The Hartby is active again on its Bedford-Stuyvesant block. The five-story Romanesque red-brick building, formerly home to St. John’s College, has been converted into a full-block rental property. The structure retains its turrets, arched windows, and central courtyard, while incorporating modern kitchens, amenity areas, and a roof terrace. Located just behind St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, the project is one of the larger adaptive-reuse developments in Bed-Stuy in recent years.
Project snapshot
The redevelopment delivers roughly 205 studio, one- and two-bedroom rental units, with about 30 percent of them rent-stabilized, according to Architectural Record. Roughly 10,000 square feet of resident amenities were added, including a landscaped courtyard, subterranean parking garage, roof terrace, gym and yoga room, communal lounges and coworking space. The project appears on Woods Bagot as a full-block conversion for client 75 Lewis Avenue LLC.
Restoration took longer than expected
Design work wrapped in 2018 and construction kicked off in 2020, but crews found surprises inside the old school that dragged out the schedule, most notably rubble-filled foundations that needed permeation grouting and stabilization, Architectural Record reports. Developer Matt Linde told the magazine the interior “looked like a great place to shoot a horror movie,” while Woods Bagot project architect James Hickerson said the team “didn’t want to put up a steel and glass structure here,” comments that summed up a preservation-first game plan.
Pricing, lotteries and who gets in
A share of the units hit the market through an affordable-housing lottery last year, with studios starting around $2,495 and one-bedrooms in the mid-$2,000s for qualifying applicants, per 6sqft. Current market listings show many apartments renting for roughly $3,000 to $6,000 at the building, which is being marketed as 788 Willoughby Avenue. That gap underscores the divide between the rent-stabilized share and the broader market-rate inventory, according to local listings on StreetEasy.
Neighborhood trade-offs
The project preserves elements such as the restored masonry, chapel-style windows, and the central courtyard. At the same time, most units are offered at market rates, which may be unaffordable for many longtime Bed-Stuy residents. A long-term lease with the church, designed to generate revenue for building repairs while supporting the conversion, allows the project to serve both as a renovation of a historic structure and as a point of discussion in local debates over neighborhood change and housing affordability.
