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Brooklyn: New Towers for Williamsburg

A new rental building, 1N4th is rising north of the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn. Apartments are also in store for the grounds of the Domino Sugar Factory.Credit...Emily Andrews for The New York Times

Tower after tower has shot up along the radically revamped waterfront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, over the past decade, and the latest one to rise, called 1N4th, will be far from the last.

The 2005 rezoning of almost 200 blocks of Williamsburg, and parts of neighboring Greenpoint to the north, catalyzed the transformation of the waterfront area, a once-bleak industrial zone lined with trash transfer stations and contaminated sites. The controversial rezoning made way for thousands of new apartments in towers, some more than 40 stories, but it also was designed to spur creation of affordable housing, along with a public esplanade and a 28-acre city park.

A 41-story building with 510 rental apartments at 1 North Fourth Street, 1N4th is now topped out and started leasing this month, but has received little media attention since construction began, perhaps because it blends in with Williamsburg’s growing collection of littoral towers. When pioneer towers like Schaefer Landing, completed in 2003, the Northside Piers development (2007) and the Edge (2008) went up, they drew many more stares.

About 10 waterfront high-rises may eventually join 1N4th, including three towers at the Domino Sugar site and several more on sites south of the Williamsburg Bridge. These could add as many as 4,300 apartments.

But the developers of 1N4th say it is not just another brick in the wall of waterfront development. Designed by FXFowle Architects, 1N4th is a glassy high-rise that is attempting to push the envelope on high-end finishes and amenities for luxury rental towers, said Jeffrey E. Levine, the chairman of Douglaston Development, which is building the tower.

“This is a rental project with condo-level amenities,” he said. And Mr. Levine touted not just the building’s Manhattan views — after all, Williamsburg’s existing luxury waterfront towers have those — but also its “360-degree views.”

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Another view of 1N4th, which is 41 stories high.Credit...Emily Andrews for The New York Times

“We’re like a ship, not a building,” Mr. Levine said. “The site is almost a peninsula jutting out into the East River, and we literally have views from our homes that are 360 degrees.”

The land was originally to be the site of a third condominium tower in the Northside Piers development, a venture of Toll Brothers, RD Management and L + M Development Partners. However, by 2010, more than 1,000 condo units had been developed along the Williamsburg waterfront, and at the Northside Piers towers, sales were sluggish. Douglaston, which took over the property in 2011, decided to instead tap into Williamsburg’s booming rental market and build 1N4th. 

Since that time, the condo market citywide has recovered. Listings in Williamsburg’s waterfront buildings are hovering around $1,450 a square foot, which is comparable to prices for new development in some Manhattan neighborhoods.

Still, like Douglaston, some developers have set their immediate sights on rental apartments. If everything currently planned along the Williamsburg waterfront is developed, towers could eventually stretch from about North Seventh Street down to Division Avenue and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with a few gaps for a New York Power Authority station, a restaurant and a government building.

Still to be determined is the future of land owned by Con Edison, just north of the power station. Zoned for manufacturing, it will be put on the market as early as next year, said Sidney Alvarez, a Con Edison spokesman.

The rental market along the Williamsburg waterfront is thriving. Rents there have increased, especially for larger apartments, as much as 25 percent since 2010, trumping parts of Manhattan.

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The Domino factory property will become offices.Credit...Emily Andrews for The New York Times

At 184 Kent Avenue, a converted warehouse, rentals began in 2010. The building, with about 340 apartments, earlier this month had studios starting at $2,800 a month, one-bedrooms at $3,300 and two-bedrooms at $4,350.

Rents at 1N4th will be comparable. Apartments will range from studios of about 466 square feet to three-bedrooms of at least 1,249 square feet, said Katie Ackel of MNS Real Impact Real Estate, who is marketing the building.

Rents range from $2,200 to $3,250 a month for studios, $2,800 to $3,700 for one-bedrooms, and $4,200 to $5,800 for two-bedrooms, she said. Three-bedroom apartments start in the high $5,000s a month and go up to $8,500 a month.

Finishes in the apartments include gray oak flooring, solar shades, Caesarstone countertops in kitchens and Pietre d’Italia porcelain tile in bathrooms. Each apartment has a washer and dryer by Bosch; other appliances are by Whirlpool.

Besides a 24-hour concierge, 1N4th has more than 20,000 square feet of interior and exterior amenities, including an 8,500-square-foot sun deck on the third floor with a swimming pool, a movie screen and a barbecue area. Inside the tower are a 3,000-square-foot fitness center, a media lounge with billiards, a party room with a kitchen and a children’s playroom. 

Developers have not yet decided if they will charge a fee for the use of amenities, but if they do, it will be only $25 or $50 a month, said Steven Charno, the president of Douglaston Development.

The spacious lobby has double-height wood-paneled ceilings and mailboxes integrated into various pieces of furniture, as well as a kitchenette, a library and a nearby business center, said Highlyann Krasnow, a broker at MNS. The building will have racks for hundreds of bicycles as well as ample storage, she said.

Most of the renters, who will begin moving in next month, will likely be in their 20s and early 30s, Mr. Levine said. He anticipates that the building will be fully leased by the first quarter of 2016.

Meanwhile, Douglaston Development has also broken ground on the final phase of its Edge development, a high-rise with 550 market-rate rental apartments to the north of 1N4th.

South of 1N4th, but north of the Williamsburg Bridge, is the 11-acre site of an old Domino Sugar factory, where three waterfront towers, one of them 55 stories, will eventually flank the waterside refinery building, a designated landmark that will be converted to office space.  

Originally proposed almost a decade ago by different developers, the Domino redevelopment project has come to symbolize the rebirth of Williamsburg’s waterfront. But it was fought by many residents and community groups for years.

However, neighborhood opposition waned in the face of a radical redesign by a new developer. Last spring, Two Trees Management received city approval for the project, to include a ziggurat-shape 16-story building set back a block from the water that is to break ground in January. The building will have about 500 units, more than 100 of them affordable.

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Brooklyn Inlet Park is several plots short of completion.Credit...Emily Andrews for The New York Times

The entire project will have more than 2,200 rental apartments, about 700 of which will be affordable; two office buildings (one tower will be half residential and half office); a school; and a six-acre park, said David Lombino, the director of special projects for Two Trees.

The first rental apartments will probably be available in spring or summer 2017, and the project should be completed in six to eight years, he said.

In an attempt to break up the march of glassy towers through coastal Williamsburg, SHoP Architects, which designed two buildings, created slender, porous structures with less glass and more metal that are varied in height “to bring light and air into the neighborhood,” said Vishaan Chakrabarti, a principal of SHoP.

Towers may eventually continue south of the Williamsburg Bridge, where there are now only a couple of residential high-rises. Developers continue to covet the land now occupied by the restaurant and catering hall Giando on the Water. 

At the same time, two other chunks of land already have approved development plans, although neither is the scene of construction activity at the moment.

One, a site at 420-430 Kent Avenue, is the former home of Kedem Winery. The new owner, Spitzer Enterprises, is still in the design process, but the zoning allows for more than 800 rental apartments with 20 percent of them affordable, said David J. Maundrell III, the president of aptsandlofts.com, a real estate company involved in the project. He would not say how many towers are planned.

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Ground is being broken on the final phase of the Edge development, a high-rise with 550 market-rate rentals.Credit...Emily Andrews for The New York Times

The other site, at 470-490 Kent Avenue, now occupied by Boro Park Certified Lumber & Home Center, is to become a development called Rose Plaza on the River. Five buildings, three of which are towers, with a total of 754 apartments, are envisioned, of which 226 would be affordable, according to Howard S. Weiss, a lawyer who consulted with the owners in obtaining the permit.

Anything south of the lumberyard is too far from public transportation to pique developers’ interest at this time, Mr. Lombino said.

While residential development along the waterfront is sprouting, one area that is quiet is a 28-acre waterfront space called Bushwick Inlet Park, just north of the new waterfront development and adjacent to the seven-acre East River State Park. 

Bushwick Inlet Park was promised to the community by the city to compensate for the massive 2005 rezoning of Williamsburg, which promised to bring tens of thousands of new residents to an area already short on parks and green spaces.

However, only about nine acres of actual parkland exist today, said Laura Treciokas, a founding member of the Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park, a group working to get the park completed.

The city needs six parcels to finish the park, and it has two: one with a newly built soccer field, park building and playground; the other a contaminated concrete lot, she said.

Four more parcels are needed, two of which the Parks Department hopes to have acquired by June, one for $68.5 million, said Maeri Ferguson, a parks spokeswoman. “We are moving forward to procure a consultant to develop a demolition plan,” she said, “which will help to determine the cost of environmental testing, design and park development.”

Acquisition of a parcel that is home to the Greenpoint Monitor Museum remains unscheduled and unfunded, as does the purchase of an 11-acre property that is now CitiStorage.

Residents are particularly worried about the 11-acre parcel.  The fear is that it might be sold to a developer who could work out a deal to provide affordable housing in exchange for permission to build yet another tower, Ms. Treciokas said.

“There’s some irony to all of this,” she said, “because we’re supposed to be this waterfront community, and that’s supposed to be the selling point, and yet there’s not a whole lot of open space on the waterfront for all these new residents.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section RE, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The View From the Bridge. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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