1163 atlantic avenue crown heights 62014

A restaurant might be coming to a desolate stretch of Atlantic Avenue between Bedford and Nostrand in Bed Stuy. New building applications were filed earlier this month to construct an “eating and drinking establishment” at 1163 Atlantic Avenue, currently a large parking lot. Since this highway-like part of Atlantic is populated mostly by warehouses, parking lots and gas stations, we wonder if this will be a fast food joint.

The property owner is Marcello Porcelli of LargaVista Companies, a developer that owns several small properties in Manhattan. Porcelli’s father, Oscar Porcelli, began buying up parcels around Manhattan in the early ’70s and turning them into Gaseteria gas stations.

Once up on a time, this property was home to Brooklyn’s oldest ice skating rink, the Brooklyn Ice Palace. The Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklynology blog has a great post on the history of the building, which opened as an ice rink in 1917 with 17,000 square feet of ice. During World War I, the state ordered the rink closed to save on materials that were used in creating artificial ice, like ammonia. Subsequently, it was transformed into a well-cooled movie palace, but that project fell into bankruptcy. Eventually, it was torn down and renovated into a spacious, state of the art ice rink, which prospered until 1955. The building eventually re-opened as a scenery design studio, which you can see in the 1970s tax photo after the jump.

1163 atlantic avenue tax photo


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