From Meat Shop to Mixed-Use Complex
For years, Luis Perez dreamed of expanding his busy Casablanca Meat Market in East Harlem, where for generations customers from as far away as Pennsylvania have shopped for blood pudding and fried pork skins. The butcher shop had long ago outgrown its cramped space on 110th Street between Lexington Avenue and the elevated train tracks on Park Avenue.
For years, Luis Perez dreamed of expanding his busy Casablanca Meat Market in East Harlem, where for generations customers from as far away as Pennsylvania have shopped for blood pudding and fried pork skins. The butcher shop had long ago outgrown its cramped space on 110th Street between Lexington Avenue and the elevated train tracks on Park Avenue.
After buying his first building, on Lexington Avenue, Mr. Perez learned that making money from real estate was comparatively easy, he said. The crack cocaine epidemic was at its height but Mr. Perez said that growing up in a tough neighborhood without a father's protection -- his father died when he was 6 -- had taught him to shrug off danger. "Mind your own business, and nobody will bother you," he said.
Today, he owns five other properties in the neighborhood.
With DDM as his development consultant, he assembled the site, dealt with multiple city agencies (because his was a mixed-use project), navigated the land-use approval process and got financing, which included $6.8 million in other city and federal subsidies.
Three of the lots were city-owned, and DDM helped Mr. Perez buy them using proceeds from the sale of nearby vacant land. The fourth lot had once been privately owned, but no one had paid the taxes for years. Mr. Perez was able to get that last piece through a legal process by which he paid taxes and other money owed to the city.
Mr. Perez selected SLCE Architects for his project because he admired its design for a federally subsidized senior housing development on 111th Street, Casita Maria. Saky Yakas, an SLCE partner, said he had been able to give the Casablanca a more interesting articulated facade because more money was available. Though they lack dishwashers, the apartments have granite kitchen counters and tiled bathrooms, features that are rare in income-restricted housing, Ms. DeMartini-Day said.
Mr. Perez said that if he had had his way, all the apartments at the Casablanca would have been studios intended for young people raised in East Harlem. "We are losing our youth," he said.
Taking an active role in recruiting his tenants, Mr. Perez found the pizzeria through his accountant, who teamed up with a restaurateur from Franklin Square, on Long Island, Nino Di Giovanni. Mr. Di Giovanni had never been to Harlem, but he said he was won over by the neighborhood's rich mix of ethnic groups. Now he is serving pizza made with fresh mozzarella and baked in an oven imported from Italy to a new, and appreciative, clientele.
"What I'm getting from the folks in the neighborhood is that they're not used to home-cooked meals," Mr. Di Giovanni said. Luz Olea, a co-owner of the greengrocer, said business was slow at first but has been improving as customers of the meat market discover her store and spread the word. "Little by little, it's getting better," she said.