Icon Realty Management is putting up fancy apartments all over Manhattan. (Well, at least in the East Village and the Lower East Side.) The prolific developer's next target: the hopping Upper East Side, of course. The Wall Street Journal outlines the mini-takeover Icon is staging along Second Avenue in the 80s. Essentially, the company bought up five consecutive low-rise tenement buildings on the east side of the street, just north of 80th Street. (It also owns another little property on 80th Street, just east of the corner.) It displaced a bunch of ground-floor institutions, included beloved long-time Chinese staple Pig Heaven, and now those structures are sitting vacant, angering nearby business owners with their lack of tenants who spend money at their shops.
After Icon's purchase, rumors circulated that the developer was planning to raze 'em and put up a tall tower.
The Journal confirms said rumors, and offers more information about another plot Icon owns just one block north, on the northeast corner of 81st Street and Second Avenue. That tower, which was heretofore the hypothetical prewar-looking building rendered above, is now more substantiated. Permits have been filed for a 14-story building that would replace the two avenue-facing low-rises on that corner, and pro-development blogger Nikolai Fedak tells the WSJ that he's seen the plans, designed by Isaac & Stern, for "11 floor-through apartments plus a duplex averaging 3,400 square feet each." It's unclear whether they will be condos or rentals.
Icon is also working on a project on 81st Street between Second and Third avenues. Flood the zoneisn't that what they say? Someone's certainly banking on the Second Avenue Subway.
· New York's Second Avenue Waits for Building Plans to Jell [WSJ]
· Could This New Prewar-Style Tower Be Rising on Second Ave.? [Curbed]
· All Icon Realty coverage [Curbed]
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