(Robert Kalfus)
Parking at this garage could drive you right into the poorhouse.
The monthly parking rate at The Empire, a condominium building on 78th Street and Third Avenue, rolled up to $1,200 on Dec. 1.
The rate — which may well be Manhattan’s highest — adds up to $14,400 a year. And parking an SUV or another oversize car costs an extra $100 a month.
“It’s gotta be the most expensive rate in the city,” said an Empire employee. “That’s more than I pay in rent.”
Empire rates also look to be about $250 more than those of the priciest neighborhood competitors, according to bestparking.com.
It lists a garage at Park Avenue and 48th Street as also charging $1,200 a month, but tenants yesterday said their monthly fee was closer to $900.
Still, The Empire rate — which includes the city’s 18.375 percent parking tax — does offer a certain level of service. When you pull up to the garage, an attendant drives your car into an exclusive, single-vehicle elevator that whisks it underground — where it takes its place in one of 31 parking stalls, right next to Range Rovers, Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs and the like.
And the new Empire rate may signal a break in a stagnant market. The real-estate firm Colliers International found in a survey last summer that monthly parking rates had dropped slightly in Midtown while rising a bit downtown since June 2009. The median rates are $538 in Midtown, $529 downtown.
Yet that could vary from block to block. An Upper East Side doctor pays $989 a month to park his Porsche at 79th Street and First Avenue, but two pals of his pay more than $1,000 a month at another garage nearby.
And parking a big, expensive car will cost you more. Paolo Zampolli, owner of the brokerage firm Paramount, pays $1,200 a month to keep his Rolls-Royce near Gramercy Park.
“It is a total rip-off,” said Zampolli, who nonetheless acknowledged that the Rolls does take up two parking spaces and that attendants often get the jitters handling the $550,000 luxury ride.
“Many garages won’t take it,” he said. “They are afraid to scratch it. It’s almost cheaper to have a driver 24/7.”