Crown Heights' 73-99 Empire Boulevard Erased for Luxury Housing

Photo courtesy of NYC Municipal Services/1940s.nyc






From Mack Trucks to Apartments: A Century on Empire Boulevard



For most of the twentieth century, the block at 73-99 Empire Boulevard in Crown Heights handled the heavy work of the city. Trucks came in for service. Tires were swapped out. Parts were stocked and sold. The buildings on this stretch of Brooklyn were built for vehicles, and for about sixty years, that's exactly what they served. The site directly neighbors the much taller Ebbets Field Apartment complex, which is the housing that replaced the ballpark.



By 2025, both were rubble. By September 2026, the foundation of a 13-story apartment building was going in. A hundred years of industrial and automotive history on a single block, cleared in a matter of months.



The main building at 73-99 Empire Boulevard went up in 1925 and opened as a Mack Truck auto service facility. At 29,000 square feet, it was built for the scale of commercial vehicle work: bay doors, floor drains, the spatial logic of a place where trucks were the unit of measure. Mack Truck operated there until the late 1930s. A general garage followed in the mid-1940s. Through the early 1950s and well into the 2000s, the building cycled through auto, truck, and equipment manufacturers alongside an auto parts and service operation, keeping the same basic function under different names and owners for more than half a century.



The lot beside it, Lot 32, had a different arc. A store and apartment building stood there before 1932, were demolished sometime in the following two decades, and the parcel has been a paved parking lot ever since. That kind of municipal scar, an empty rectangle of asphalt in the middle of a block, often signals an interrupted plan that was never revisited.



The smaller building next door, on Lot 35, was constructed in 1930 and started life as the parts department for the same Mack Truck operation. It, too, followed the automotive thread: Tire Sales and Service occupied it from the late 1930s through the early 1960s, followed by an auto and truck manufacturer through the late 1980s. A brief stint as a Family Services office in the early 1990s broke the pattern before the building went vacant from 1994 to 2014. World Laundry then took the 8,000-square-foot space and held it until operations ceased in 2024.



The two buildings together tell a story that plays out across dozens of blocks in the outer boroughs: a long industrial life, a soft landing in a service use, and then vacancy, waiting for whatever comes next. From the mid-1920s to the late 1980s, forges and service bays and auto manufacturers dominated both parcels. The laundromats that followed were a form of afterlife, useful but provisional, occupying space that was already living on borrowed time. Both buildings were demolished in 2025.











What is replacing them is a 13-story, 250,000-square-foot mixed-use building with 261 apartments, 78 of which are designated as affordable units under Mandatory Inclusionary Housing. The development will include ground-floor retail, a basement, community space, and a sub-basement parking garage, a detail that matters on an Empire Boulevard block that has long been short on street parking.



The developer is CW Realty Group, which acquired the site for $40 million from the previous ownership team of Manhattan-based Bridges Development Group and Harry and Alex Adjmi's A and H Acquisitions. Those prior developers had purchased the property in 2021 for $15 million, spent several years navigating the approval process, and sold at more than double their entry price. The flip reflects both the rising cost of development sites in Crown Heights and the value added by securing entitlements on a contested parcel.



The approval process was not uncomplicated. Bridges Development Group and A and H Acquisitions won the support of Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso by agreeing to reduce the project's shadow impact on the Jackie Robinson School playground. Shadow analysis has become a recurring flashpoint along this stretch of Crown Heights as the rezoning pressure that transformed one block ripples outward to the next.



The development at 960 Franklin Avenue, known as Botanic Heights and built on the site of the former Consumers Park Brewery and later the Morris J. Golombeck Spice Company, generated similar concerns about shadows falling on the greenhouses of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The original building design for that project was scaled back significantly in response, reducing its shadow footprint before approvals moved forward. The pattern is consistent: taller buildings, shadow studies, negotiated reductions, then construction. Crown Heights is learning what it means to absorb density block by block, and the terms of each negotiation set a precedent for the next one.



The foundation is being poured now. The lot where Mack Truck serviced commercial vehicles a century ago is being excavated for a sub-basement parking garage, which is its own kind of continuity: the block began serving vehicles in 1925 and is ending, in part, by building a place to put them underground.



The Mack Truck building is gone. The tire shop is gone. The laundromats that bridged the industrial past and the residential future are gone. What took their place will house hundreds of people on a block that, for most of its existence, was not designed for anyone to live on.



Empire Boulevard will look different in five years than it does today, and different again in ten. That is not a new story for Brooklyn. It is just a very old block catching up to the present.



📋 Reader Records
🚗 Did You Work at the Mack Truck Garage — or Used the Laundromat on Empire Boulevard?

Whether you serviced trucks on the Lot 28 floor in the 1950s, worked the tire bays on Lot 35 before Family Services moved in, or dropped off your laundry at World Laundry before it closed in 2024 — this block has a century of layered history that the foundation crews are burying right now. Photographs from the garage years, Mack Truck service records, anything that documents what 73-99 Empire Boulevard looked like before the demolition crews showed up in 2025: it belongs in the record before the 13th floor goes up.

📩 Share Your Story or drop a comment below — every contributor gets full credit
⬇️ Keep Reading
🏗️ More Brooklyn Buildings Lost to the Crane and the Checkbook
Crown Heights, Williamsburg, Fort Greene, Greenpoint — the same story playing out block by block across Brooklyn, documented before it disappears.
🚗 73-99 Empire Boulevard in Crown Heights, Brooklyn was occupied by Mack Truck Auto Service from 1925 through the late 1930s, followed by decades of auto, truck, and tire service operations, and most recently World Laundry (2014–2024). Both buildings were demolished in 2025. CW Realty Group's 13-story, 261-unit mixed-use development was underway as of September 2026.


Source(s): 


1. Gillespie, M. (2025, February 12). New renderings reveal proposal for 76-99 Empire Boulevard in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. New York YIMBY. https://newyorkyimby.com/2025/02/new-renderings-reveal-proposal-for-76-99-empire-boulevard-in-crown-heights-brooklyn.html

2. Bradley-Smith, A. (2025, March 19). Plan to bring high-rise apartments to Empire Boulevard clears City Planning. Brownstoner. https://www.brownstoner.com/development/crown-heights-rezoning-73-empire-boulevard-city-planning-vote/

3. Jones, O. (2025, August 19). CW Realty buys controversial Crown Heights development site for $40M. The Real Deal. https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2025/08/19/cw-realty-buys-crown-heights-development-site-for-40m/
Location: 73 Empire Blvd, Brooklyn, NY 11225, USA

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