Gantry Plaza State Park is 12 acres (4.9 square hectares) state park that runs along the East River in the Hunters Point section of Long Island City, New York City borough of Queens. The park is situated within an older dockyard and a manufacturing area and contains a few remnants of buildings that were in use before. The park’s most prominent feature is the collection of the gantry, which includes bridges that serve cars fueled by barges that carry freight railcars from Queens and Manhattan.
The park’s southern portion was once a docking area and has been restored “contained apron” transfer bridges built under the James B. French patent. They were built in 1925 to remove and take railway car floats to supply industries within Long Island City via the Long Island Rail Road’s North Shore Freight Branch, which was located once at the south-facing end of 48th Avenue (now part of Hunter’s Point Park). The northern portion of Gantry Plaza State Park was an old PepsiCo bottling plant that ended in 1999. This branch was for freight lower than street level and was filled by the time 2000 began.
The park houses a 120-foot length (37 meters) and sixty-foot tall (18 meters) cursive, red-colored neon-on metal Pepsi-Cola sign created by the General Outdoor Advertising Company in 1939. It was restored in 1993 by Artkraft Strauss 1993. It was erected on top of the bottling plant before being removed and put into a permanent position in the park. The Pepsi-Cola sign was designated as a New York City landmark on April 12, on the 12th of April in the year 2016.
The park first opened at the beginning of May in 1998. The park was completed on July 31, 2009. As per the Queens West Development Corporation, the park will be constructed in phases. Thomas Balsley designed the original section of Gantry Plaza State Park with Lee Weintraub, both New York City landscape architects, and Richard Sullivan, an architect. Stage 2 is the brand new, 6-acre (2.4 acres) section of the park designed with the help of New York City landscape architecture firm Abel Bainnson Butz and the first stage of Stage 2 was opened in July 2009. Gantry Plaza State Park is expected to encompass forty acres (16 ha) in size when it is completed. H&A Power Washing Long Island
In Popular Culture
- Gantry Plaza State Park tour is presented in one nine and a half minutes in the 1969 film produced by Olsen and the banden. The Olsen Gang in a Fix.
- The film Munich used the park’s final scene, which was shot in 2005. The pier and the Pepsi-Cola sign in the north are seen in the scene.
- The exact location was utilized. The same location was used for The Interpreter. In the closing sequence, Nicole Kidman waves goodbye at her character Sean Penn, seated on the fence in front of Gantry Park, Long Island City. The Pepsi-Cola signboard that was in the former bottling plant is evident.
Locate other communities that are similar to Long Island City Courthouse