968 60th Street, rendering by Karl Fischer
An abandoned factory on the southern edge of Borough Park was demolished last year, and now new rental apartments are rising in its place. YIMBY has a look at the design for the new building at 968 60th Street, near the border with Sunset Park and Dyker Heights.
The five-story development, called the Hamilton, will wrap around a full block on Fort Hamilton Parkway between 60th and 61st streets. Retail will occupy the ground floor along 61st Street and Fort Hamilton Parkway, and residents will be able to enter through a lobby on 60th Street.
The building will offer 92 apartments, ranging from studios to three-bedrooms. PR reps for the project tell us that rents will start at $1800 for studios and go up to $4,000 for a three-bedroom. The rents seem a bit ambitious for the area, especially since the subways and the freight trains rattle beneath a concrete bridge along an open cut across the street. Still, the Hamilton will provide new housing for the neighborhood’s growing Orthodox Jewish, Chinese, and Mexican communities.
The apartments will span 85,688 square feet of residential space, creating nicely sized average units measuring 930 square feet. The ground floor will host 13,900 square feet of retail, which may include restaurants or small shops.
The cellars will have a 63-car parking garage and 4,500 square feet of amenities for tenants. There will also be a shared roof deck on the top floor.
The developer is Lipa Friedman’s Halcyon Management, and the ubiquitous Karl Fischer designed the project. Halcyon has also developed two other pricey rental buildings in Brooklyn—101 Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg and The Plex in southern Crown Heights.
This property sits inside the industrial area that stretches between Sunset Park and Borough Park, and it was originally zoned for heavy manufacturing. But the developers secured a variance to convert the factory to apartments back in 2005. The measure allowed them to demolish most of the factory and build a new structure on the foundations of the old building.
The former factory at 6002 Fort Hamilton Parkway, aka 968 60th Street