Manhattan's Vanishing Gas Stations

The other day my boss and longtime friend Tem were driving along Houston Street to a job site on East 10th Street. The Californian had moved here in the early 80s and I had come to the East Village in the 70s. We spoke about the changes to the neighborhood, pointing out what was still where it was and what wasn't. Most of it was gone and turning onto Lafayette the architectural metal worker said, "There used to be a car wash here."

"With a gas station."

All the gas stations are vanishing from New York."

"The ones on the Bowery have been gone for years." I used to walk under the shelter of the 4th Street gas station in the rain.

"Like the one where I bought my old Soviet bike." It had been a bright orange.

"Or the one on the FDR."

"That's still there, but most will become skinny luxury condos."

"Like the rest of Manhattan." The borough had been undergoing a radical economic cleansing during Mayor Bloomberg's three terms.

"Soon motorists will have to get gas in Brooklyn."

"Unless there are no cars in the city." My dream for a carless society was not so farfetched without gas in a city.

"There'll always be cars." Tem came from California and the Golden State was the birthplace of America's love with the car.

"There are no cars in STAR TREK."

"And there's no STAR TREK on TV now."

"No, there isn't." For the first time in decades the Enterprise wasn't exploring the cosmos.

Tem dropped me on 10th Street to bondo the cracked metal door frames and I thought about a gas station on 10th Avenue which sold for a fortune. The developer planned a 12-story, 15-unit condo. Each one had to cost $5 million for him to break even.

Maybe more.

“Developers like these sites for the same reason gas stations wanted to be there originally,” Mr. Shvo said. “Lots of people and lots of traffic.”

Like laundromats, gas stations can be tough to sell because of concerns that the soil beneath them may be polluted, brokers say. A glance around any suburb can reveal stations that have sat empty for years, in part because the sites may be brownfields, requiring the cleanup of chemical pollutants — or at least the fear of that possibility makes it hard to get loans for redevelopment.

Often, deed restrictions have been placed on properties by sellers or long-ago owners, which can ban residential development to avoid health problems and potential lawsuits.

Those restrictions can be lifted before a deal closes, however, if the buyers reassure the sellers by excavating several feet of soil, for example, or installing protective shields.

Restriction like that is now in place at 718 11th Avenue, where a Mobil station on a corner lot at West 51st Street is for sale at $9.5 million. If affordable housing were included, a developer could put up a 29,000-square-foot apartment building on the site, which has a lease in place till 2015, said Matthew Nickerson, a broker with Massey Knakal Realty Services.

While cleanup and insurance can be expensive for these sites, the development potential of land in a bustling Manhattan neighborhood far outweighs those problems, said Mr. Nickerson, who was also involved in Mr. Shvo’s deal.

Still, “between construction and insurance,” he said, “this is not like building on a typical site.”

Next year, a BP station at 300 Lafayette Street, at East Houston Street in SoHo, is expected to close, to make way for a planned seven-story, 75,000-square-foot office tower from the LargaVista Companies, according to someone with knowledge of the project who requested anonymity to avoid damaging the project’s chances of getting city approvals.

LargaVista has owned the site since 1976, though gas has been pumped there since the 1930s, and plans to take advantage of the site’s prominent location by putting stores on the building’s three lowest floors, the person said.

It is not the first time the firm has hung up its nozzles. In the mid-2000s, it turned a nearby Gaseteria into a 23-unit condo called One Avenue B, although it had to shoehorn the project into a triangular lot.

In addition, at the nearby intersection of East Houston and Avenue C, where a Mobil occupies a trapezoidal parcel, a rental building will rise on the site when the station’s lease expires in two years, according to HPNY, a development firm that is a partner in the project.

The 12-story rental building will encompass 43,000 square feet of apartments, as well as 6,000 square feet of ground-floor stores, which will wrap three sides, HPNY said.

With so many gas stations going the way of Model T’s, crimping supply, holdouts may end up thriving, a possibility not lost on Vasilios Hondros, a manager of a Mobil that opened in May on Eighth Avenue and Horatio Street in Greenwich Village.

Replacing what was most recently a Lukoil, the station has, according to Mr. Hondros, tripled the size of its store, which sells candy, e-cigarettes and lottery tickets. Taxicabs provide three-fourths of the business, he said.

At $12,000, the monthly rent is not cheap, Mr. Hondros said, though he has no plans to leave before the end of his 15-year lease.

“They’re just trying to put condos everywhere, to make it so just rich people can live in New York,” he said. “I feel bad for the people who have to drive.”