Latest shelter news from Glendale, Ozone Park, Maspeth & Ridgewood

From the Queens Chronicle:

No one is saying for certain, but it appears that the on-again, off-again proposal to build a men’s homeless shelter at a vacant factory building on Cooper Avenue in Glendale is on hold, according to Councilman Bob Holden (D-Middle Village), who addressed a packed house at the Juniper Park Civic Association’s meeting on Sept. 20.

Holden said he received confirmation in July that negotiations were underway for a plan to erect a shelter at 78-16 Cooper Ave. The facility could house up to 200 beds, he said, the maximum number permitted by the city’s Department of Homeless Services.

At the time, according to Holden, DHS Commissioner Steven Banks told him that no contracts had been signed.

As things stand, Holden said Banks is open to discussing other possible locations for the shelter, leaving the Cooper Avenue site available for other purposes.

“I’m confident,” he told the estimated 150 concerned area residents in attendance. But, he added, “It’s not a definite. We have people who are ready to protest.”

He promised to “work out the political end on my part.”

“We’re getting close” to making a school happen, Holden said. “They just have to go through the [Department of Education]; they have to talk to other people.”

A school, he said, “seems more likely now, it’s safe to say, than a homeless shelter.” The comment elicited widespread applause from the crowd.

From QNS:

Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan said that rumors about a new homeless shelter in Maspeth has been confirmed to her office from an unknown source.

Nolan told QNS on Friday afternoon that the shelter could be placed at P.S. 9 on 57th Street — but other activists and politicians are holding their tongues. The assemblywoman also declined to disclose the identity of the source.

Although city officials have yet to confirm this, Nolan worries the de Blasio administration could act fast to divert students – many of whom are bused in – and place “hundreds” of homeless people in the building.

“I don’t want to see a homeless shelter on 57th Street, it’s an absolutely terrible location,” Nolan said. “The city hasn’t [followed through] on anything they said and we have homeless people in all the hotels in Long Island City on a small rotating basis. How many more area we going to take? I want to work with Councilman Holden, Assemblymen Barnwell and Miller… and I’m hoping we can all work together.”

In Maspeth, 57th Street only runs for about a block and a half between Flushing and Grand Avenues and is mostly lined with warehouses, about five row-houses as well as P.S. 9.

“When the city moves, it moves very quickly, and I don’t want to wake up next week and find beds in P. 9,” Nolan continued.

Nolan also spoke of concern about a potential shelter at Summerfield Street and Wyckoff Avenue in Ridgewood.

From the Queens Chronicle:

Ozone Park activist Sam Esposito made a Facebook post on Sunday evening in which he claimed a tentative victory in the Ozone Park Block Association’s crusade against the homeless shelter being constructed at the former Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church on 101st Avenue and 86th street. The shelter is being constructed to house 113 men with mental illness.

Esposito claimed that major work had stopped and that a change in plans by the city will be made public soon.

“In closing, nothing official has been announced yet, but all indications point to the fact that we are NOT getting the 113 men, and the whole idea of a shelter, in that location, right now, is up in the air,” the post says in part. “I sent out 2 letters, again, to the owners’ wives this week and I hope they will find it in their hearts to convince their husbands, to do something else with this site.”

Isaac McGinn of the Department of Homeless Services, however, said the city is going ahead with its plans to turn the church into a homeless shelter.

Factory turned into church (and luggage storage?) in Elmhurst

This old factory at 74-16 Grand Avenue most recently has been used as a church. The problem is that they never got permits or a place of assembly to legally turn it into one. There currently are 5 active DOB violations and thousands of dollars in ECB fines. The most interesting violation has to be this one:

Not sure why large quantities of luggage are being stored on the premises. And then there's the fact that the facade is crumbling.

City keeps driving jobs away

From the Daily News:

No amount of scrumptious dessert makes the news go down easier that Junior’s, maker of Brooklyn’s signature cheesecake, will soon shut its Queens bakery and reopen in New Jersey.

The move comes not because Junior’s is fading; its flagship restaurant beams brightly at the foot of Flatbush Ave. But the company, which churns out more than a million cheesecakes a year, cannot justify the cost of industrial real estate in the five boroughs.

Founded in 1950, Junior’s joins an exodus of established New York food-makers.

Streit’s, the venerable matzo baker still in its 1925 Lower East Side home, is decamping to Pennsylvania while pondering a move to Rockland or Westchester counties.

Hummus giant Sabra left Queens for Virginia.

Stella D’oro, whose heavenly scents once kissed the Deegan Expressway; Taystee, which moved its 400 Flushing baking jobs to Pennsylvania after fleecing the city for tax breaks; Bazzini, the Bronx firm that roasted Yankee Stadium’s nuts; and Old London Foods, a mighty maker of Melba toast, linger only in the sense-memories of New Yorkers.

Firms like those were canaries in the coal mine, lured away with the honey of tax breaks or repelled by the vinegar of union combat. Junior’s is the coal mine. That an employer of 60 felt it had no choice but to leave is a distressing sign of the city’s inability to retain middle-class jobs.

Among other forces, conversions of factories to living spaces — hello, Williamsburg and Long Island City — have helped drive the cost of manufacturing space out of reach.

Former mob joint may turn into something interesting

I noticed the other day that the former Casablanca restaurant/catering hall, which was once owned by mob boss Joe Massino and seized by the Feds, has building permits posted. And it may one day soon become something useful! Check it out:

Factory illegally converted into yeshiva

From DNA Info:

A yeshiva is illegally using a factory building as a school and has racked up a litany of complaints about illegal construction, according to Department of Buildings records.

Neighbors have a laundry list of grievances about United Talmudical Academy, located at 25 Waverly Ave., which include the use of the street as a parking lot for school buses and students who harass women in nearby buildings and throw garbage out the window.

Now neighbors say the school is doing construction — including waterproofing the roof and working on the elevator shaft — without a permit at all hours of day and night.

Four complaints were made to the DOB on Nov. 6, prompting the department's emergency response team, which responds to complaints that are deemed hazardous and in need of immediate attention, to inspect the building.

One caller said that they were doing work on the building after 6 p.m. during the week and all day on Sunday, records show.

Inspectors issued a stop work order on the site the next day because of construction work being done in the building's elevator shaft without a permit, according to the DOB.

The agency found that workers were weatherproofing an abandoned shaft, had made illegal partitions and were using the building as a school illegally, the records show.

Two violations were also issued — for work without a permit that includes weatherproofing being done on the roof and occupancy contrary to use for a factory building being used as a school.

Over the next several days 12 more complaints were made to the department about continued construction at the building despite the DOB's order to stop.

A complaint made on Nov. 10 describes construction taking place at 2 a.m. on a Monday.

Another factory to become residential

From Crains:

The latest launching pad for big-scale residential development in Astoria, Queens, has hit the market with an asking price of $60 million. The development site, located at 11-12 30th Drive, a parcel that stretches from the Astoria waterfront along Vernon Boulevard inland to 12th Street, can accommodate up to 460,000 square feet of residential space according to sources. Height limitations permit a building up to 10-stories tall.

In the late 1990s, a storage yard at a plastics factory on the site was gutted by a massive fire.

The parcel is currently home to a single-story factory building occupied by Bohea Associates, a grocery wholesaler. Adam Spies and Doug Harmon, brokers at Eastdil Secured, are handling the sale of the property on behalf of owner Vernon Realty Associates.

DeBlasio looking to kill what manufacturing is left

From Crains:

An unlikely coalition of manufacturers, business groups, liberal City Council members and housing advocates are pressuring Mayor Bill de Blasio to protect the city's industrial areas. But the mayor himself is pushing the very thing they fear most: housing in their midst.

Mr. de Blasio is looking for ways to add apartments to the city's 17 industrial business zones, or IBZs, which former Mayor Michael Bloomberg shielded from residential rezoning but largely ignored during his final years in office. Critics sense a similar lack of enthusiasm from Mr. de Blasio, whose first budget slashed funding for the IBZ program and whose aides talk of putting "workforce housing" in industrial areas to advance the administration's goal of creating 80,000 affordable units.

"No housing is affordable without a job," said Leah Archibald, executive director of the East Williamsburg Valley Industrial Development Corp., delivering her signature line. Her group, a Brooklyn development corporation, represents about a thousand businesses that employ 15,000 workers.

Advocates for industrial businesses have been fighting a lonely battle to maintain footholds in hot markets like Williamsburg and Long Island City, Queens, but the recent support of housing activists—natural allies of the mayor—could mark a turning point.

Chemicals manufactured and stored behind proposed Glendale homeless shelter

From the Daily News:

More than 100 homeless families could be transferred to a former textile mill next to a chemical distributor filled with hydrocloric acid and formaldehyde, the Daily News has learned.

If the proposed shelter is approved by city officials, homeless families would be moved onto Cooper Ave. in Glendale next to the Independent Chemical Corp., which houses a witches brew of chemicals in barrels and tankers inside and outside of the building.

“The fact they are even entertaining this is mind-boggling,” said Juniper Park Civic Association Robert Holden, who showed a reporter barrels in plain sight from 79th Place. “I think that the city — whoever is in charge — never even went back there.”

The mist of hydrochloric acid is known to be corrosive to human tissue and organs.

“This is a very dangerous site,” said Holden. “You’re talking about kids sleeping 10 or 15 yards from a tanker truck filled with dangerous chemicals.”

Juniper Civic has more.

Madelaine Chocolate still waiting for funds

LIC residents discover that factories make noise

From DNA Info:

BluePrint Juice is a runaway hit with the juice-cleanse set but people who live near its Queens factory say noise from the site is putting the squeeze on their sleep cycles.

BluePrint, which sells cold-pressed fruit and vegetable juices at Whole Foods and elsewhere nationwide, runs a facility at 48-55 36th St., where its neighbors say workers empty dumpsters overnight and unload trailers with forklifts as early as 6 a.m.

"The windows are closed right now, but when the windows are open — forget about it,” said Larry Lembo, 63, who has lived at the rear of a building overlooking the BluePrint site since 1974. "It's like it's in your backyard."

Another longtime tenant of Lembo's building said the noise from BluePrint, which locals said moved into the 36th Street a manufacturing zone about two years ago, jars her from her sleep.

"It's something you don't get used to," the neighbor said, declining to give her name.

Lembo took his complaints about BluePrint — whose founder Zoë Sakoutis was named one of Crain's New York Business's "40 Under 40" last year — to Queens Community Board 2 and the 108th Precinct.

Commanding officer Capt. Brian Hennessy said the NYPD hasn't issued any noise summonses at the property, but there have been 22 complaints about noise related to garbage pickups at the site since January, according to the Department of Environmental Protection.

Hennessy said police have spoken to BluePrint and its waste removal company, Action Carting, about keeping noisy operations contained to more reasonable hours. Both were receptive to making adjustments, he said.

Rockaway candy maker hitting the road

From the Daily News:

Rockaway’s chocolate dreams could be melting away.

Madelaine Chocolate, among the largest employers in Rockaway, has put its 5.4-acre building complex at the foot of the Crossbay Bridge up for sale.

Los Angeles-based real estate giant CBRE has listed the four-building complex on the market, saying it’s “suited for redevelopment to multifamily, retail or mixed use.”

The facility was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, causing about $50 million in property damage and lost sales.

The loss of the 65-year-old chocolatier — which at one time employed about 450 people — would be a blow to Rockaway’s economy. The business was the largest local employer along with Peninsula Hospital, which shuttered in 2012.

Madelaine owners would only say in a statement they could be moving to another location in or out of New York.

LIC paper factory now a hotel

From LIC Post:

A new hotel has just opened in a renovated old paper factory that contains vestiges of Long Island City’s industrial history.

The Paper Factory Hotel, located at 37-06 36th Street, has incorporated many old items into the design—such as an antique paper machine.

”We have preserved its intricate machines and interspersed them in our space, keeping alive the roots of our hotel and the stories it brings with it,” according to the hotel website. “We wished to hold on to the charm of this industrial age.”

I do give them props for acknowledging the history of the area and understanding that this building used to provide good jobs to working people. It still does, but to a lesser extent. Better a hotel than "luxury condos".

DOB finds Knockdown Center's plans objectionable

From The Forum:

The city Department of Buildings last week rejected an application for a permanent place of assembly, as well as its alteration permit and change in certificate of occupancy, submitted by the Knockdown Center, a Maspeth art center that has drawn criticism from area residents who worry it will draw thousands of drunken patrons to the area but which center representatives say will respect the neighborhood and create jobs.

The center, which set up shop in an abandoned glass factory at 52-19 Flushing Ave. in Maspeth, has for the past year been hosting such events as art shows and concerts by applying for temporary permits – but in order to continue operating it must receive a place of assembly permit and a certificate of occupancy from the city. The Knockdown Center filed in August for a place of assembly and in October for a certificate of occupancy and a permit to conduct alteration work at the site – all of which was rejected last week.

The place of assembly application had requested that up to 5,000 people be allowed at the spot – something that raised eyebrows for area civic leaders and legislators, who have said they are concerned thousands of people would end up partying in a residential area.

When is an industrial property not an industrial property?

From the Daily News:

A former glass factory in a gritty section of Queens is being transformed into a sprawling arts venue — though community members have been largely unaware of the sweeping changes in store.

The Knockdown Center, located at 52-19 Flushing Ave. in Maspeth, has already hosted eclectic events from mini-golf to art installations.

But it still needs approval from the local community board before operating as an arts venue, said Jean Tanler, Queens coordinator for the Maspeth Industrial Business Zone.

“They’re not supposed to be operating as an arts center as far as I’m aware,” Tanler said.

Because it is located in the industrial business zone, it must get a variance from the city Board of Standards and Appeals and go through the community board, Tanler said.

Local leaders have been seeking alternatives to replace the exodus of manufacturing that was once a staple of the area, but they were puzzled by the lack of communication by Knockdown.

Kate Watson, a spokeswoman for the center, did not respond to several requests for comment.

The most recent listed owner of 2.5-acre property is Paul Sklar of Lynbrook, N.Y., according to city Buildings Department records. Sklar could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The venue recently hosted a projector video project featuring 20 artists and a poetry reading as well as several art shows.

Community Board 5 Chairman Vincent Arcuri said the board had no knowledge that the factory was being used as performance space.

“We don’t know if it’s legally occupied,” Arcuri said. “We have not heard anything about it.”

Jeff Mulligan, executive director of the Board of Standards and Appeals, said there was no record of a variance request to operate as an arts venue.

I give props to the Daily News for looking into the legality of this setup. Other news websites have mentioned this place as an "hip" art space, but failed to mention that it's being repurposed illegally. So again, we have a property in the IBZ being used for non-IBZ purposes. What is the point of having special zoning if variances and non-enforcement end up making it look like swiss cheese?

Queens Plaza getting another tower

From Crains:

The two-story, neon Eagle Electric sign, a long-time landmark in Long Island City, that was replaced by a regular billboard over a decade ago, is slated to get a high-profile successor—a 40-story, 400-plus-unit rental tower.

Early this month a consortium of Property Markets Group, the Hakim Organization and Vector Group paid $37 million for 23-10 Queens Plaza South, a prewar Art Deco-style loft building that was once home to Eagle Electric's production facilities, and a neighboring building at 23-01 42nd Road. The plan is to demolish the latter building and, with the considerable air rights afforded by the adjacent factory, construct a brand new apartment tower.

Long Island City has seen a boom in residential development in recent years, but much of the building has been focused along the waterfront. What drew the investors to the Eagle Electric site was a shift in development away from the river—where most properties have been snapped up, if not built up, already—towards Queens Plaza.

City planning strikes again

From the NY Times:

Though there are plenty of start-ups that favor Williamsburg and Greenpoint, developers, local officials and real estate brokers say there is a dearth of office space. Most landlords, lured by the promise of building lucrative apartments in the increasingly popular residential area, are reluctant to devote space to commercial tenants who can pay little and might wither as quickly as they bloom.

For some longtime residents and younger champions of north Brooklyn, the shortage raises the specter of a creative, economically diverse neighborhood turning into just another bedroom community. Will entrepreneurs follow the lead of Kickstarter, which is renovating an old factory in Greenpoint to serve as its long-term headquarters, or will the area’s booming residential market squeeze out everything but wealthy commuters?

Part of the problem is zoning: though parts of Williamsburg and Greenpoint are zoned for mixed commercial and residential use, the zoning tilts residential. The bigger issue is supply, or as developers might see it, demand.

...it was not uncommon for the owners of old factories or warehouses — the kind of industrial building every developer wants — to refuse to sell because they are holding out for their properties to be rezoned for residential use.

Asbestos in Grand Avenue dumpsters

College Point condo project waits for approval

From the Times Ledger:

Developers seeking to turn a dilapidated College Point factory into a 134-unit condo complex nearly have enough money to begin, according to their lawyer.

A developer called Waterfront Resorts Inc. is seeking to transform the Chilton Paint Factory on the corner of 110th Street and 15th Avenue into waterfront housing, complete with a public park along the coast, but they need a key city approval to do so.

The company, headed by a man named Henry Lam, was granted a variance in 2009, which allowed them to circumvent the zoning code and build a residential building in a manufacturing area, but the project was never started and that variance expired in July, according to the city Board of Standards and Appeals, a commission that grants variances on a case-by-case basis.

The company is now seeking to extend its waiver for four more years, according to attorney Eric Palatnik.

“We think we will be constructed well before that, but that will give us time to get our finances together,” he said.

The 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession meant that capital for the project was hard to drum up and even now remains a challenge, although Palatnik said the developers are nearly done raising money.

He will ask the BSA to extend the length of time the variance applies to the parcel of land because of the economic circumstances beyond the control of the developer.

Chemical invasion in Sunnyside

From the Queens Chronicle:Sunnyside residents are up in arms over fumes from auto body shops and a local refinery on 39th Street, which is already a concern to the 108th Precinct because of problems posed by double-parked cars queuing up for vehicle maintenance services.The businesses, all structurally connected on the same street, share a common wall with residential backyards on a parallel block.A group of homeowners are crying foul. They said their quality of life is being infringed upon as fumes from car spray paint guns escape into the air when not painted inside regulated spray booths, which properly filter the emissions.The residents are also concerned by visible black smoke emitting from the refinery, which creates jewelry, on the corner of the block.Gabriel Sanchez, owner of Gabriel Auto Body at 43-05 39 St., confirmed that he used to paint cars on the premises. However, he no longer does, after receiving a fine from the Department of Environmental Protection in January for $2,000.

Piñata assemblers treated like piñatas

From the Daily News:

Three women workers at a Queens piñata factory took a whack at their bosses in a lawsuit Monday, accusing them of sweatshop conditions and lousy pay.

The plaintiffs were forced to work 11-hour shifts in the locked basement of a party supplies store while earning only $3 per hour off the books, according to a lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.

A malfunctioning boiler in the confined space at Let’s Have a Party retail store added to the deplorable working conditions, the suit said.

The illegal basement factory in Woodside had "no windows, no ventilation … was cold, damp and smelled of dead mice and sewage," the complaint said.

The basement factory was connected by a staircase to the party supplies store on 45th Ave., but the doors at the top of the stairs were locked and there was no other direct access to the street, the workers’ lawyer, Artemio Guerra, said.

The plaintiffs, Maria Diaz, Ruth Dominguez and Laura Vidals, were "imprisoned" in the basement when government inspectors attempted to gain access to the building.

They are seeking unspecified back pay. Domingo and Diaz were fired allegedly after complaining about their low pay.