Revealed: East West Tower, 142-38 37th Avenue, Flushing
BY: STEPHEN SMITH ON NOVEMBER 6TH 2014 AT 7:00 AM
East West Tower, rendering from Architects Studio
Architects Studio, based in Maspeth and headed by Anthony and Angelo Ng, has kept themselves awfully busy lately with projects in Flushing and other Chinese neighborhoods throughout the city. They designed the Shangri-La Tower in downtown Flushing, bringing a façade that would be at home in Manhattan or Williamsburg to a neighborhood where red brick predominates, and their names can be found on permits from Jamaica to Williamsburg.
And now, they’ve got another residential building under construction back in Flushing, whose rendering they’ve shared with YIMBY.
Excavation work and shoring has already begun for the 13-story building at 142-38 37th Avenue, to be developed by Kenny Liu (also behind the Shangri-La Tower on 41st Avenue) and dubbed the East West Tower. The façade is clad in a clean, white material, and the project eschews the through-wall Fedders units typical of new Flushing construction (even condos) in favor of less obtrusive PTAC units.
The 135-foot-tall structure will hold 87 condominiums, with seven or eight per floor from levels 3 through 13, spread over 64,000 square feet of residential space. The units will sit atop a walk-in health center on the first and second floors, with nearly 27,000 square feet of floorspace.
The building will also feature a whopping 142 off-street parking spaces, the majority in an underground garage. While most residential builders in New York City build as little parking as the zoning code will allow, Chinese Queens is a sprawling area that includes car-oriented neighborhoods like Bayside, College Point, and Briarwood. Parking is therefore in high enough demand in downtown Flushing, the business district in the center of Chinese eastern Queens, that developers build it voluntarily.
Liu picked up the land – an assemblage of four lots – for $14 million a year ago, working out to around $150 per buildable square foot.