The Mid-Century Furniture Warehouse is located at the corner of 2nd & Cecil B. Moore and holds biweekly furniture sales, offering a collection of "professionally restored American Mid-Century, and Scandinavian furniture" in a spacious and unheated warehouse. We've been meaning to check it out for quite some time and finally made it over there this weekend. The place is legit, and if money and space were no object we would have bought up half the stock. Alas, both money and space are indeed objects and we left emptyhanded. Around the corner though, we spied some new construction at 1638 and 1640 N. 2nd St., so the trip wasn't for naught. These properties were, until quite recently, sitting vacant.
As of this weekend, a pair of four-story buildings had appeared here.
According to the permits, the developers are constructing a pair of mixed-use buildings. Each structure will have retail space on the first floor and a pair of apartments upstairs. Not pictured are two similar buildings being built behind these structures, on Philip Street. The buildings on 2nd Street make sense, as this stretch of 2nd Street has a combination of homes and businesses, though we confess we're not sure how the retail situation will work out on little Philip Street.
As we were looking at the L&I Map, we noticed another project on the horizon for this block. Perhaps you noticed, there are some more vacant lots immediately to the north of the two new buildings. For those parcels, different developers got a variance from the ZBA earlier this year to build three new townhomes. Again, if we're to look at this side of 2nd Street, they'll fit right in. And the homes, along with the mixed-use buildings, will have views of the repaired Putnam Building, which we last visited about half a year ago.
It's great to see these lingering vacancies fill in on 2nd Street, as we've seen on so many other blocks in South Kensington.