Billionaire investor Axel Stawski is letting go of a five-story office building in Long Island City, the last of a block-wide assemblage he held in the high-development Court Square section of the neighborhood.
Stawski sold the property at 23-10 43rd Avenue on April 5 for $50 million through the entity Long Island City Center LLC, records show. He had purchased the site from the Bank of Austria in 1994 for an unknown price.
The buyer was the city’s School Construction Authority, which plans to demolish the building and replace it with a 547-seat school building on the 21,000-square-foot site.
The deal serves as follow-through on a long awaited concession to the controversial Long Island City Ramps project. Announced in 2018, it promised to bring more development to the area surrounding the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge on-ramps, including a 50,000-square-foot public park and apartment towers along Jackson Avenue.
The current structure occupies roughly a third of a city block along the edge of an area of the neighborhood which was rezoned in 2001 to allow for skyscrapers.
Surrounded by towers, the proposed school site would sit adjacent to a large, vacant lot and a small building sandwiched between the two properties that were purchased by Ron Zeff’s Carmel Partners from Stawski in March 2022 for $200 million.
It was projected to be one of neighborhood’s last major deals before the 421a tax abatement expired last June.
Pilings are in the ground and construction underway for the development of Carmel’s 66-story residential tower, which will measure 838,000 square feet with more than 17,000 square feet of ground-floor retail.
Despite an impressive portfolio spanning the city, including six buildings in Manhattan, Stawski has largely managed to fly under the radar in New York City real estate. His firm, Stawski Partners, made headlines in 2020 when it filed a lawsuit against one of its major retail tenants, Gap, at 1212 Sixth Avenue for $530,000 in unpaid bills for water and snow removal.