Marketing has begun for the new, 24-unit residential condominium building at One Avenue B on the northeast corner of East Houston Street in the East Village.

The 8-story building is being developed by LargaVista Companies on a site that had been owned by Robert Porcelli, who was the owner of the Gasteria gas station that formerly occupied the small, triangular lot.

The building, which is expected to be completed later this year, will have studio and 1- and 2-bedroom apartments ranging in size from about 465 to 1,252 square feet.

It has been designed by The Marin Group and will have concierge service, a fitness center, residents' storage, a landscaped sun deck and a private circular driveway and a lobby that includes gallery space for art exhibits.

Apartments will have washers and dryers, open kitchens with Bosch appliances and bathrooms with white Thassos marble tiling, slate floors and deep soaking tubs.

Excavation work on the project was halted a couple of times recently when cracks appeared in an adjacent building at 9 Avenue B.

Walter Marin is chairman and CEO and Gabriel Nanca is the project manager of The Marin Group.

An article by Dana Goodyear in the March 10, 2003 issue of The New Yorker magazine noted that demolition was starting on a Gaseteria filling station at the corner of Lafayette and Houston Streets, observing that "the presence of a conspicuous New York brand will be diminished."

"This scruffy property, along with twenty-four other Gaseterias in the city, will be leased to British Petroleum and become a B.P. Connect Station, complete with cappuccino machines, solar-powered canopies, and automated pumps with Internet access," the article continued.

"An ecologically suggestive green-and-yellow motif will replace the simple, begrimed emblem of a royal-blue semicircle and a red semicircle embracing the word 'Gaseteria,' in bold black type," the article maintained, adding that 'To me, it looked like a hamburger in the beginning,' Oscar Porcelli, Gaseteria's founder, said of the logo, which he designed himself."

The article said that Mr. Porcelli "came up with the idea for Gaseteria in 1976: 'those were the crazy days of disco and name-using. There was Danceteria, Caviarteria - lot of the -terias were going on. So I did Gaseteria. It was catchy.'"