Construction fencing went up around 175 3rd Street in Gowanus last summer, and what comes next is 27 stories of concrete and glass rising 281 feet over one of Brooklyn’s most contested development corridors.
Charney Companies and Tavros Capital are the developers. Bjarke Ingels Group designed it. The New York City Department of Buildings issued excavation and foundation permits in July and August of 2025, and materials are already stacked on site. The full building permit hasn’t landed yet, but the machinery is in motion.
The numbers are not subtle. At 1.08 million square feet, the complex would contain 1,071 apartments spread across connected towers running along 3rd Street between the canal and 3rd Avenue, directly in front of the landmarked Powerhouse Arts building and across from Whole Foods. It’s going all-electric. The facades are gridded, the corners chamfered, the structural elements exposed, a look the architects say echoes Gowanus’s industrial past. Fine. It’s still a 57-floor equivalent footprint landing in a neighborhood where four-story walkups are the norm.
Sixteen stories go straight up off the sidewalk before the tower hits its full height of 281 feet. That’s not a typo. The Coignet Building and the American Can Company Building sit across the street, both individually landmarked. Both will be dwarfed. Powerhouse Arts, the landmarked cultural venue the city spent years rescuing, will be obscured from canal-level sightlines once this thing is fully framed.
“The scale of this project is going to fundamentally alter what you see when you look down 3rd Street,” said one local preservationist familiar with the community board review process, who asked not to be identified because they’re still in conversations with the development team.
Of the 1,071 apartments, 250 would be designated affordable under Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, the requirement baked into the Gowanus rezoning that the City Council passed in 2021. That’s 23 percent, the minimum the rezoning requires. The rest go to market rate. Four years since that rezoning vote, rents in the neighborhood haven’t waited for the construction to finish.
The application filed in September 2025 also shows 84,220 square feet of commercial space, including ground-floor retail, artist workspaces, fitness areas, and social spaces. There’s a rooftop pool. Terraces are slated for the 14th, 16th, and 18th floors.
The piece that neighborhood groups can’t stop talking about is the 28,000-square-foot public esplanade planned along the canal, designed by Field Operations with the Parks Department. It’s required. It’s also not built yet, and it won’t be until long after foundation crews have finished. The Gowanus Canal Conservancy has been watching this site closely, and groups like it will be tracking whether the esplanade ends up genuinely open or quietly gated off to residents who don’t live in the building.
That distinction matters more than it might sound. Developers in this city have a long track record of calling waterfront space “public” while designing it in ways that don’t exactly welcome the public. The canal itself is still a Superfund site. Don’t expect a swim in that outdoor pool to mean anything about the water twenty feet away.
The site spent years as a Verizon parking lot ringed by single-story industrial buildings. Nothing much happened at that corner for over a decade. A change of ownership eventually brought Charney and Tavros in, and the last remaining structure, a single-story brick building, has since been cleared, according to The Brooklyn Paper.
What’s left now is a cleared lot, a construction fence, and permits authorizing the first phase of work. Foundation crews can go as deep as they need to under the permits already in hand. The full building permit is the next threshold, and once that’s issued, 175 3rd Street starts its climb toward 281 feet.
The Gowanus rezoning of 2021 was always going to produce buildings at this scale. This is the first one that’s actually breaking ground.