NYT: It Went From Sailors’ Quarters to Notoriety. They Aim to Make It a ‘Refuge.’

The New York Times covered the groundbreaking for Chelsea Beacon, an adaptive reuse project that will bring 131 units of affordable and supportive housing to New York City. For the design, we inserted a new building that rises contextually above the historic 1931 structure, preserving the building’s unique details.

Formerly a boarding house for sailors, the building eventually became the Bayview Correctional Facility, which shutdown in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy. The conversion of a former prison to affordable housing, which includes housing for formerly incarcerated individuals, amounts to kind of karmic justice.

Associate Partner Bethany Borel’s quote concludes the article: “We’re designing these apartments the way we’d design any apartments in any project and returning the overall sense of the building to be a place of refuge instead of confinement.”