Excavation is underway at 237 East 77th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where crews have unearthed the rear of the lot below street level to make way for an eight-story residential building. The midblock parcel between Second and Third Avenues had sat vacant and overgrown for more than a decade before construction equipment finally moved in.
According to New York YIMBY, the 16,745-square-foot project will include six condominium units, designed by INM Architects and developed by Yevgeniy Lvovskiy of ZHL Group. Property records reported by PincusCo show ZHL Group purchased the site for $4.2 million from Craig Filipacchi in March 2025. Department of Buildings records show Lvovskiy submitted initial new-building applications for the project that August, according to the same PincusCo account.
The building will rise with setbacks on its final two stories before culminating in a bulkhead with an adjacent roof deck, the outlet reports. Its facade is expected to feature a column of bay windows running down the centerline, flanked by narrow rectangular windows, with the design suggesting a possible brick or stone cladding. No renderings have been released beyond an elevation diagram posted on the construction board, which lists an anticipated completion of winter 2027.
A Carriage House’s Long Second Life
The lot’s current transformation follows a winding history. The site previously held a three-story building originally constructed as a carriage house that later served as a photography studio before its demolition in 2015, per the seed reporting. Civic records published by Columbia University note that in the years before that demolition, the structure had been used by the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter to provide services for homeless adults in the late 1990s and early 2000s…