Richard Meier caused a near riot when his Perry Street lofts opened last decade in the far West Village. The two glassy towers were so popular they spawned a third next-door and nearly transformed the neighborhood.
The developers at SDS Procida were hoping for a similar success in Brooklyn, where they built On Prospect Park, essentially one of the lofts turned on its side, a swooping wall of glass on Grand Army Plaza.
Our old colleague Dana Rubinstein checked out the condo’s slow but steady progress in The Journal this week, revealing that the building, after a half-decade of marketing and considerable price-cuts, has finally sold out half of its units, albeit with mixed results.
The dissonance with brownstone Brooklyn has outraged some neighbors.
The design’s supporters, however, argue that, like the arch and library, it’s a reflection of the times in which it was built. “What do you people want in 2010, the Acropolis?” wrote a commenter named CommentQueen in one of the many online debates on the subject.
Good or bad, the design was no match for the downturn. The price of the first condo that sold, a fifth-floor unit that closed Dec. 23, 2008, was an impressive $3.2 million. A unit in the same line on the 10th floor sold one year ago for $1.57 million. “When late ’07 hit, all projections on almost anything went out the window,” Mr. Procida said.
Yet the most interesting discovery came in a follow-up blog post: Despite the building’s apparent Manhattan appeal, half of the apartments that have sold were purchased by Brooklyn buyers. So much for brownstone dissonance. It also just goes to show that the entitled, moneyed classes of BroBos may not be what we thought them to be.
