For residents of Manhattan's Yorkville neighborhood, life, and property values, will be greatly improved when the Second Avenue Subway opens in December. Until then, construction noise and long slogs to the Lexington Avenue subway continue.
"The eastern Upper East Side, a subway desert, is about to see the end of its drought," writes real estate reporter C. J. Hughes for The New York Times. "In December, nine years after construction of the initial phase began — and decades after it was first proposed — the Second Avenue subway is scheduled to open."
But those who live in apartment buildings between Third and York Avenues, as well as those developing new ones, may already be celebrating: Their property is enjoying new attention and price premiums, a trend that doesn’t bode well for buyers in search of bargains
The primary area Hughes writes about is Yorkville which stretches south to north from East 79th St. to East 96th St., and west to east from Third Ave to York Ave, and beyond to the East River.
Two of the three Second Avenue stops in the first phase of the Second Avenue line will serve Yorkville.
Credit: MTA. For an interactive view of the full project profile click here.
According to the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) website:
Phase 1 construction extends the
train from its current terminal at 57 St – 7 Av to the new 96 St – 2 Av station, via an existing tunnel under Central Park and 63rd St. New subway stations will be located at 72nd St, 86th St and 96th St, along Second Avenue and the Lexington Ave-63rd St. station will be redone.
[For subway geeks: "Q trains operate between 57 Street/7 Avenue, Manhattan, and Stillwell Avenue, Brooklyn at all times, except weekdays from about 6 AM to about 11 PM when the route extends to operate between Astoria, Queens," according to the Q train schedule/map (PDF).]
Back to Yorkville, Hughes writes about how the opening of the states affect sales at "the Azure, a 128-unit condop at 333 East 91st Street and First Avenue, which began sales in 2008, the year the subway project started." (For the record, the New York version f the Azure has no relationship to the Azure Apartments under construction in San Francisco's Mission Bay, mentioned here recently.)
In case you were wondering, "a condop is probably one of the most misunderstood designations in New York real estate," writes Marjorie Cohen for Brick Underground, a New York real estate website and newsletter. "They’re a category created by owners and developers in the 1980’s who wanted to get around an IRS rule that threatened to stifle their profits."
Cohen goes on to write about condops in much detail. Check out Wikipedia's definition, which is just as mysterious.
Read the full story: Yorkville Bets on the Second Avenue Subway
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