mentioning earlier. This replaces a parking lot and the four-story Chairmasters warehouse seen here in Google street view.
NYC Public school architecture has been improving in recent years. I find most of the newer stuff to be pretty decent, especially urbanistically.
Speaking of which, Bronx Community College got a great looking new library by Bob Stern:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...llege-library/
That is a thing of beauty. It's very well integrated into the campus and very fitting for an academic building. In fact, it's one of the better buildings on campus, in my opinion.
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