Monday, December 18, 2006

Narrowminded...


R.S.D. reports from Bellerose:

"249-21, 249-23 & 249-27 88 Rd in Bellerose. Three 2 family homes were placed on a piece of property that once held one one-family home. The original home was illegally demolished last year. The developer was forced to stop when residents and civic leaders scared away the illegal immigrant workers. The Office of Emergency Management ripped a hole in the sidewalk and disconnected the gas line, which was still active in the house while it was being torn down.

Code requires that there be a minimum of 8 feet between these houses. There's only about 7.5 feet between two of them. The curb cuts are too wide and too close together, eliminating any street parking. Since the driveways are much too narrow for any cars to be parked in them, we all know the multiple cars will be parked on the street or on the concrete pad where the lawns are supposed to be. For each house, that's a minimum of two cars for the top apartment, two for the lower level, and of course two for the illegal cellar apartment.

The infamous Dept of Buildings sent out an inspector (with his seeing eye dog, we assume) and reported that the driveway is "about 8 feet" and marked the complaint, "resolved." Please, please, someone teach these people how to use a ruler!The subdivided plot of land at 249-27 88 Rd narrows down to less than nine feet. The house itself is just about five feet wide at the rear."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm about to pour "a dram of Glenlivet" into my morning coffee as a "bracer"! Is that photographic depiction.... that "Belle-Rose-Sliver-InFill-Vertical-Cattle-Barn" (just posted 12/18/06) an ICBM silo, an exterior elevator (the community seems to have gotten "the shaft" on this one), or an obscene architectural (and I use the term lightly) gesture with the middle finger? Now, this is just another form of a typical "storage- bin- for- humanity" project that greedy block-busting developers love to build in Queens. How would you like to have one of these "ugly things" next door to your posh Manhattan town house Mayor Mike? If you don't like it, you could always move! (After all, we've all got to sacrifice and make room for those projected 1 million plus future reidents of N.Y.C. that you just talked about! How about doing your share and convert your dwelling to an SRO and you can live in the basement)! My Squirrels have far more luxurious accommodations in the lovely 70 year old Beech tree in my rear yard! Well,I think I'll go back to bed. Maybe it's just all a bad dream that'll be gone when I wake up again!..........VERDI

Anonymous said...

You would think the illegal demolition of a house with an active gas line would convince the city that better enforcement of codes is needed - but apparently this hasn't sunk in yet. Hopefully it won't take a neighborhood being blown to pieces to get that point across.

Anonymous said...

Hey, the neighborhood can be blown to pieces and the politicians will just blame Con Ed.

Remember the brown out last summer? Everyone knows it was caused by illegal conversions, but the politians blamed Con Ed.

They expected us to believe that old cables and shoddy workmanship was concentrated in one neighborhood for decades.