NEW YORK CITY, NY – The New York City Department of Sanitation wants to build garages on three sites, one of them owned by United Parcel Service, in the Hudson Square neighborhood where six luxury residential towers have risen in the past few years, according to the Web site www.downtownexpress.

The project would require joint use of the 85,450-square-foot UPS parking lot on the north side of Spring St. along West St. behind the UPS. Washington St. truck-loading facility. Sanitation would build a garage 150 feet tall — 13 feet taller than the new, 12-story, Philip Johnson-designed Urban Glass House directly across Spring St. from the site. The garage would store garbage and recycling trucks, snow plows, and salt spreaders on the upper level, and UPS would use the lower level for the staging area for its Manhattan South sorting and dispatching operation.

The garage would be home to trucks from three Sanitation districts, including those currently on Gansevoort Peninsula, as well as those from the Sanitation garage on the south side of Spring St. at West St. Under a legal settlement, the city must remove its garbage trucks from Gansevoort by 2012 so that the peninsula can be redeveloped as part of the Hudson River Park.

Norman Black, UPS public affairs director, said the city was threatening to take over the property under eminent domain, so the company made a deal, according to www.downtownexpress.com.

Also part of the D.O.S. project is the demolition of the existing Sanitation garage at Spring and West Streets and replacing it with a truck-washing and refueling facility that would accommodate four 4,000-gallon diesel fuel tanks, a 4,000-gallon unleaded gasoline tank, a 4,000-gallon ethanol tank, a 2,000-gallon hydraulic oil tank, a 2,000-gallon motor oil tank, and a 1,000-gallon waste oil tank.

The third part of the project calls for converting an existing parking garage on Washington and Clarkson Streets into a covered shed to store 6,500 tons of road salt with two above-ground storage tanks for liquid calcium chloride used to melt snow and ice on city streets. This would replace the salt shed on Gansevoort.

Sanitation will conduct a public scooping session on the project from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Wed., Jan. 31, in the Rosenthal Pavilion on the 10th floor of New York University’s Kimmel Hall, at 60 Washington Sq.