Opened June 6, 1998 on former Long Island Rail Road float bridges from the 1920s, the Long Island City park preserved two towering steel transfer gantries that once hoisted rail cars onto East River barges until 1957.
Reach it via the 7 train to Vernon Blvd-Jackson Ave or the NYC Ferry's Hunters Point South stop, and the pier decking gives way to lawn areas dotted with movable Adirondack chairs facing the Manhattan skyline.
The two black steel frames on the shore are transfer bridges, built in the mid-1920s to a James B. French patent, and they are what the park is named for. The Long Island Rail Road had no freight crossing into Manhattan, so freight cars were rolled off the pier onto car floats — flat barges — and towed across the East River. The gantries carried the hinged apron that let the track rise and fall with the tide, so the rails on the barge and the rails on land stayed continuous. They served the North Shore Freight Branch, which ran along the south side of 48th Avenue, and stopped working in 1957. The branch itself was filled in during the early 2000s.
Everything else here is younger than the frames. The state opened the first stage in 1998 to a design by Thomas Balsley with Lee Weintraub and the architect Richard Sullivan; a second stage by Abel Bainnson Butz added six acres in 2009, bringing the park to about twelve acres and four piers.
The Pepsi-Cola sign is a separate piece of salvage. General Outdoor Advertising built it in 1939 for the bottling plant that stood on this shore, Artkraft Strauss rebuilt it in 1993, the plant closed in 1999, and in 2009 the sign was dismantled and reassembled on a permanent footing inside the park. It is 120 feet long and 60 feet high, ruby neon on metal, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated it on April 12, 2016 — a rare case of a sign protected in its own right.
The park faces Midtown across a narrow reach of the river, so the sightline is unusually close: the United Nations, Tudor City and the Chrysler Building sit almost directly opposite, at a scale you cannot get from the Brooklyn shore. Each of the four piers frames a different slice, and the walk carries on south into Hunters Point South Park.
4-09 47th Rd, Long Island City, NY 11101 · Official site ↗
Gantry Plaza State Park is a 12-acre (4.9 ha) state park 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. The most prominent feature of the park is a collection of gantries with car float transfer bridges, which in turn were served by barges that carried freight railcars between Queens and Manhattan.
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