SUNSET PARK

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In 1916, the nation’s first nonprofit housing cooperative was born in Brooklyn.

It’s known as the Castle, for good reason. Built in 1886 as the NYPD’s 68th precinct house, it’s an ornate Romanesque Revival brick fortress with a crenellated turret gazing down at the intersection of Fourth Avenue and 43rd Street in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. After the NYPD decamped in the 1970s, the building went into a steep decline.

Yosef Streicher has announced that his HS Realty Associates, which purchased the former precinct house and adjacent stables for $6 million last summer, is planning to restore the derelict Castle to its original glory – and build a structure on the site that will house condominium apartments.

“My plan is to do a commercial space, possibly a child-care facility, in the basement and first floor, then add 10 to 15 condos,” Streicher told Habitat. “We’re going to build above the stable and we’re aiming for a total of 40,000 square feet.”

Streicher’s first hurdle will be the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which gave landmark status to the exteriors of both buildings in the 1980s. In 2011 the commission fined the previous owner, the non-profit Brooklyn Chinese American Association, for “failure to maintain the building.”

Streicher expects cooperation from the commission. “We’re trying to bring value to the community,” he says.

Considering the hefty price tags on some of the ultra-luxury units in super posh condos being constructed all over the city, you kind of expect a lot of bang for your buck — if you're one of the lucky buyers, of course. And developers are looking to deliver just that. Take one of the apartments planned for 53W53, an ultra-luxury residential tower being built next to the Museum of Modern Art. Well, take all of the apartments in that building. Each apartment's layout needs to accommodate the unusual architectural elements of the asymmetrical, 1,050-foot tower designed by Jean Nouvel, reports The New York Times, which will "taper as it rises like a shard of glass." So how do you figure out how the pieces of this very expensive puzzle will ultimately fit together? In the case of 53W53, you build a full-scale mock-up of a $10 million apartment in an industrial section of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and start working out all the kinks. The Times explains that the prototype functions as a lab of sorts, so developers can troubleshoot "most of the challenges posed by the building’s unusual design." How cool is that?