Construction fencing now rings 175 3rd Street in Gowanus, where Charney Companies and Tavros Capital are pushing a 27-story, 1,071-apartment tower closer to reality after years of dormancy on one of Brooklyn’s most watched development sites.
The project, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group and dencityworks|architecture, will rise 281 feet at the corner of 3rd Avenue and 3rd Street, directly across from Whole Foods and in front of the landmarked Powerhouse Arts building. Permits for excavation and foundation work went out in July and August of 2025. Materials and portable toilets are already on site.
The scale of what’s coming is hard to miss. At roughly 1.08 million square feet and going all-electric, the complex would pack 1,071 apartments into connected concrete and glass towers running along 3rd Street between the canal and 3rd Avenue. Gridded facades. Chamfered corners. Exposed structural elements giving the building a deliberately industrial look that its architects say fits the neighborhood’s history.
Don’t mistake that aesthetic nod for deference to the surroundings. The building climbs 16 stories straight off the sidewalk before reaching its full height, dwarfing the Coignet Building and the American Can Company Building across the street. Both are individually landmarked. So is Powerhouse Arts, which the tower will directly obscure from certain vantage points along the canal.
About 250 of the 1,071 apartments would be set aside as affordable housing under Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, a requirement triggered by the Gowanus rezoning. That’s roughly 23 percent of total units, the minimum threshold the rezoning demands. The remaining units will be market-rate in a neighborhood that’s seen rents climb steadily since the rezoning passed.
The application submitted in September of 2025 also shows 84,220 square feet of commercial space, ground-floor retail, artist workspaces, fitness areas, and social spaces. There’s a rooftop with an outdoor pool. Roof terraces are planned for the 14th, 16th, and 18th floors. The building permit for the new structure hasn’t been issued yet, but excavation and foundation work can proceed under the permits already in hand.
Worth watching is the 28,000-square-foot public esplanade planned along the Gowanus Canal, designed by Field Operations in collaboration with the city’s Parks Department. It’s a required piece of the project. How and when it actually materializes, and who controls access to it, will tell residents more about the developers’ commitments than any rendering ever will.
The site sat idle for years as a Verizon parking lot surrounded by single-story industrial structures. For over a decade, that corner barely changed. The Brooklyn Paper reported that the property’s last remaining structure, a single-story brick building, has now been cleared. A change of ownership brought Charney Companies and Tavros Capital into the picture, and the new team moved fast once they had the site.
Charney Companies and Tavros Capital released updated renderings last year.
The company behind the design, Bjarke Ingels Group, is the Danish firm known for projects including the Via 57 West residential tower in Manhattan and the Google campus in Hudson Square. Bringing BIG into a Gowanus project signals the developers’ ambitions and their expectation that the neighborhood can support premium rents.
It can’t be said enough: 250 affordable units in a 1,071-unit building is not a community benefit. It’s a baseline legal requirement, and it lands in a neighborhood where longtime residents, many of them Latino and working-class, have watched their options shrink since the city rezoned Gowanus in 2021. The Gowanus Canal Conservancy and other local groups have spent years pushing for deeper affordability commitments and real environmental accountability along the canal. A shiny esplanade designed by Field Operations doesn’t automatically answer those demands.
The New York City Department of Buildings shows the excavation and foundation permits active. What it doesn’t show is any guarantee that the final building will look like what’s in those renderings, or that the public waterfront access will open on any particular schedule.
Gowanus is changing fast. That’s been true since long before this tower broke ground. What’s different now is the speed and the scale. A 281-foot building on 3rd Street is not background architecture. It’s a statement about who this neighborhood is being built for.