Plans have been filed with the Department of Buildings for a 15-story apartment building at 861 Lexington Avenue on the southeast corner at 65th Street.

According to the website of Ark Investment Partners, a first mortgage has been secured for the development of a 65,000-square-foot, mixed use project on the site that will contain 25 condominium apartments and 5,908 square feet of ground floor retail space.

The site had until recently been occupied by a four-story structure that was known as the Kean Residence that according to the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts had originally been painted a salmon pink and had leaded glass windows, rusticated detailing and "a remarkable double height space on East 65th Street" and had originally been "built as two brownstones in 1880" and "transformed by Francis L. V. Hoppin for J. Steward Barney, an architect, artist and society figure" in 1922.

In his "Streetscapes" column June 1, 2003 in The New York Times, Christopher Gray wrote that "Although Barney had designed many buildings, including the village-like Church of the Holy Trinity complex on 88th Street east of Second Avenue, he had given up architecture in 1915 to pursue painting."

The site is across 65th Street from the 1881 priory of the Roman Catholic church of St. Vincent Ferrer that had been built in 1867 by The Dominicans and designed by William Schickel.

The site is also across Lexington Avenue from a low-rise building on the southwest corner at 65th Street that is notable for its parging, or heavily modeled plaster decoration, prompting Mr. Gray to write that the intersection composed "an urban sonata, one whose distinctive architecture notes rise even above the neighborhood's dense traffic."

H. Thomas O'Hara is the architect for the planned new building for which the Department of Buildings issued a permit June 26, 2009. The permit listed Maurice Bendrihem of Lex 65 LLC c/o Davis Development as an owner of the project.