Brooklyn's modular tower at Pacific Park welcomes its first residents

The 32-story building comes with 363 rentals in studios, one, and two-bedrooms

By Tanay Warerkar@TanayWarerkar Nov 15, 2016, 5:31pm EST

Almost a month after leasing got underway on the market-rate units at Pacific Park’s modular rental, 461 Dean Street, the first set of residents are now getting ready to move in to what developer Forest City Ratner Companies has called the world’s tallest modular building.

As part of a media preview held Tuesday afternoon, Curbed got a chance to tour three model units at this 32-story building that’s located adjacent to the Barclays Center, and is designed by the same architects who designed that arena, SHoP.

The tour kicked off in one of the amenity spaces of the building. Adam Greene, a vice president of residential development at Forest City singled out the amenities as being on par with many of the city’s luxury developments and said it’s not necessarily something you’d see in a modular building.

The amenity space we were in was a large lounge area with an attached catering kitchen. In addition, the building comes with a two-level fitness center, a yoga and dance studio, a children’s playroom, a game room with billiards and ping pong, and a rooftop terrace.

From there we were whisked away to the 20th floor, which houses three of the development’s model units. The first, was a 690-square-foot one-bedroom overlooking Flatbush Avenue. Even the rainy weather wasn’t a spoilsport to the spectacular views of the Verrazano Bridge and Downtown Brooklyn. The windows are deceptive too—they might not seem all that great on the outside, but inside they’re large and akin to floor-to-ceiling windows.

We next traipsed on to one of the several quirky shaped apartments this building has to offer—this one was a curvy studio that measures over 700 square feet, so even though it’s a studio, it’s larger than the one-bedroom we visited first. As you walk in, windows all along the right side of the unit offer views of the landscaped roof of the Barclays Center. The bedroom, which is located in one of the corners of the building, overlooks Flatbush Avenue, and gives you a sense of being suspended above all the action below.

What about all noise from the arena and the traffic you might ask? Greene says it’s all under control thanks to triple glazed windows that block out all the sound—the windows are operable however if you should choose to tune in.

The third apartment we toured was a regular-style studio measuring about 450 square feet. In all, the building has 23 different styles of apartments that come in studios, one-bedrooms, and two-bedrooms. Of the 363 apartments, 182 are market-rate units, and the rest are affordable, which were offered through a lottery that went live in April (84,000 people applied for the affordable units).

Of course, the market-rate rentals don’t come cheap with studios starting at $2,450, one-bedrooms at $3,125, and two-bedrooms at $4,750. The building is predominantly comprised of studios and one-bedrooms—149 and 166 to be precise, and the rest are two-bedrooms.

It hasn’t been smooth sailing for this development however, which is the first completed project in the Pacific Park megaproject in Prospect Heights. There were construction delays and complaints of leaks over the years, but Forest City seems to have put all of that behind it with 461 Dean ready to be fully complete by the year’s end.