Downtown

Ready, Set, Go: Bulldozers roll for Two Trees, Gotham at BAM cultural district sites

Eye On Real Estate

February 19, 2014 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle
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Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night …. stays developers from starting work on high-profile BAM Cultural District projects.

In recent days, whenever the heavens held off on the precipitation, crews were out with Bobcats and bulldozers, doing their very first demolition work on two different projects.

This is the start of something big.

The result will be hundreds of new apartments plus new cultural facilities – forward progress in turning the Downtown mini-neighborhood anchored by the Brooklyn Academy of Music into what’s being called a new Lincoln Center, only better.

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Take a peek:

* The site where Two Trees Management is building a 31-story rental apartment tower designed by TEN Arquitectos, 286 Ashland Place, was functioning as a parking lot until Feb. 10. A sign went up warning folks not to park their cars there after that, or they’d be towed.

The heavy machinery has since arrived to start ripping up the paving at the site of the Walentas’ project – which will have 381 apartments, 20% of them affordable for low-income residents. Also planned: a plaza, a public library, BAM’s Hamm Archives Center and a performing arts presenter for artists of the African diaspora called 651 ARTS.

Workers have been installing the construction fence around the massive site, which has frontage on Ashland Place, Lafayette Avenue and Flatbush Avenue. By the time you read this, the fence will probably be finished.

* Bulldozers are chomping into the earth at 598 Fulton St. – the future home of a 51-story skyscraper the Gotham Organization is building. It too had been a parking lot, until some time in December.   

It’s also going to be a rental apartment building – and 50% of  its 585 units will be affordable.

It, too has a glam design – by FXFowle Architects.

Bounded by Ashland Place, Fulton Street and Rockwell Place, the site is next door to the Theatre for a New Audience. The Shakespeare-centric playhouse opened last fall with a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” directed by Julie Taymor that drew crowds – and rave reviews.


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