Gregg Wies & Gardner design rendering
The proposed new apartment building at 873-897 Grand.
Thomas Breen photo
873-887 Grand as it looks today.
A New York-based landlord plans to knock down two vacant Grand Avenue commercial buildings and build 112 new apartments in their stead on the northern end of Wooster Square.
Local architect Sam Gardner presented that development plan Tuesday night during the latest monthly meeting of the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team, which was held online via Zoom.
The new six-story, 112-unit apartment building is slated for 873, 887, and 897 Grand Ave. — three properties on the north side of the street, which currently hold a long-vacant commercial building, a surface parking lot, and the vacant former home of Unger’s Flooring.
A holding company controlled by New York-based landlord Joel Strulovich purchased those three properties last November for $3.1 million from a holding company controlled by New York-based landlords Edward Roubeni and William Ahdout. Gardner said on Tuesday that the new development will include a mix of studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments. Per the city’s inclusionary zoning ordinance, 10 percent of the units will be reserved for tenants making no more than 50 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI), which currently translates to around $57,350 for a family of four.
“This project will promote more much-needed affordable housing in the area,” Gardner told the meeting attendees.
Bird's-eye view of proposed building.
The building will include ground level parking and five stories of apartments above. It will also include a rooftop terrace area, a garden facing Lyon Street, and street-level parking, which will bring the building up to six stories tall. With the development to be constructed two feet behind the current sidewalk line, the block’s sidewalk is set to be wider and more comfortable for pedestrians, Gardner said. Constructed in light colors, the building will also reflect heat, as per the city’s heat absorption requirements.
Though developers have begun drafting applications for the construction of the building, those applications have not yet been received by the City Plan Commission, according to a City Plan Department staffer.
Given the planned building’s height and magnitude, various community members on Tuesday expressed concerns about how its construction could negatively affect the lives of current residents nearby.
"None of your renderings show the building in the context that it will be placed in," said Reeder.
“This seems dire for the properties behind it,” said Linda Reeder, a local architect who has been in conversation with Gardner about the project. “In the winter, the shadows cast by the six stories will go across people’s backyards and entire homes.”
The properties behind the proposed building, two and three-story family homes, could be starved of sunlight all year due to the height of the building, posing a heating problem during colder months, Reeder argued.
“I thought the whole point of zoning was to give people the right to sunlight, to restrict large buildings like these,” she added.
Reeder’s point gave way to discussion about the properties’ underlying zoning, and about whether or not allowing these kinds of projects on this particular stretch of Grand Avenue is fair to existing residents.
873-887 Grand.
As a member of the neighborhood group that succeeded in stopping the city from rezoning this stretch of Grand Avenue as a Commercial Gateway District back in 2019 and 2020, Lyon Street resident and artist Mona Berman said on Tuesday she’s concerned with how the new project backtracks that progress. The previous rezoning approach proposed introducing new economic activity, mainly through residential developments, into Grand Avenue’s current commercial environment.
Given the lack of commercial activity being introduced in the new development at 873 – 897 Grand, Berman, as well as fellow Wooster Square community member and urbanist Anstress Farwell, called for clarity from the city as to whether or not the development is a way to push forward previously dropped zoning plans.
“The city needs to choose if this is a commercial corridor or a residential area,” said Berman. “They need to clarify what their intention is, especially after all the work we’ve put in to get the zoning pinned down.”