FIFTH Avenue in Park Slope is so last year; today Fourth Avenue is the new Fifth. And Third Avenue is the new Fourth.
Prominent developer Shaya Boymelgreen and many others have projects on the drawing board for Third Avenue. And they will certainly be helped along with the arrival of Whole Foods Market, which should be open in 2008, on Third Avenue and Third Street.
“Obviously, Whole Foods was a major catalyst for development on Third Avenue,” says Ken Freeman, sales director for the Brooklyn office of Massey Knakal. “It would have happened anyway, but I believe Whole Foods moved it forward by five years.”
It is believed that Boymelgreen has purchased the Jewish Press Building between Carroll and Second streets for a development tentatively called Gowanus Village.
There’s also been talk of Toll Brothers dipping its toes in the Gowanus. However, the company withdrew an application for a state-supervised cleanup of a two-block stretch of Bond Street along the canal because expected residential rezoning of the area hasn’t happened. The Department of City Planning is expected to vote on rezoning this summer.
And Marc Freud of Troutbrook Properties snapped up more than 20,000 square feet of property on Third Avenue from Douglass to Butler streets.
“The building was a former manufacturing plant,” says Freud. “We’re waiting for a zoning change from the city before we proceed . . . If it is zoned for residential, we plan a mixed-use building on the site. We are also prepared to shift our plans and build a hotel on the Douglass Street site.
“You have condos two blocks going north selling for $600 per square foot,” Freud adds. “The changing of the Gowanus creates a bit of waterside nature, and is not an ‘if’ anymore so much as a ‘when.'”