A parcel of land at 206-210 West 77th street that now holds a Hertz garage and rental office is being sold, and brokers expect it will eventually become a new apartment tower that could rise as high as 185 feet. The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, a social service agency, just put the parcel on the market and Crain’s expect it to sell for as much as $45 million. The garage is between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway.
“The seller is taking advantage of an extraordinarily hot land market,” Bob Knakal, chairman of the brokerage company Massey Knakal Realty Services, told Crain’s. “There haven’t been many development sites to hit the market on the Upper West Side in recent years.”
The site could hold various facilities based on current zoning, a press release notes.
“The site is 75 feet wide and contains up to approximately 92,000 square feet of development rights, including allowable bonuses. The property is currently improved with a six-story, 250 space parking garage. Allowable uses for the property include mixed-use, residential and retail, or community facility.”
The news of still more high-rise development on the UWS really Hertz.
Hertz anticipated this several years ago when they opened the location on W95th. There was even a period of time (later reversed)when Hertz stopped taking advance reservations for 77th Street pick up. I guess we can kiss the relative serenity at W95th goodbye. That said, given the presence of competing car rental establishments within a few blocks – they might show up as a garage tenant in the new building. Can’t wait to see what the new owners find when they try to remove the big gasoline tank in the basement.
Good. Gives me somewhere to move to get away from the crappy “homeless shelter” captial otherwise known as the 90’s (where the other Hertz is).
Looking at all this new construction – especially the new building on 77th and Broadway, plus the plethora of construction on 10th Avenue and 44th/45th, just leads me to beileve we are now a city with neither style nor sophistication. It’s really a shame – want to see the real new urban…check out Shangai. Top shelf, they’ve got us beat.
How many more apartment towers do we need in this area. There have been at least four or five in the last 2 -3 years.
When is enough — enough? Even with the platform expansion at 72nd St — it’s unsafe because of the crowds.
The Hertz garage on West 77th Street may not be an architectural gem – but the possibility of it being replaced with a 185 foot tall tower is a horror. The tragedy is not about this project as much as about the total failure of New York City ‘s Zoning administration and Building Department, to manage growth sensibly and sensitively.
The blocks between Broadway and Amsterdam, from 72nd to 79th Street are particularly vulnerable; they were zoned for commercial development years ago, due to the short blocks that result from the angle of Broadway relative to the city’s grid plan along Amsterdam. These blocks were “leftover” then, but are now congested, terribly dense and overbuilt – the rules were written for long low residential blocks between taller buildings along the avenues – not for the unusual circumstance of the avenues converging.
How can a tower be built on this site without crippling the firehouse across the street? What bonuses encourage such absurd bulk in the middle of a short block? Ask makers of the recent Linden on 78th Street, how to exploit every zoning trick available to build another ravaging eyesore – How very sad that our city cannot accept responsibility to channel development toward improving the fabric of neighborhoods that need it, rather than into the pockets of few, willing to abuse that fabric at the expense of all.