Skip to Content
CityRealty Logo
Construction work is proceeding for a new, 24-unit, residential condominium building at One Avenue B on the northeast corner of East Houston Street in the East Village.

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

Clifford Finn, the director of New Development Marketing at Citi Habitats, which is marketing the building, the project, described the development as "a great boutique building," adding that it will have a concierge and a roofdeck.

He said it has has been designed by The Marin Group for Paco East Houston, which is owned by Robert Porcelli, who was the owner of the Gaseteria gas station that formerly occupied the small, triangular lot.

The building will have studio and one- and two-bedroom units ranging in size fro 456 to 1,252 square feet.

It will have storage units, Brazilian cherry-wood floors, a washer/dryer and gourmet kitchens in all units, refrigerators will have touch-screen LCD panels that control TV, Internet and radio and bathrooms will include oversized soaking tubs. The building's gym will house a Pilates/yoga studio.

Sales are scheduled to begin next spring.

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.'"
Architecture Critic Carter Horsley Since 1997, Carter B. Horsley has been the editorial director of CityRealty. He began his journalistic career at The New York Times in 1961 where he spent 26 years as a reporter specializing in real estate & architectural news. In 1987, he became the architecture critic and real estate editor of The New York Post.