1800 E. North Ave. Arises From the Ashes

1800 E. North Ave. Photo by Mariiana Tzotcheva.

After the neighborhood changing Pizza Man fire of January 2010, prospects for the redevelopment of the site at the intersection of N. Oakland and E. North avenues looked dim. But in April 2013, Joseph Property Development purchased the site for $825,000 from the Goldberg family and began working on plans to redevelop the site.

Following shortly after a design process that involved a series of design revisions being presented to the East Side Architectural Review Board before receiving approval, Joseph Property Development began construction of a new mixed-use building on the site in late 2013. The multiple meetings of the review board occurred because the initial designs by project architect James Piwoni failed to meet the board’s recently passed architectural guidelines — guidelines that, ironically enough, Piwoni had helped create.

When finished, the mixed-use building, known as 1800 E. North Ave., will have 39 apartments, 36 parking spots , and 6,000 square-feet of first-floor retail  space.

In February, my colleague Michael Horne reported on a minor brouhaha that had arisen over the project. Twenty-seven ventilation grills, that weren’t visible from the renderings used to approve the project, had been constructed on the building. “What we approved did not have the vents,” Ald. Nik Kovac, the chair of the board and alderman of the district, said during an ARB meeting discussing the issue. He added, “painting the grills probably is the most obvious solution.”

The renderings, which are provided below, show a white, fairly transparent balcony wall and railing, whereas the finished balconies feature a frosted-green, non-transparent wall which hides most of the aforementioned vents, so it looks like another solution was found.

Our photos capture the building as it nears completion.

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Renderings