Mixed-Use Building Planned for Former Single-Family Homes on Tennyson St.

By Eric Heinz

Construction is set to begin in November on an apartment complex that will replace three buildings on the 4300 block of Tennyson Street.

Demolition was recently completed on three single-family homes, which also hosted art project for some time before they were scraped.

The properties at 4353 N. Tennyson are being developed by First Stone Development, which paid a total of $2.6 million for the three lots between 2018 and 2020. First Stone plans to construct a three-story apartment complex with 34 units and 2,500 square feet of ground-floor commercial space. There are also plans for a common area on the roof.

“We probably will start construction in November,” said Leonard Taub, a developer and managing member with First Stone. He added the planned name of the complex is The Jasper.

The units will be one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments, and some will have a mezzanine, Taub said. The walkability of the Tennyson neighborhood is what drew Taub to the area, and First Stone recently built a series of townhomes in the neighborhood that sold in six months.

“I always liked the area, and I’m a developer from New York and I came here about nine years ago and one of the first places I saw was Tennyson,” Taub said. “I saw the vitality of the neighborhood and the small mom-and-pop shops, and it’s not too commercialized yet. It’s a dense area, and the vibrancy on that street is what drew me to it.”

The development will be one of the first under the recently adopted Tennyson Street design overlay, which requires more room for pedestrians by requiring setbacks and requires ground floor commercial in many cases.

Two other projects for which applications have been filed within the Tennyson overlay are the redevelopment of Local 46 at 4586 N. Tennyson, with 84 residential units and street level commercial retail and restaurant space, and plans for 27 units with street-level commercial space at 4114 and 4120 N. Tennyson.

Taub said First Stone had to revise its plans about halfway through the design process, but he said the overlay didn’t provide many obstacles to what he wanted to build.