Friday, May 16, 2008

Goodbye ghastly garage!

A portion of the long-awaited 3.2-million-square-foot complex, dubbed Gotham Center, is slated to be built on a city-owned site occupied by a municipal parking garage, where demolition could begin soon. The site is on the south side of Queens Plaza, at the corner of Queens Boulevard and Jackson Avenue.

Big Tishman project moves forward in Long Island City

Queens broker John Maltz, president of Greiner-Maltz Real Estate, said he had heard that the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene could be leasing up to 600,000 square feet of the complex's first building, which will be 800,000 square feet.

Permits for a shed and scaffolding, which often precede demolitions, were approved by the city Department of Buildings in February. The scaffolding is finally going up this week. However, no building plans or plan to demolish the city's garage have been filed on the DOB's Web site.

The long-awaited project is split into two parts: a garage and office tower west of Jackson Avenue on the site of the municipal garage; and a possible commercial and residential development east of Jackson Avenue on privately-owned land, a source familiar with the deal said.


Not sad to see this one go, happy there will be more jobs created, hope they include parking.

Photo from Forgotten-NY

11 comments:

RC said...

A post modern monstrosity best forgotten.

Has anyone ever been to the flea market held there?

verdi said...

A Donald Manes era relic.

It's best gone along with that crook!

Anonymous said...

FINALLY..... I have been hearing about this for so long, and it is good to see that something will finally happen with the space. Whatever goes there will surely be better than that nasty garage.

Anonymous said...

Pretty stupid getting rid of a garage when congestion pricing will make it valuable someday.

A guess the taxpayers can roof over the Railyards and build ten garages there.

Important that a developer makes money by dumping anonther few thousand on Queens Plaza. It will certainly be a nice place to live: rail yards, noise, convicts, prosties, yes yes yes, a nice place to live.

Anonymous said...

anon #2 do you wake you that grouchy every morning, or do you have to practice? You can't find anything positive in this?

Anonymous said...

Is this parking garage still open as of June 28th 2008?

flashblueprint said...

Is there any update here at all? I see scaffolding but no progress. Anyone have some news here?

Anonymous said...

I've been using this garage for years. I kind of think of it as my garage. What a perfect location between the Queens Plaza and Queensborough Plaza subway stations.It's been closed for some time now, but I was sad to see it starting to come down the other day. Who gives a shit what it looks like, LIC is an industrial dump anyway.

Anonymous said...

i actually love this building. it's one of the very rare buildings in the city that has some kind of identity. wish people were more educated in history of architecture before they decided to tear down everything made in the past.
what a shame it's gone!

Anonymous said...

How do you propose to cut pollution or help people by closing down a garage that actaully helped ease congestion? This is idiotic.

Stephanie Weil said...

Hopefully the city is smart enough (HAH!) to restore the lost parking spaces that this building provided. And hopefully add a lot more.

This garage was in an ideal location - people going to Manhattan could just drop off their cars there if they didn't need them and take the bus or the train in.

I actually liked the architectural style. And yes, I remember Q-P Fleamarket in the complex across the street to the east. I didn't know it was still an on-going business. I thought it had gone away by the late 80s/early 90s. By then, it was a shadow of what it was in the early-mid 1980s.