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Gantry Plaza State Park

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Gantry Plaza State Park
Transfer bridges, support gantries, and piers in the park
Gantry Plaza State Park is located in New York City
Gantry Plaza State Park
Location in New York City
TypeState park
LocationHunters Point, Queens,
New York City, United States
Area12 acres (4.9 ha)[1]
CreatedMay 1998
Operated byNew York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation
Visitors905,450 (in 2014)[2]

Gantry Plaza State Park is a 12-acre (4.9 ha) state park[1] on the East River in the Hunters Point section of Long Island City, in the New York City borough of Queens. The park is located in a former dockyard and manufacturing district, and includes remnants of facilities from the area's past.

History

The park's gantries, as seen from Pier 4.

The southern portion of the park is a former dock facility and includes restored "contained apron" transfer bridges of the James B. French patent. These were built in 1925 to load and unload rail car floats that served industries on Long Island via the Long Island Rail Road tracks that used to run along 48th Avenue (now part of Hunter's Point Park). The northern portion of Gantry Plaza State Park was part of a former Pepsi bottling plant.[3][4]

The Pepsi-Cola sign and residential towers of Long Island City as viewed from Gantry Plaza State Park.

Constructed in 1936 by Artkraft Strauss, the 120-foot (37 m) long and 60-foot (18 m) high neon Pepsi-Cola sign was located on top of the bottling plant before it was preserved and moved into a permanent location within the park in 2009.[5][6][7][8]

The park first opened in May 1998 and was expanded in July 2009. The park is being developed in stages by the Queens West Development Corporation. The original section of Gantry Plaza State Park was designed by Thomas Balsley with Lee Weintraub, both New York City landscape architects, and Richard Sullivan, an architect. Stage 2, the new six-acre (2.4 ha) section of the park, was designed by New York City landscape architecture firm Abel Bainnson Butz and the first phase of Stage 2 opened to the public in July 2009. When complete, Gantry Plaza State Park is expected to total 40 acres (16 ha) in size.[9]

Park facilities

The park as seen from Roosevelt Island.

The park offers picnic tables, a playground, playing fields, and a waterfront promenade with a view of United Nations Headquarters and the midtown Manhattan skyline. Fishing and crabbing is permitted at pier #4, subject to New York State Department of Environmental Conservation regulations.

In film

  • The film Munich took advantage of this view in its final scene, shot in 2005.[10] The pier and the Pepsi-Cola sign to its north are visible in this scene.
  • The same location was used in The Interpreter,[10] in the final scene where Nicole Kidman's character says goodbye to Sean Penn's character, who is sitting on a fence by Gantry Park. The Pepsi-Cola sign at the former bottling plant is visible in the scene as well.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "Section O: Environmental Conservation and Recreation, Table O-9". 2014 New York State Statistical Yearbook (PDF). The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. 2014. p. 672. Retrieved 2016-02-13.
  2. ^ "State Park Annual Attendance Figures by Facility: Beginning 2003". Data.ny.gov. Retrieved 2016-02-13.
  3. ^ Costella, AnnMarie (July 9, 2009). "Gantry Plaza Park Gains Six Acres". Queens Chronicle. Retrieved 2009-07-12.
  4. ^ Gray, Christopher (November 7, 2004). "On Waterfronts of the Present, Rail-Bridge Relics of the Past". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-07-12.
  5. ^ Dunlap, David W. (April 18, 1988). "Landmarks Panel to Study Stable and Pepsi-Cola Sign". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
  6. ^ Lippincott, E.E. (November 5, 2000). "Pepsi, Too, Has a Classic, and It Will Stay On". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
  7. ^ Dunlap, David W. (December 10, 2008). "What Happened to the Queens Pepsi Sign". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
  8. ^ Blumenthal, Ralph (February 25, 2009). "Letter by Letter, Pepsi Rejoins Skyline". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
  9. ^ "Gantry Plaza State Park - About the Park". GantryPlazaStatePark.com. 2012. Archived from the original on June 27, 2015. Retrieved 2016-02-13.
  10. ^ a b Duke, Nathan (January 4, 2010). "The Reel Queens: Queens Locations Appeared on Screen More This Decade". Queens Village Times. Retrieved 2010-05-30.
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