Though the weather is cooling down, it isn’t putting a damper on new development in Long Island City. On Wednesday, a new 10-story, 102,292-square-foot mixed-use building topped out at 37-14 36th Street, located between Northern Boulevard and 37th Avenue in the Dutch Kills section of the neighborhood.
At the start of the month YIMBY announced the topping out of Watermark Court Square, at 27-19 44th Drive. The 168-unit rental building had added around 17 floors since the end of May. Building permits place the height at 282 feet, although it is not certain whether the figure includes its mechanical bulkhead. In either case, the 27-story tower now stands among the dozen-tallest buildings in the Court Square district, eight of which topped out less than a year ago.
Construction is wrapping up on the Aloft Hotel at 27-45 Jackson Avenue, in Long Island City’s Court Square district. According to Starwood Hotels, the 176-room property, officially called the “Aloft Long Island City – Manhattan View,” is set to open on October 27. At that point, the 18-story, 186-foot-tall high-rise should become the tallest all-hotel building in Queens. Though the 31-story slab of the nearby 29-11 Queens Plaza North, which opened its doors just recently, stands a good deal taller, the Marriott Courtyard within occupies only the tower’s lower half, with the residences at Aurora LIC sitting above. By YIMBY’s count, Aloft Hotel’s lofty pinnacle rises higher than that of any other hotel in the borough.
When YIMBY last checked in five months ago, foundation work for the apartment building at 27-17 42nd Road in Long Island City was only starting. Now, concrete is being poured for the tower’s fourth level as it climbs on the way to its eventual 258-foot height. Though it would have dominated the surroundings when it was first proposed in late 2000s, today the building would barely make a dent on the local skyline. However, its vertical, slightly curved bulk, squeezed tightly between its high-rise neighbors, is a positive example of proper density creation within the transit-rich neighborhood. Sitting just one block south of the Queensboro Plaza station, serviced by the N, Q, and 7 trains, the future tenants living within its 184 apartments would be situated just one stop away from Midtown Manhattan.
Some of the most densely populated neighborhoods in Queens are nestled along its eponymous central arterial roadway, 7.2-mile-long Queens Boulevard. However, around its midsection, between Grand Avenue/Broadway to the east and Greenpoint Avenue/Roosevelt Avenue to the west, the subway temporarily veers north of the 200-foot-wide the thoroughfare. This portion is much less developed than neighborhoods on either side. Apart from a dense residential cluster in central Woodside, almost all of this stretch is decidedly anti-pedestrian and thinly developed, replete with low-slung commercial properties, such as auto shops and parking lots. The 11-story, residential Elmhurst Building, on which construction is wrapping up at 70-32 Queens Boulevard, now stands as the tallest on a two-mile stretch of the boulevard between Rego Park and Woodside. Although modestly-sized by the standards of the city skyline, the solitary stack towers like a Saguaro cactus over a desert. However, change is in the air as a wave of development is sweeping the area. Enabled by a 2006 neighborhood upzoning and fueled by an acute housing shortage, the new projects will transform the barren district into the urban neighborhood that it ought to be.
