“There are many things that people need, the question is, Is this location going forward?” she added. “Everyone is nostalgic when you look at something that’s been there for a while, maybe even a gas station,” said Lisa Linden, a spokeswoman for LargaVista, which is Spanish for “long view.”
LargaVista has formed a partnership with Related, a development company, to build the office building, a seven-story, $200 million project of zigzagging glass designed by the architect Rick Cook. In the early 2000s his father’s company, LargaVista, shifted its goals to prioritize developing its more than 60 parcels citywide, “in order to maximize its extremely valuable portfolio of prime locations,” according to its website. “You’re going to travel miles before you see a gas station.” “It’s not going to be easy for the drivers, and the people who are using this facility,” Sunkanmi Alaka, a cabdriver, said as he waited for the restroom a few days before the station closed. What happens now if you are downtown and the needle is on E? And while Amazon and FreshDirect may fill the hole when the corner store goes condo, there is no doubt it is getting harder in Manhattan to get many of the basics that make life livable. As New York City’s molten property values have made selling off a parcel of land often more profitable than operating the grocery, hardware store or gas station sitting on it, the gas station’s passing appears to be the latest example of a common trope.
#GAS STATION NEAR MY LOCATION DRIVERS#
The closing of the inelegant station, its shabby convenience store invariably full of drivers dancing in place while waiting in line for the restroom, has a familiar feeling. Today, the only reminder that this stretch of SoHo was once a forest of filling stations known as Gasoline Alley is a coffee shop of the same name that sells single-origin coffee beans from Burundi. It closed on Thursday, to be replaced by a glass-and-steel luxury office building, turning some four square miles at the southern end of the borough into a gasoline desert. For cabdrivers, it was a way station in an unruly city, where they could fill up, use the restroom, or kneel for afternoon prayers on one of the communal kilims the owner let them keep stowed beside the convenience mart. It has existed on the corner for decades - first as Gaseteria, later as BP, but nearly always selling gas. The gas station at the corner of Lafayette and East Houston Streets in SoHo is an industrial outpost in a Manhattan neighborhood of luxury lofts and even more luxurious shopping.
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