A crumbling parking garage on W55th Street shuttered on October 31, sending local residents scrambling to find new spaces for their cars. Its closure marks the latest chapter in an ongoing saga of troubled Hell’s Kitchen parking garages.

The Rapid Park garage at 411 W55th Street closed on October 31 with little notice to customers. Photo: Brennan LaBrie

The owner of the Rapid Park garage, which sits shrouded in scaffolding and propped up by temporary support beams between a residential building and Alvin Ailey, currently owes $6,000 to the Department of Buildings (DOB) for failure to comply with a 2023 citation deeming the structure unsafe. 

Local resident Melissa Bell, who relied on the garage for 15 years, learned just one week beforehand that it was scheduled to close. “It was really sudden,” she said. “They were like ‘we’re closing on Friday’. There was no signage; they just told people as they came in.” Other clients of the garage say they received an email notice on October 16 from City Parking Management announcing the closure and signposting alternative local parking.

But for Bell and other regular patrons, the garage’s degrading state was hard to miss. “I kind of saw this coming, because the building has been falling apart,” said Charles Russell, a neighbor who has used the facility for 20 years.


Images from the December 2023 inspection report show missing shoring, cracked cinderblock at the rear fire escape and the underside of a deteriorated concrete slab. Photos: DOB

A November 2023 inspection report by the DOB described a 114-year-old building plagued by crumbling concrete and brick, deteriorating steel beams and mortar joints, and missing fireproofing. 

“There were big chunks of cement falling down,” Bell said. As conditions worsened in recent years, capacity grew limited as support structures and barricades filled the garage, she added.

The DOB’s citation directed the garage’s owner to immediately install temporary support beams throughout the six-story structure, and to barricade especially unstable sections of the second floor until made safe. The DOB then fined the garage $2,500 for failing to provide “adequate protection” around these beams. A spokesperson for the DOB told W42ST the agency found evidence that vehicles were allowed to drive “too close” to the beams – which, like the barricades, are still in place.


Photographs from the November 2024 follow-up report showing netting added to catch any falling debris and barriers put up to prevent cars from being parked between shoring columns. Photos: DOB

The architecture and engineering firm hired to make the required repairs filed five extension requests for the project to avoid monthly fines, pushing its estimated completion from November 2024 to September 2025. The garage’s customers, however, saw little to no proof of progress.

“When the ceiling caved in, instead of fixing it, they put bags under the ceiling to keep the dust from falling down,” Russell said. He likens these responses to “throwing Bandaids” on the building’s structural issues, which included frequent elevator shutdowns.

The garage is one of nine in Hell’s Kitchen with a filing status of “unsafe” in the DOB’s database, out of over 100 local garages. A total of 39 are filed as “safe with repairs and/or engineering monitoring,” meaning they will require repair or monitoring in the next six years to ensure safety; 36 have no filing status, two more are pending, and 20 structures are deemed “safe.” While this is an improvement from our last report in February 2024 — there appear to still be gaps in reporting and enforcement, two years on from the deadline given to parking garages to comply.

The 2023 inspection of the W55th Street premises was part of a city-wide wave that followed the partial collapse of a Financial District garage in April 2023, which killed one employee and injured seven others. Later that month, the DOB shut down four garages across Brooklyn and Manhattan.

In November 2023, city officials closed the garage under Hudsonview Terrace apartments at 747 10th Avenue after engineers spotted holes in its ramps big enough to see the Amtrak rail lines below – prompting Amtrak to halt all trains running north out of Penn Station for four days. The garage remains closed.

Many cars parked at the Hudsonview Terrace garage were directed to the Skyline Hotel at 721 10th Avenue, which was soon hit with a partial vacate order itself. DOB inspectors deemed its cellar and first floor overloaded with cars, in violation of the garage’s certificate of occupancy. Piccadilly Hotel Co was hit with a $24,000 fine for failure to comply with the order, and has since added almost $15,000 in fines for not submitting Periodic Inspections of Parking Structures (PIPS) and compliance reports. The garage reopened in November 2024. 

* This story was updated at 9:05am 11/14/2025 to reflect that some W55th St garage clients received an email notice on October 16 from City Parking Management announcing the closure and signposting alternative local parking.