Tuesday, June 10, 2008

'Landmark Luxury' in LIC

You can always leave it to Karl Fischer to give Miss Heather cause for amusement. Or transform an otherwise distinctive-looking building into something that should be gracing an office park in Omaha, Nebraska. Take your pick.

Having been to Omaha, I can verify that Miss Heather's comment is right on.

Great Moments In Real Estate Rhetoric: Long Island City

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Landmark" lolla-palooza is more like it!

A classic pile of steaming crap located in the heart of LIC's "asthma alley".

Notice how the term "luxury" is bantered about when a developer has to unload a slice of shit on some unsuspecting newbie/buyer from the mid west!

Sorry folks. Luxury is i.e. a pre-war Park Avenue apartment not a rehabbed former LIRR power plant laden with toxic soil beneath its "towers"...featuring a varied menu of PCBs, old cleaning solvents etc.

Nice place for the wife and kids to grow up!

Anonymous said...

I have beloved photos of the old Schwartz Chemical Factory from the 80's growing up in this neighborhood. We always thought that someday it would be opened again to become a hospital or school or something useful and beneficial to the community. But now, walking past this sham I know that our neighborhood has been taken away from us and handed over on a silver platter to the highest bidder that wishes to give campaign contributions to this administration. Governor Pataki and Mayor Guiliani outright lied to us 10 years ago. It's quite obvious that all of the cars in the neighborhood have out of town license plates on them now and these poor souls have no idea what they have gotten into with this crap housing. These apartments are certainly not meant for us, three generations of hard-working New Yorkers. As an engineer, I can easily see faults with most of the construction that has gone on with this toxic waste site as well as the haphazardly slapped together pre fab townhouses that are being built across the street and marketed to rich out of towners as well.

I just read that the community board meeting was 'told' this week that there will be 5,000 more apartments crammed on the southern part of Hunter's Point where David Doctoroff had his BRILLIANT vision of having an Olympic Village for yet another failed policy of the Bloomberg administration. Could you imagine at least 5,000 more people, no let's be more realistic, 10,000 more people all will Volvo SVU's with out of town license plates crammed onto a toxic pier? Can you imagine most of those SVU's going through the Midtown Tunnel to get to work in Manhattan everyday joining the other hundreds of Volvo's from this neighborhood that are already doing it. I bet the fatcats at the MTA are loving this neighborhood now.

Let's face it, only the little people take the subway. Little people like us.

Anonymous said...

Could you imagine at least 5,000 more people, no let's be more realistic, 10,000 more people all will Volvo SVU's with out of town license plates crammed onto a toxic pier?
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You will look back at this statement and wish this was true.

Cheap housing on brownfields means only one thing: your community will become, in short order, barracks for immigrant 'guest workers.'

Remember, Harlem was built as upper middle class housing, and a tremedous amount went on line just as the Panic of 1905 hit and the former African-American community near Penn Station was getting cleared out.

Solution?

Like the Queens of today, places built for one family became overpriced rentals for three or more families. What was intended as owner occupied townhouses, became money machines for absentee landlords.

Anonymous said...

We have the preservation community to thank for this. The people in Hunters Point, like 10-63 Jackson, tried to get this landmarked, and the Manhattan-centric preservation community, with a few gestures at sympathy, went along with the LPC.

That damn law needs to be overturned and the entire preservation community (as it now 'exists' need to be thrown out on its ass.

Anonymous said...

Yea, just like that article a few months ago where they newspapers poked fun at the community for not saving the LISB building at Queens Plaza.

They had clueless local civic leader say something like 'dah, we dont know nuttin about landmarkin.'

The reality is when they called, they were told it was pointless because the LPC will not ok it.

The reporter said, 'now now, you dont want to make an enemy of the LPC do you?'

The answer from the community was, (which did not get printed, of course) 'why not? they dont care about us, we dont care about them.'

They twisted the news to make Queens look stupid.

With the silent compliance of the preservationists, both local and in Manhattan, they succeeded.

Anonymous said...

In regards to the comment: "You will look back at this statement and wish this was true.

Cheap housing on brownfields means only one thing: your community will become, in short order, barracks for immigrant 'guest workers.'"

- It's already been put out there that affordable housing on "Hunters Point South" is NOT going to happen. This will be yet another area given over to billionaire developers who live in CT and have no use for a NY neighborhood other than to destroy & rape it. The "beach' is doomed - a selling point to the recent transplants, is now a stab in their backs. They will cram as many luxury condos as they possible can on this toxic pier and the cancer & asthma rates will soar due to all the PCB's unearthed.

There WILL be 5,000 to 10,000 new out of town millionaires here all with Volvo SVU's and walking around with Dockers. And like all the rest of them, have no use for the neighborhood other than to use it as an overpriced bedroom community until they get new jobs training Asian workers overseas who will ultimately take their knowledge and replace them. They will be here because Manhattan has been given over to the ultra-rich of Europe & Asia.

Just the way Fuehrer Bloomberg wants it.

The lower class illegal Mexican servant community will be further out in Sunnyside or Woodside or Maspeth or Corona where you can still get an apartment for $900.00 from the right super.

And besides, anyone who has seen the old Con Ed toxic maps of Queens & Brooklyn can see that most of the riverfront was eternally polluted in the 1920's & 1930's as Con Ed began to put a stranglehold on it's New York monopoly of supplying power and poured unbelievably massive amounts of asbestos and oil into our soil.

They don't call this area Asthma Alley for nothing but apparently these facts don't get into the sales brochures for these horrendous abominations of buildings that are destroying the Queens & Brooklyn waterfront.