Rendering: Essex Crossing. SHoP Architects.
A year ago next week, a sweeping plan was unveiled to redevelop the former Seward Park urban renewal site adjacent to the Williamsburg Bridge, bringing one-thousand new apartments and 600,000 square feet of commercial space to the Lower East Side. Since that time, developers and architects have been hard at work to meet a spring 2015 deadline for groundbreaking on the first four parcels. For an update on their progress, we sat down recently with key members of Delancey Street Associates, the consortium created to build the project, known as Essex Crossing.
Charlie Bendit is co-CEO of Taconic Investment Partners, which along with L+M Partners and BFC Partners, was selected to create the nearly 2-million square foot complex. Isaac Henderson of L+M is the project manager. We met in a conference room ringed with conceptual drawings of Essex Crossing at L+M’s offices on Park Avenue South. Among the headlines from our interview:
Here are all of the renderings released today showing what Essex Crossing, the new Seward Park project, might look like. Keep in mind, architects still need to design the buildings. These images are simply representational. Following the renderings, see a detailed narrative on the housing, retail, open space and community facilities to be built during […]
Ludlow and Broome streets. Site 1 of Essex Crossing.
Here’s an update from the Essex Crossing development team. In the coming weeks, you’ll start to see more activity on some of the sites that will make up the big project in the former Seward Park urban renewal area. Spokesperson Annel Cabrera tells us:
The initial phase of construction will begin on Site 1 the week of May 8. This parcel is the Municipal parking lot at Ludlow and Broome streets. Yesterday, Cabrera noted that quite a few car owners have ignored signs indicating that the lot was closing April 15. She said the cars remaining in the area would be towed. The preliminary work will include clearing the parcel and beginning excavation. It’s expected to last about four weeks with work hours Monday-Saturday 7 a.m.-6 p.m.
A site plan for the Essex Crossing park along Broome Street between Suffolk and Clinton streets. Rendering by West 8.
A 15,000-square-foot park stretching along Broome Street between Suffolk and Clinton streets will be one of the first projects to break ground in the giant Essex Crossing development, and details of its design were unveiled last night.
After gathering community feedback on initial designs earlier this year, landscape architects West 8 appeared before a Community Board 3 subcommittee to present their latest drawings. The park is expected to begin construction in March 2015 and be completed in two years.
The plan calls for a “relaxing neighborhood amenity with passive uses” that offers a “green oasis in the city,” representatives from the firm told committee members and an audience of citizens gathered in a meeting room at Sara D. Roosevelt Park.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg came to the Lower East Side this morning to announce that the Seward Park project, delayed for four decades, was finally a “done deal.”
Standing in an abandoned building of the Essex Street Market with some of the city’s biggest developers, community partners and neighborhood activists, he called Essex Crossing (the official name of the project) a “wonderful thing” that will bring “the new housing, jobs and open space Lower East Siders want and need and deserve.”
Word got out yesterday that the residential, commercial and community-oriented complex would be built by L+M Development Partners, BFC Partners, and Taconic Investment Partners. They’re paying the city $180 million for the site and investing a total of $1.1 billion to build the new community at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge over the next decade. Groundbreaking is expected in the spring of 2015; the first buildings are projected to open in the summer of 2018. The architectura