“R trains rerouted via the F”
News broke this week that a real estate “developer” will be to constructing a new high rise on 23rd street in LIC, on a rare lot where no buildings were built.
Full stop. Think about that for a minute: here we have a property in the middle of a neighborhood that has seen explosive residential development over the last ten years. Wouldn’t a big flat lot devoid of significant buildings have been one of the first to have a high rise built on it? Why hasn’t this happened already? To understand why, let’s take a quick look at this history of this lot.
Back when I was writing 7 Line L.I.C., I researched this lot, and found that nothing was ever constructed here. Let’s go to the historic aerials:
1924: vacant land.
1951: still vacant.
1996: Taxi parking & Garage.
As you can see, there is a yellow line running through this property. That would be the R train, as it makes its way from the end of Northern Blvd at Queens Plaza, hooking west under 43rd avenue and then north through this property and into the 60th street cross river tunnel. With a subway tunnel directly under the property, it makes sense why previous owners of this property didn’t construct much on top of it. To do so would involve the MTA, and potentially result in some service outages during construction.
With the gold rush that is development in L.I.C. today, clearly the developer is willing to take on the extra paperwork. Will the R train have to be shut down nights and weekends to accommodate some of this construction? Will weekday diversions (likely to the F line) come into play? The announcement doesn’t say. While the R doesn’t run late at night, new building construction also doesn’t typically take place between midnight and 5 A.M. Will an exception need to be made? How will the noise of such construction be mitigated for nearby residents?
The article does mention that the height of the building may be increased via the acquisition of air rights. Will these rights come from the NYC DOT overpass next door? Another developer constructing buildings just up 43rd avenue made just such a play, and faced community opposition. There is also no mention of any affordable housing in this new building, nor is there any mention of the developer so much as contributing one street tree to the neighborhood.
There’s a chance I’m wrong. Maybe it will have affordable housing. Maybe the subway tunnel is *just* deep enough not to require disruption (I doubt it, but…). Does the MTA even know about this project? Unless someone asks these questions, no one will know until construction begins and it’s just sprung on the community with no notice and no time to amend plans for the benefit of everyone (and not just the pockets of the developer).
We’ll find out the actual details sooner or later. Until then, if you’re an urban nerd super interested in what I call the ‘chicago-ification’ of the 7 line elevated through L.I.C., grab yourself a copy of 7 Line L.I.C., either direct or via amazon.
Looking down at the Taxi lot from across 43rd ave.
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They really need to stop building so much stuff already! They don’t understand that all these extra development is why the subways are overcrowded, and them building more and more while the subway is already at or beyond capacity is not helping out with the overcrowding problem either.
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In the 70’s, I pushed a Checker out of that lot!
It was Midland Service Corp then.
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Interesting piece here, I wonder how they’ll manage to build this high rise without seriously disrupting service and/or building a concrete platform to support all that weight, like at Hudson Yards. But either way, getting air rights from the MTA (if they own the property) to build high up should involve some big contributions to transit like 1 Vanderbilt did.