After years of sitting on the old Caledonian Hospital, looks like Joseph Chetrit's finally pulling the trigger and creating a massive new rental development right along the park. This, from no less capitalist sources than the Wall Street Journal:
CALEDONIAN HOSPITAL GOES CONDO (and rental?)
13 comments:
It's about time that this marvelous spot was returned to active duty. As long as the new building doesn't tower over its neighbors I welcome it to the nabe.
The article mentions interior demolition and tight timelines, perhaps they mean to reuse what is there?
Can someone please forward this article to Moses Fried?
Unfortunately, the choice of Karl Fischer as architect makes me fear the worst.
this is big news Q. I'm guessing in about 5-10 years you are going to miss the scene you so nicely portrayed in your "Uncanny Dilemma" post. But then I suppose you can sell your home and move to Detroit, where there will still be plenty of urban grit and I assume lots of canning activity, given the 10 cent deposits they have there.
They've been sitting on this for a while and keeping a lot of the plans close to the chest with the hopes of minimizing community input. I wonder how many units will be available to current residents and whether or not any will be flagged for affordable housing? I presume this will be labeled a "luxury" development, so that's going to be great news fro homeowners in the area, but I wonder what that will that mean for those of us who are renters in the neighborhood.
Karl Fischer? Oy vey. If it is any consolation, BouncerBlog, Karl Fischer rarely does much for property values. Shudder.
What's wrong with Karl Fischer? Curious. Looked up his designs, and they seem pretty nice.
Trying again sans typos:
Let's just say I'm not a fan. His designs may look nice enough in some suburban blandness somewhere, but they are not contextual in any way here. Take a good look at the crap he designed around McCarren Park in Williamsburg, for example. No thanks.
I do like some of what he did with the Gretsch Building, but that was before his true nature came out. He was still trying to break into the NY architecture scene from Montreal.
Could be worse, I suppose, although isn't Scarano banned for a while?
We live close by and have been trying to get them to clean up the site for years. A development there is welcome regardless of its aesthetics.
An owner who lets a site deteriorate like this one has (and Chetrit has owned it all the while, just not done anything with it) doesn't inspire much confidence in me regarding any future development to be done there, and the choice of Karl Fischer as an architect would seem to follow in that vein.
Babs,
Part of the reason that I believe there wasn't much activity on Chetrit's part was because he was trying to avoid some of the community backlash that the Park Tower (the Lincoln Rd development) had to endure. I think once he realized that we are governed by a different community board, he wasn't as worried. Especially, since there isn't much of a voice from this end of the park at those meetings.
CB 9 had nothing to do with the Lincoln Rd. construction site - that development is as of right and needed no CB approvals or waivers. The protests against it were entirely from local residents acting on their own. According to both the WSJ and The Real Deal, Chetrit's been sitting on it waiting for the housing market to come back. I don't think the two are in any way related.
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