A luxury condo developer says he wants to build residential towers on each side of the Brooklyn House of Detention — a bold salvo in his bid to win redevelopment rights at the soon-to-reopen jail.
Last week, the Bloomberg administration solicited bids to transform the House of D into a mixed-use penal facility.
Two towers — consisting of condos, office space, a hotel, or any combination — could be built alongside the Atlantic Avenue jail under the city plan. And the proximity of the inmates to the tenants isn’t deterring developer Jed Walentas.
“It’s a valuable piece of real estate and I don’t think the jail is a huge issue,” Walentas, son of DUMBO developer David Walentas, told The Brooklyn Paper this week. He said his company would propose “a residential building next to” the jail.
Walentas added that “if the project is done right,” apartments in the resulting “House of D” condos could attract the same wealthy tenants as the Court House, a posh 320-unit building that Walentas’s Two Trees Management built one block from the jail.
Walentas made his bold pronouncement last Friday, one day after the city’s Economic Development Corporation officially asked developers to submit plans for two 10- to 15-story commercial and/or residential towers that would sandwich the existing 11-story jail at the rapidly gentrifying corner of Atlantic Avenue and Smith Street.
The towers could be filled with offices, hotel rooms or apartments, according to the city’s pitch. Walentas said that he would consider building there only if it was guaranteed that he could do a residential development, which would likely be more profitable than the alternatives.
Along with new towers, the House of Detention complex would include a 22,000-square-foot underground parking garage for city workers and hundreds of new cells for the jail, which has been closed since 2003.
Diagrams distributed to interested developers suggest that the new cells would rise to the rear of the existing Atlantic Avenue structure, with the mixed-use towers occupying city-owned land east and west of the jail that is now used for parking.
The request for proposals said the redesign must “ensure that inmates and city personnel should not be able to view into the new residential and/or commercial developments” — and vice-versa.
Shops would fill the ground floors of all three buildings, a nod to pressure from Borough President Markowitz, who has long pushed the city to “knit” the Boerum Hill part of Atlantic Avenue back to the Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill side by adding in the pedestrian-friendly retail at the jail. The Beep cheered the city’s call for residential development at the jail.
“I’ve always felt that with creative planning, this site can serve the needs of the city’s Department of Correction while also meshing with the character of this thriving area,” he said.
Markowitz said the jail-side apartments would do just fine on the open market. And real-estate experts agree.
“People certainly have been open to looking at apartments [nearby]. They are buying even knowing that the jail could reopen,” said Sue Wolfe, an Atlantic Avenue broker and the president of the Boerum Hill Association, which opposes the jail’s reopening.
Janel Patterson, a spokeswoman for the EDC, said city officials would decide whether to put hotel rooms, apartments or offices in the towers based on the strength of the developers’ proposals. She added that the city has not definitely decided that residential development must be part of the site, but said that whatever is built “must be compatible with the Department of Correction’s plans” to reopen the jail.
