Downtown Brooklyn will soon be home to the borough’s tallest and second-tallest buildings if everything goes Eric Adams’s way.
Photo: Binyan Studio and TenBerke Architects
The neo-Gothic, very empty Brooklyn Tower is currently the tallest in the borough, but if everything goes Eric Adams’s way — which, for better or worse, quite a few things have been these days — Downtown Brooklyn will be getting Brooklyn’s second-tallest spire, too.
At a real-estate forum on Friday, the mayor talked up plans to replace a sad seven-story building on a city-owned site at 395 Flatbush Avenue with a mixed-use 72-story concrete-and-glass tower. (Brooklyn Tower stands at a lording 93.) According to a notice in the City Record, of the 1,263 residential units planned for the space, between 253 to 379 affordable units would be set aside for households earning at or below 80 percent of the area median income — that ranges from $90,720 for a single person to $116,000 for a family of three, per the city’s Housing and Preservation Development agency.
“It’s a beautiful building right across the street from Junior’s,” the mayor said at the Real Deal’s New York forum, “so you can put on a couple of pounds and work out in the gym when you get that cheesecake.” Developers Rabina and Park Tower Group currently control the trapezoidal site beneath the current structure through a ground lease with the city that runs through 2072, and will seize on legislation passed by state lawmakers last year plus the City of Yes Housing Opportunity, which would allow for greater building density at 395 Flatbush Avenue through a rezoning. Acting Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Ahmed Tigani says in a statement that under the current plans, no public funds are set to be allocated for the project, and a development team spokesperson says Rabina and Park Tower will take advantage of property tax incentives that would require, among other things, an all-electric building design and higher wage requirements for construction workers.
The more than half-century-old steel building at 395 Flatbush Avenue, which under the project’s proposed plans would be converted into the base of the new skyscraper, was once dubbed the neighborhood’s “biggest eyesore” by Brownstoner and currently counts among its tenants a Verizon call center as well as a ground-floor 7-Eleven that recently posted a tattered sign on its door banning unaccompanied minors in the evening. (Many of the commercial ground-floor spaces are currently sitting vacant, Gothamist reported.) In addition to the proposed, 840-foot pinnacle, a City Hall official says the project is slated to include 66,000 square feet of retail and 75,000 square feet of commercial space, along with a 4,750-square-foot public plaza and an “expanded and heightened” entrance at the DeKalb Avenue subway station.
After sharing shiny renderings of the potential glass tower, the mayor then led the room in a sort of guided meditation on what life could be like for future residents. “It’s a new couple that gets married and have a child,” he explained. “The baby is delivered at Brooklyn Hospital. They walk down the block to their home, and they just started their career. They will take the Q train, which is near the hub of transportation, and they will allow their children to play in a beautiful park.” That is, if everything moves forward as planned — a public “scoping hearing” on the rezoning’s environmental impact is scheduled for June 5.