architecture

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Auf Wiedersehen, Loreley (Corrected)

Update 09-07: Per a comment on Twitter, I was mistaken in my original post at what intersection I was looking at (double D'OH!!), but nevertheless R+L's Loreley is still gone, per the corrected text below.

I'm not sure when the Brooklyn outpost of Loreley Biergarten closed, but when I happened to think I was walking by its location in the shadow of the BQE a couple days ago, it was gone. This is what it looked like when Loreley existed, in a spread from my Guide to Contmporary New York City Architecture:

[That should say 64 *Frost* Street – D'OH! | Photos by Amy Barkow]

Not only is restaurant designed by Rickenbacker + Leung gone, per this Google Street View from April 2012:


But sometime between then and September 2013, the date of this Google Street View, the restaurant changed from Loreley's innovate brick fencing to something with a wood fence, and the city put in a preliminary plaza at the triangular tip where Frost and Meeker meet:


The new restaurant, since mid-2013, is Battery Harris, a "Carribbean-inspired restaurant and bar."

Since the above view, (see my photo at top) taller buildings have taken over the low-rise buildings behind and the city has made the parklet more permanent through the extension of the curbs, but at the omission of the planters and stone benches. Although I didn't take a close look at the construction sign while passing by the other day (the BIS indicates a Place of Assembly permit filed by C. Wall Architecture, which has done plenty of restaurants, so I'd wager on another one here), whatever occupies the one-story building at the tip of the site former Loreley space will hopefully nurture the new but empty public space in front of it...and maybe they can show movies on that big blank wall facing the plaza, rather than putting up a billboard aimed at BQE drivers.

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