Rendering
Sept. 22, 2015 By Jackie Strawbridge
A four-story, 51-room hotel is planned to join the ever-growing hotel scene in Long Island City and Astoria.
Called The Gantry, the hotel will be located at 38-22 28th St., near Growing Up Green Charter School and the Fisher Landau Center for Art, as well as a Holiday Inn and Sheraton Four Points.
Vee Hospitality President Amit Veeramachaneni, who lived in Long Island City before a move to Astoria, has been aiming to bring a hotel to this area for a few years.
Veeramachaneni filed plans for a hotel at the Department of Buildings in 2012, but withdrew them amid design and environmental cleanup processes, he said. New plans were filed last week.
“It’s a great location, it’s a great neighborhood,” Veeramachaneni said. “There’s local businesses and ease of access to Manhattan.”
The hotel takes Long Island City’s iconic waterfront gantries as its design inspiration.
Braided stainless steel tension ropes are strung across the hotel’s façade, to recall the ropes and pulleys used for loading and unloading shipments from the water. Window panes are also stacked to mimic the shape of the gantries.
“We went through a couple things, and for some reason, [the gantries] stuck with me,” Veeramachaneni said. “They’re visually pleasing to me.”
“There’s been a lot of hotels that came to the area, but I’m hoping the thought that we put into our design will come across through the finished product,” he added.
Veeramachaneni estimated that rooms will run on average $159 per night.
He said he expects to begin construction in roughly the spring of 2016.
One Comment
Just what Dutch Kills needs, ANOTHER HOTEL. With the complicity of the Department of City Planning (?) Dutch Kills has been innundated with 18 hotels in a 8 block radius. Why not build an apartment building? And as unoriginal as this construction is on a quiet beautiful residential block, rhis novice builder has chosen to name this hotel “The Gantry”, alluding to the Gantry Park, one supposes, in Hunter’s Point. Why? This Is Dutch Kills, not Hunter’s Point. How clever!