Renderings Revealed: A Sleek, Eco-Friendly Building For Coney Island Preschool Wiped Out By Sandy

A Coney Island preschool is getting some fancy — and eco-friendly — new digs.

In 2012, when Madeleine Jones Head Start Center on Neptune Avenue was decimated by Superstorm Sandy, Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens, which owned the preschool, started searching for a new location — eventually finding a great deal in an abandoned lot located at 2856 West 15th Street.

Now the architecture firm charged with designing and implementing the new Head Start has shared the renderings of the planned facility on its website (as was first reported by New York YIMBY).

Designed with resiliency and sustainability in mind, the completed building will boast 16,731 square feet of space and rise 53 feet into the air, according to preliminary floor plans, reports YIMBY. On the first floor there will be a commercial kitchen, a multipurpose room, and several offices, and there will be more classrooms and offices on the second and third floors.

“Stepped roofs allow for outdoor gardens, learning spaces, and play areas for each age group,” according to the Dattner Achitects website. In addition, large windows and solar panels are intended to flood the space with natural sunlight, according to sketches.

The cheerful yellow building is intended to “foster the social, emotional, physical and cognitive development of preschoolers in a safe environment guided by the philosophy of the Montessori approach to early childhood education,” say the architects.

The Montessori school, which will serve 75 children, is seen as a symbol of revitalization in a neighborhood hard hit by Sandy, notes YIMBY:

Catholic Charities picked up the 9,500-square-foot property from a neighborhood church for only $910,000 in December 2014, according to public records.

As Coney Island has rebuilt over the last two and a half years, development has finally begun to rebound in the neighborhood close to Luna Park and the New York Aquarium. The last month has brought three new filings within two blocks of the Stillwell Avenue D/F/N/Q stop, including an eight-story mixed-use building around the corner from the planned Head Start Center and a medical building on Stillwell Avenue.

For contrast, this is what the site of the preschool building looked like in 2013.

This is what the space will look like when construction is complete in 2016.