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LCOR and the California State Teachers? Retirement System (CalSTRS) plan to break ground next month for The Charleston, a 191-unit residential condominium building at 225 East 34th Street on the northeast corner of Tunnel Exit Street between Third Avenue and Second Avenues.

The site is close to the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

David Sigman, senior vice president of LCOR, which is based in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, told CityRealty.Com today that the building is expected to be completed next year and that sales should start this summer.

The 21-story building has been designed by SLCE with HLW International as design consultant. Most of the southwest corner of the building, which has a one-story base with about 11,000-square feet of commercial space, is angled and its frontage on 34th Street has three projecting bays that descend from the highest at the west to the lowest at the east.

The building, which convenient to good public transportation and Murray Hill, will have many balconies.

It will have 9-foot-high ceilings, a fitness center, a catering kitchen, a media lounge and an landscaped plaza. It will offer studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments and several three-bedroom penthouses.

It is named after Charles Benenson, the New York developer who died in 2004 and had owned the site. Mr. Benenson, a well-known art collector, was the developer of several properties in Manhattan including the Connaught apartment tower at 330 East 54th Street and at one time was the owner of the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.

?It was very important to the Benenson family that the building be named in memory of our father, Charlie,? Lawrence B. Benenson, a principal of Benenson Capital Partners LLC, has commented, adding that ?LCOR was gracious enough to agree and we are certain The Charleston will be one of their most successful projects.? Benenson Capital Partners LLC sold the property for about $73 million.

LCOR is also developing a 37-story, 199-unit residential condominium building at 101 West 24th Street that is also expected to be completed in 2007.
Architecture Critic Carter Horsley Since 1997, Carter B. Horsley has been the editorial director of CityRealty. He began his journalistic career at The New York Times in 1961 where he spent 26 years as a reporter specializing in real estate & architectural news. In 1987, he became the architecture critic and real estate editor of The New York Post.