There goes a piece of the neighborhood.
A half block chunk of the Upper East Side is set to be knocked down, and a high-rise building will likely to be built in its place.
The wrecking ball-fated slab is located at 1357-1363 Second Ave. Currently, the portion of Manhattan is occupied by a five-story building containing 28 apartments and a variety of commercial establishments which, according to Patch, have all closed since the end became imminent. The building, located on the southwest corner of East 72nd St., spans half of the block.
Real estate development company the Chetrit Group bought the building from its former owner, SL Green, for $47.2 million in 2018. On Thursday, city records show that Chetrit filed plans to demolish the entire century-old structure, Patch first reported. It is not yet clear what will go up in the building’s place, and no new construction plans have been filed yet.
In April 2020, The Chetrit Group razed a historic, Romanesque-style church on the block. “The Upper East Side church addressed at 252 East 72nd Street was built as a chapel building for a much larger, never realized structure for the Knox Presbyterian Church,” City Realty reported at the time. “Penned by prolific architect Robert Henderson Robertson in the mid-1880s, the full vision would have stretched to Second Avenue and celebrate its corner location with a 125-foot-tall bell tower.”
Earlier that year, The Post’s Steve Cuozzo observed that “The Chetrit Group clearly has something in mind for both 257-259 E. 71st St. and 250-260 E. 72nd. The latter buildings, where three stores have left or are leaving, front on Second Avenue The site might be combined with the 71st Street properties that are being demolished.”
The south half of the west blockront between E. 78th and 79th, he added, “ looks primed for redevelopment as well.”
City Realty previously published renderings of a Weill Cornell Medicine-operated medical tower on the site, but the plan was never formally announced, Patch noted.