Completion is near for the 10-story, 74-room hotel under construction at 40-47 22nd Street, in northern Long Island City. The property will most likely operate under the Howard Johnson brand, which completed another 10-story hotel four blocks northwest at 38-61 12th Street in 2014. The project’s developer is Ratan Realty Three LLC, with Michael Kang serving as the architect.
Six of the seven subway lines that connect Queens to Manhattan converge at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge, where Queens Plaza meets Queens Boulevard, Northern Boulevard, and Jackson Avenue. There, the elevated Queensboro Plaza station handles the N, Q, and 7 trains, while the E, M, and R serve the underground Queens Plaza stop. The two stations face increasing pressure from steady growth in both Long Island City and the borough as a whole, as well as the impending overflow of Brooklyn commuters displaced by the L train shutdown. The need for a transfer connection between them has become more pressing than ever.
The future 15-story residential building at 41-32 27th Street, called Steel Haus, has reached street level. The narrow building will sit upon an irregularly shaped plot on the northern fringe of the booming Court Square district, north of Queens Plaza. The 46-unit project, developed by the Hakimian Organization, will join a dense block of residential and office mid- and high-rises that have replaced a district of crumbling commercial properties over the past ten years. ESM Construction Corp serves as the general contractor.
Office-to-residential conversions are usually expected of ornate, pre-war high-rises, or tall-ceiling industrial lofts. Such conversions are much more rare at mid-century office buildings, particularly ones that had no redeeming architectural value in the first place. Long Island City’s Luna LIC became one of the city’s only such projects when it opened its doors earlier this year. The nine-story office building was built in 1955 at 42-15 Crescent Street, at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge. Over the past few years, Meadow Partners redeveloped the property into an 11-story, 124-unit rental, and sold it to World Wide Group for a hefty profit. The architects at Avinash K. Malhotra Architects, also known as AKM Architects, opted for minimal intervention, rather than a total structural overhaul, which was sufficient to transform the poorly-aged eyesore into the latest addition to the growing residential community around Court Square.
When YIMBY last reported on the residential building at 41-04 27th Street in northern Long Island City, at the end of June, it was noted that the nine-story project reached its topmost point. In the two months that have passed, the concrete frame has been sheathed in a curtain wall that looks ready to receive its panel cladding. The 32-unit property, developed by Great Stone Development and designed by Tan Architect, stands at the intersection of 27th Street and 41st Avenue. In conjunction with its equally-new neighbors, the building scale makes for an appropriate transition between the dense skyscraper district of Court Square to the south, and the traditional, rowhome-lined blocks of Dutch Kills to the north.
