Who would have guessed the next burgeoning skyscraper district would be along the Lower East Side East River waterfront. As per the Lo Down, L+M Development Partners and CIM Group have revealed early diagrams for a pair of residential towers rising from a parking lot site at 260 South Street. The developers will need to navigate through the environmental review process and gain approvals with the Department of City Planning, according to the article.
Tentatively, the Handel Architects-designed towers would rise to 62 and 69 floors respectively, making them a bit shorter than Extell’s One Manhattan Square and JDS Development’s 247 Cherry Street. The team hopes to begin construction in 2018 and complete the project in 2021.
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The one-million-square-foot plus development would include up to 1350 apartments with roughly 338 of the units set aside for low-income and/or middle-income families. The development partnership picked up the Lands End II complex at 265-275 Cherry Street and its river-facing parking lots several years ago. To help gain approvals, the developers proposed to make 25% of the units permanently affordable and have commissioned landscape architects, Mathews Nielsen, to upgrade green spaces around the buildings, add more retail, and attach an underground parking lot.
The Two Bridges area has long been overlooked by developers due to its relative isolation from subways, abundance of government-controlled properties and its mono-residential land uses. Now it seems developers have suddenly realized that its superblocks are hiding unused development potential that can support towers with incomparable views of Manhattan and the East River. With lot size being a crucial component in zoning FAR calculations, the open, mid-century schemes have left a great deal of potential floor area on the table. Even a superblock designated with a relatively low FAR can yield a large tower, especially if there are no height limits in place.
The area may hold Manhattan’s last bastion of large, as-of-right development, though many locals hope to change that. Per the Lo-Down, “During the next year, there will be an enhanced environmental review in the Two Bridges area to address community concerns about the three large-scale projects on the drawing board.” Adjacent to the Manhattan Bridge, Extell’s One Manhattan Square at 252 South Street is farthest along and will top off at 821 feet. JDS Development hopes to move forward soon on their more than 1,000-foot supertall at 247 Cherry Street, and just north of 260 South Street, Starrett Corp. is reportedly planning a 60-story building with 740 apartments at 271-283 South Street.
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