Where is real estate mogul Jerry Speyer going now? He's going to Queens.

The city picked the owner of world-famous Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building to build a mammoth tower of at least a million square feet at the Long Island City site where Queens Plaza Muncipal Garage stands.

Speyer won the right to build the office tower at Jackson Avenue and Queens Plaza South, which could be tall enough to rival Citigroup's 50-story skyscraper nearby.

Speyer's partner is the Modell family, which leases 200,000 square feet of retail space inside the ugly concrete parking facility.

Finding a builder to buy the city-owned site has been important to the Bloomberg administration. It wants to promote economic growth in Long Island City, where a 37-block area has been rezoned for high-rise development.

An earlier choice for the job, Louis Dreyfus Property Group, backed out last year.

"The city is committed to developing central business districts outside Manhattan, and Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn are two of the keys to that development," city Economic Development Corp. spokeswoman Janel Patterson told the Daily News.

Speyer, who's trying to get the city Department of Transportation to serve as a 250,000-square-foot anchor tenant for the project, declined to comment.

He and the Modells were chosen for the assignment over Bruce Ratner, who made his mark by developing MetroTech in Downtown Brooklyn.

The boroughs beyond Manhattan are unfamiliar terrain for Speyer. He owns trophy properties from Berlin to Buenos Aires to Fifth Avenue.

"He's a major player," said Gail Roseman, a Sholom & Zuckerbrot Realty broker who's also president of the Queens Economic Development Corp. "This is confirmation that Long Island City can really happen."

Unlike Speyer, the Modells go way back in Long Island City. Until the mid-1990s, their sporting goods retailing business was headquartered on Vernon Boulevard. They've owned property across from the parking garage for more than 20 years.

Their site could be developed in tandem with the garage to create a huge office campus - a prospect that has business boosters in the neighborhood cheering.

"We believe the development of the garage will jump-start the revitalization of Queens Plaza," said Gayle Baron, president of the Long Island City Business Development Corp. "It's a real positive."