Flatiron on Flatbush
Coming soon to New York, the city’s first all-electric skyscraper. Also imminent, the city’s first public school designed to Passivhaus standards. Not coincidentally, they’re both part of a single full-block development where Boerum Hill meets Downtown Brooklyn, mixing not only use but also scale, massing, and sustainability strategies to dramatic effect. Prominently sited at the pointy corner of Flatbush Avenue and State Street, the first phase of Alloy Block, slated for completion early next year, is an unusual union of a high-rise residential tower—a sleek, flatiron-shaped wedding cake with slight setbacks on two of its three facades—and a mid-rise school, with triple-glazed windows set in the dark-gray brick of its airtight envelope.
At a recent construction tour organized by the Urban Design Forum, AJ Pires, president of Alloy Development (and board member of UDF), related that they began assembling the site back in 2015. “As both the architect and the developer, we [attended] over 120 community meetings to listen to people’s concerns and iterate with our design capacity,” he said, putting a positive spin on what by all accounts was a contentious ULURP process regarding the height of the two towers as originally proposed in 2018. Then known as 80 Flatbush, it was a NIMBY’s worst nightmare and a YIMBY’s fever dream, up zoned to the effect of 900 transit-adjacent residential units in two towers, plus the public school, literally wedged between a long block of classic Brooklyn brownstones and the historic Williamsburg Savings Bank tower (it now goes by the bland moniker One Hanson Place). Hundreds of meetings and dozens of tweaks later, the project was approved with a 12.5 percent reduction in FAR, from 18 to 15.75, with the first of two phases slated for completion in early 2024 and the second phase set to break ground shortly thereafter, for a grand total of “1.2-million square feet of seven programs in five buildings”—three new, two adaptively reused—upon completion in 2028.
Of course, the backyard—mine, yours, everyone’s and no one’s, really—has been changing for years, what with Brooklyn’s answer to Billionaire’s Row rising along Flatbush Avenue. In partnering with NYC Public Schools, which owned the western parcels of the block, Alloy agreed to not only to build a new 350-student high school housing the Khalil Gibran International Academy but also a 500-student elementary school for the ongoing influx of residents in Downtown Brooklyn. With that in mind, the development team “chose to make the school building an independent building in the middle of the block, versus a piece of a podium,” for which they enlisted Architecture Research Office. “As architects,” Pires continued, “we didn’t want to conflate the school with the rest of the [design and development process].” Architecture Research Office’s Stephen Cassell and Adam Yarinsky, also present for the tour, elaborated on the challenges of the site, where they’ve cleverly co-located the two schools in a single eight-story building, with separate entrances—Flatbush for the high school, State for elementary—and learning spaces as well as shared amenities such as the cafeteria.
The tour started in the partially below-grade “gymnatorium” of the elementary school and made its way up to a third-floor terrace (part of the high school) overlooking the Whole Foods 365 Market across the way. Then it was down to the plaza, where the school cantilevers along Flatbush, and around the corner down Third Avenue, circumnavigating KGIA’s current home at 362 Schermerhorn Street on the west side of the block, where it will continue to operate until the new school is completed next year; those historic buildings will be adaptively reused as cultural and retail spaces in phase two. Doubling back on State Street, Pires led us through still-raw lobby and amenity spaces to a finished unit, built as a construction mock-up, and then up the top of the high-rise via hoists near the building’s prow. The phase-one tower, which also includes street-level retail, clocks in at 480 feet, just shy of the neo-Romanesque Savings Bank—arguably its stylistic antithesis—whose clocktower is roughly eye-level with its new neighbor’s rooftop pool; the phase-two tower, which will add office space and more apartments to the western half of the site, will be significantly taller at 840 feet.
Looking past the gilded dome, and in just about every other direction, expansive vistas revealed just how low-lying much of “classic Brooklyn brownstone” country is. This was most starkly illustrated by the drop in rooflines south of Schermerhorn Street—the view to the west, which will be occluded by the second tower—but equally apparent in Park Slope and Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and beyond. I couldn’t help but wonder if there are other ways to densify.
The school is literally and figuratively the heart of the narrative. As Pires tells the origin story, “we approached the only other landowner on the block, New York City Public Schools, to ask about their air rights. Their response was, ‘Actually we’ve been looking for a new facility for this high school.’” Building a public school sans public funding allowed Alloy to tap a Department of Education-adjacent public benefit corporation called the NYC Educational Construction Fund, which issued a competitive bid for a new school that was handily awarded to Alloy. (Founded in 1967, the ECF has built 18 schools in the city, mostly in the 1970s, and was largely dormant for decades until it was revived during the Bloomberg administration.) Although the new facilities would add much-needed school seats, critics at the time noted that the sheer scale of the residential component could perversely exacerbate the deficit in capacity, alongside broader questions about the project’s opaque financing structure.
Unsurprisingly, that didn’t come up during the tour, when Pires merely noted that Alloy received $1.6 million in incentives from ConEd and NYSERDA, and that the tower is $175m and that the school is $160m. Leaving aside the question of whether the city should be building its own schools or relying on private developers to do so, the new school in phase one counts towards the project’s public benefit—valued at over $200 million by Alloy and the ECF —which means that only 10 percent of the 441 rental units of the new 505 State Street tower will be affordable versus 30 percent of the second phase; in total, Alloy Block will add 850 units, 200 of them “permanently affordable.”
As for the decision to go all-electric? “From a policy and incentive standpoint, we made a really smart bet relative to the way Local Law 97 is going to work.” Pires admitted that it’s “not that complicated: The boiler is an electric boiler versus a gas-fired boiler and the cooktops are induction versus gas. That’s it.”