Woodhaven's small businesses frustrated by and are suffering from city's opaque sign regulations

Queens Chronicle

 
“Jamaica Avenue looks like crap,” said Margie Schmidt, the second-generation owner of Schmidt’s Chocolate in Woodhaven.

The candymaker is not alone in her blunt assessment of the neighborhood’s main shopping street.
Stores along Jamaica have been pulling down their awnings and signs — many of them up for decades — to avoid thousands in potential fines from building inspectors who blitzed the neighborhood three years ago.

On the facades of stores, restaurants and laundromats up and down the boulevard, signs no bigger than a car window are all there is to identify businesses.

For owners, the tiny signs were all they could think of to keep from being written up. Signs less than six-feet square do not require a city permit.

Last week, the Woodhaven Business Improvement District, which represents 317 stores and professional offices on Jamaica Avenue, sponsored the first workshop for business owners since the city declared a moratorium on writing tickets for sign violations last February.

But many of the more than 50 Woodhaven business owners who packed the tables at the Avenue Diner, where the workshop was held, said they still could not get straight answers from representatives of the city’s Department of Buildings about how to comply with the law.

“I wanted to know: How much is a permit?” said Schmidt.

‘‘‘Well,’ they said. ‘I don’t want ‘Well.’ I need the city to tell me. You mean there is no set price?’
“I asked three times,” she said

When a reporter asked Pedro Woss, owner of K&P Realty Services, also on Jamaica Avenue, what information he got from the workshop, he held up two fingers in the familiar shape of a zero.

“They don’t know the answers to questions,” said Woss.

 

City's Broken Facades program reveals hundreds of more buildings with hazards

THE CITY

The five-star Lotte New York Palace, featured on “Gossip Girl,” beckons guests and selfie-takers with an Instagram-ready courtyard, ringed by a mansion-like 19th century brownstone at the base of a modern hotel tower.

But what visitors may not know is that months ago, a city building inspector flagged the Madison Avenue property’s owner, the Archdiocese of New York, for failing to put up a sidewalk shed or other measures to protect passersby from a facade deemed dangerous.

The $10,000 fine for “failure to take required measures to protect public safety” — and two other fines totaling $3,750 for failure to maintain exteriors — followed a March 2019 engineering report that found broken roof tiles, deteriorating chimneys and loose safety railings, among other potential hazards, records show.

The Palace is one of more than 300 buildings citywide that have open violations in city Department of Buildings records for not putting protections in place to shield passersby in the event a piece of facade crumbles or collapses following a failed inspection.

The risks of deteriorating materials dozens of feet above ground came into tragic view last month, when architect Erica Tishman was killed near Times Square by a piece of terra cotta that broke free from a building and plummeted.

The Department of Buildings swiftly announced it would inspect 1,331 buildings whose mandatory every-five-year inspections had found their facades unsafe, “to determine if they required additional pedestrian protections.”

Of those, 220 lacked such protections and would be issued violations requiring them to put up barriers to falling objects, according to the DOB. The agency declined to identify the buildings while enforcement actions are ongoing, and no such violations appeared in public records as of Tuesday.

Admin. note: There is no city Broken Facades program, I just made it up. Although they are free to use it as long as they stay motivated to regulate these buildings.

 

How exactly does this happen?

From NBC:

Eight families have lost their homes after an apartment building in the Bronx partially collapsed, sending several tons of bricks cascading onto the ground.

Chopper 4 was overhead as firefighters responded to the Fteley Avenue building Soundview Thursday evening, with bricks and debris strewn on the sidewalk and on the street. Bricks fell with enough force to mangle the front gate and cave in the awning, with some hanging precariously over the entrance.

No one was hurt in the collapse, and the cause is under investigation. FDNY officials on scene said an occupant started some repair work but "it just looked like the age of the building, maybe weather."

Sidewalk shed bill has a hearing

From Crains:

Because it's much costlier to fix a façade than to maintain a shed that devours sidewalk space, blocks sunlight and hurts businesses, and no deadline to remove it, sheds have spread across the city. There are now 8,843—about 200 miles worth—and they pop up any time a building is built or repaired, as Crain's documented in a cover story last year.

Late last year City Councilman Ben Kallos sponsored a bill to stop the scourge and last week a hearing was finally held to discuss it.

His bill would compel landlords to remove sheds—which Kallos called "the house guest that never leaves"—if no work is done on the building for seven days, with exceptions for weather and other issues.

While officials from the de Blasio administration and real estate community agreed at the hearing that sheds are ugly, they insisted Kallos' bill could jeopardize public safety by forcing sheds to come down sooner than they should.

Developer destroys facade of Elks club in response to landmarking push

From LIC Post:

Unique exterior details were illegally torn from the former Elks Lodge on 44th Drive this morning just days after the local community launched an effort to landmark the property and stave off development.

Construction workers took jackhammers to the building, located at 21-42 44th Drive. An elk head, one of the building’s unique exterior details, has been hacked off.

According to DOB documents, the work was taking place without proper permits. By Monday afternoon, police had arrived to enforce a stop work order from the Department of Buildings, an officer told the LIC Post.

Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, who wrote a letter to the Landmark Preservation Commission requesting landmark consideration of this property, called the illegal alteration “a disgraceful act of civic vandalism.”

He reached out to the DOB and Mayor’s office to have inspectors visit the location and issue a stop work order.

Elmhurst building facade peels away

From PIX11:

A portion of a Verizon building in Queens came crashing to the ground during a powerful overnight storm that downed trees and power lines across the area.

It happened at Vietor Avenue and Broadway in the Elmhurst section of Queens.

Images from the scene show a chunk of the building as tall as an SUV crumpled in the middle of Vietor Avenue. Debris could be seen on top of several cars parked along the side of the road, and at least three vehicles appeared to sustain severe damage.

Residents reported hearing a loud crash in the middle of the night, then seeing a portion of the building -- about 20 feet by 60 feet sheet of bricks -- on the ground. No one was hurt.