Carter's Review

This attractive, 12-story building at 21 East 1^st Street on the northeast corner at Second Avenues in the East Village was erected by BFC Partners in 2013 and has 52 market-rate rental apartments and 9 residential condominiums and two commercial condominiums.

BFC Partners consists of Donald Capoccia, Brandon Baron and Joseph Ferrara.

The building, which is known as Jupiter 21, was designed by GP55, which has done several good-looking residential buildings in Harlem in recent years.

Nine of the 13 affordable condominium apartments were reserved for residents of the two buildings that the new structure replaced and the other units were sold through a supervised lottery on the Lower East Side.

Bottom Line

One of the handsomest new buildings in the East Village and the Lower East Side, this building has many amenities including a roof deck and a bicycle room.

Description

The building is setback partially above the 8^th floor.

Amenities

The building has a concierge, a roof deck with a wet-bar and showers and an outdoor screening room, a live-in superintendent, a bicycle room, central air-conditioning, video intercom, and storage. It is pet-friendly.

Apartments

Some apartments have balconies or terraces and all have Kohler deep soaking tubs and Caesarstone kitchen countertops, Summit International refrigerators, Miele dishwashers, Bertazzoni ranges and GE washers and dryers.

Some apartments have corner windows.

History

The building is on the former site of the Mars Bar, which was a popular and well-known East Village institution. In an April 28, 2013 article in The Wall Street Journal, Josh Barbanel described the “graffiti covered Mars Bar” as “a now-defunct dive bar known for its grungy, punk-rock ethos.”

“The bulky new building,” he continued, “will feature a model of the planet Jupiter hanging in the lobby” and he quoted Mr. Capoccia as saying that the building’s “name was chosen because ‘Jupiter follows Mars’ – in the order of the planets.”

The article said that the “site was part of the huge Cooper Square urban-renewal area assembled by the city decades earlier that remained stalled for many years.”

It also noted that one of the former buildings on the site was a “moving pictures” theater run by Louis Minsky of the Minsky burlesque family and that it at one point had a pool hall upstairs and the top floor “was used as an off-off Broadway theater in the 1950s” and in the 1970s the city gave the building to Ellen Stewart, the founder of the La Mama Experimental Theater Club on the condition she rent it out to artists.  Ms. Stewart died in 2011 but her daughter, Mia Yoo, now the artistic director of La Mama, bought one of the apartments at Jupiter 21.

BFC Partners also built the Toren, a major and quite striking residential high-rise in Downtown Brooklyn.  Mr. Capoccia is a co-founder of the New York State Association for Affordable Housing and a former member of the U. S. Commission of Fine Arts.