Telling it like it is

Ray Rogers condemns NYC's rezoning policies as REBNY policies that benefit fat cat developers like Rob and Jerry Speyer (Tishman Speyer), Jed Walentas (Two Trees Management), Gary Barnett (Extell Development Company) and Daniel Brodsky (The Brodsky Organization). Rogers says REBNY is run by "bullies and racketeers" while speaking at Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer's rezoning hearing in East Harlem (7-13-17).

More mega-towers planned for Queens Plaza

From DNA Info:

Developer Tishman Speyer released a rendering and update Monday on its massive, two-tower office and retail complex planned for Queens Plaza — a project city officials are calling a "major job generator" for the neighborhood.

The developer and investment company Qatari Diar are building the 1.1-million-square-foot project at 28-10 Queens Plaza South, next to Tishman Speyer's existing building at 2 Gotham Center, which houses offices for the city's Department of Health.

The complex will feature two, 27-story office towers connected by four stories of retail at their base, which will include a food hall, restaurant and parking garage, according to the developers.

Shocking news: Developers head streetcar organization

From LIC post:

Some of the names behind the push for a new streetcar system between Queens and Brooklyn will sound familiar to western Queens residents, due to major projects they are developing here.

The Friend of the Brooklyn-Queens Connector (BQX) – which has been working on the Connector plan since 2014 – has released its board of directors list (online here).

That list includes some big players in Astoria and Long Island City development.

Tishman Speyer is represented on the Friends of the BQX board by public affairs managing director Michelle Adams, who is also a member of the Long Island City Partnership board. Tishman Speyer is the developer behind 2 Gotham Center at Queens Plaza South and 28th Street and is also working on a two-tower commercial building next door.

Jordan Barowitz of the Durst Organization, which is developing the Hallets Point megaproject on the Astoria Waterfront, also sits on the BQX board. The $1 billion project involves more than 2,000 units of housing, plus a supermarket and a school. The development broke ground in January.

Developer digging up the Van Alsts

From the NY Times:

More people are buried in Queens than are living there now. This is a story of some of the departed.

Precisely how many will not be known, though, until a bulldozer breaks ground early next year for a 42-story apartment tower in Long Island City, on the site of what was once a cemetery, owned by a family that settled there 350 years ago.

The Van Alst family cemetery was rediscovered only a little more than a decade ago, after the city decided to rezone the mostly industrial tract for residential, retail and office development.

After two developers, H & R Real Estate Investment Trust and Tishman Speyer, announced in June that they would build on the site, they were required by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which issues guidelines for archaeological work, to make a good-faith effort to find any descendants of the last known member of the family, Harry Van Alst, who lived in Queens in 1925.

As part of the proposed rezoning of the development site in Long Island City by the City Planning Commission, an archaeological consulting firm, Historical Perspectives, was hired in 2000 to research the environmental impact.

The consultant found that in 1925, Harry Van Alst, a Queens lawyer who lived in Long Island City, received an anonymous telephone call informing him that workers expanding the West Disinfecting Company’s complex had unearthed bones and remnants of caskets, roughly at Jackson Avenue and Orchard Street. He had them moved to Cypress Hills Cemetery and reburied.

But the consultant was unable to determine how many family members had been buried in the family plot originally, how many had been removed earlier and how many were reinterred in 1925 in Cypress Hills, and concluded: “There is still the possibility that undisturbed burials exist within the potential development site.”

The Queens Gazette has a list of other long lost borough cemeteries.

"Mayor's Fund to Advance NYC" is full of notorious developers

From Capital New York:

Mayor Bill de Blasio wants the city's parks and playgrounds to offer year-round equipment and recreational activites for adults and senior citizens, not only children.

The mayor presented that idea Monday morning, when he laid out several of his fund-raising goals during a closed-door meeting of the newly formed, 58-member board of advisers to the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City, according to a document obtained by Capital.

His wife, Chirlane McCray, chairs the Mayor's Fund, a 20-year-old organization that solicits donations to bolster initiatives run out of City Hall.

The three-page document outlines three priorities for de Blasio and McCray, who met with the board at Gracie Mansion.

The first idea is upgrading parks, pools and playgrounds.

"In addition to the conventional park equipment for children and passive recreation space, the model envisions: multi-purpose equipment for adults and seniors; year-round programming for kids and adults; wifi connectivity; site specific apps complementing on-site programs; unique public safety elements grounded in community policing models - all of which will build on local community partnership and park 'ownership,'" according to the memo, which was distributed to those attending the meeting.

That program will be run jointly by the city's health, education and parks departments, the mayor's Community Affairs Unit and the NYPD.

And here are the members of the Fund. Miss Heather has the poop, er, scoop:

The Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City Board of Advisors:

Husam Ahmad, HAKS Construction
Marisol Alcantara, West Harlem District Leader
Jo Andres, Artist, Filmmaker & Choreographer
Gina Argento, Broadway Stages
Barry Berke, Kramer Levin
Anthony Bonomo, Physicians’ Reciprocal Insurers
Barbara Bowen, Professional Staff Congress
Jill Bright, Conde Nast
Steve Buscemi, Actor
Derrick Cephas, Weil, Gotshal & Manges
Janet Dewart Bell, Communications and Policy Consultant
Cheryl Effron, Founder, Conjunction Fund & Founder, Greater NY
Jay Eisenhofer, Grant & Eisenhofer
Steven Feldman, Bullion International
Hal Fetner, Sidney Fetner Associates
Marian Fontana, Writer, Performer & Founder, 9-11 Families Association
Charlene Gayle, Macon Realty
Aron Govil, Ducon Technologies
Beth Green, Attorney
George Gresham, 1199 SEIU
Jon Halpern, Halpern Real Estate Ventures
Fred Heller, Metro Systems
Louis Hernandez, Former President, NYPD Hispanic Society
Anne Hess, MADRE & Philanthropist
Lorna Brett Howard, Philanthropist
Laura Imperiale, Tully Construction
Amabel Boyce James, Philanthropist
Orin Kramer, Boston Provident
Pam Kwatra, Kripari Marketing
John McAvoy, Con Edison of New York
Mary McCormick, Fund for the City of New York
Cheryl McKissack, McKissack & McKissack
Ron Moelis, L+M Development
Rud Morales, Primary One, Inc.
Mike Muse, Muse Recordings
Charles Myers, Evercore Partners
Cynthia Nixon, Actor
Ronald O. Perelman, MacAndrews and Forbes
Bruce Ratner, Forest City Ratner
Steven Rubenstein, Rubenstein Communications
Bill Rudin, Rudin Management
Bill Samuels, Effective New York
Mary Sansone, Congress of Italian-Americans Organization
Chris Shelton, CWA, District 1
Harendra Singh, Singh Hospitality Group
Daisy Soros, Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans
Jerry Speyer, Tishman Speyer
Rob Speyer, Tishman Speyer
Mary Alice Stephenson, GLAM4GOOD
Stuart Suna, Silvercup Studios
Ken Sunshine, Sunshine Sachs
Carol Sutton Lewis, Carol Sutton Lewis and William M. Lewis, Jr. Charitable Foundation
Jon Tisch, Loews
Dan Tishman, Tishman Construction
Estela Vasquez, 1199 SEIU
George Walker, Neuberger Berman
Jeff Wilpon, Sterling Equities
Steven Witkoff, The Witkoff Group

The names highlighted should get your attention. So much for the DeBlasios being real progressives. They're nothing but tweeders. Filling an advisory board with folks that have resisted and/or gotten around providing promised affordable housing, taken advantage of eminent domain for private gain, as well as a chick with an on-the-record a shady past, patners-in-grime with a slumlord who plans to use Newtown Creek environmental settlement money to build a hotel? What a joke.

You simply can't make this sh*t up.

So much for that

From the Daily News:

Two-thirds of the storm-ravaged buildings whose owners sought help from Mayor Bloomberg’s Rapid Repair program are still not fixed — two months after Hurricane Sandy hit, the Daily News has learned.

With registration set to end Monday, Rapid Repairs has completed work on only 4,216 of the 12,555 buildings enrolled in Rapid Repairs — just one in three.

“Work has begun on another 2,506, with another 5,833 remaining,” Peter Spencer, spokesman for the Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery, said Friday.

Eleven days after the storm, Mayor Bloomberg announced Rapid Repairs — a $500 million, first-of-a-kind effort to quickly restore power and heat to homes devastated by Sandy. “In the neighborhoods hardest hit by Sandy, homeowners need help fixing their homes — and they need it now,” the mayor declared.

The city agreed to pay contractors to assess the damage and get power, heat and hot water back up and running right away. Within 10 days, 6,000 homeowners had enrolled.
More than two months later, thousands of homeowners are still waiting. The city hired Tishman to assess damage, but many homeowners complained the firm wound up doing repeat assessments and losing paperwork while no actual work was done.

Construction billing practices being investigated

From Crains:

Federal prosecutors are investigating the billing practices of four more New York City construction giants, radio-station WNYC reported Monday morning. Turner Construction Company, Tishman Construction, Plaza Construction and Skanska USA are now under the FBI's magnifying glass. That news comes after charges filed against Bovis Lend Lease in April ultimately led to an admission of guilt and $56 million in fines.

A grand jury subpoena had been issued to a firm called AECOM, a parent company of Tishman, in December of last year, the report said. But a spokesman from Tishman declined to comment on the investigation.

Turner Construction Company issued a statement this afternoon confirming that they, among other major construction contractors, had been issued a subpoena by the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York last December.

Companies currently under investigation are involved in a number of large-scale public projects, including the extension of the 7th Avenue Subway line.

Commuter parking bait-and-switch at Queens Plaza

From the Queens Chronicle:

Despite outcry at a Community Board 2 meeting, Borough President Helen Marshall on Friday approved a proposal which would allow for a significant reduction in the number of parking spots at 28-10 Queens Plaza South, the Gotham Center office tower.

The land, which is owned by the city, is now home to the city’s Health Department. An old parking facility at the location was put out of service in 2008.

Developer Tishman Speyer had initially agreed to create 1,150 parking spaces, but is proposing to instead maintain 550 spots. The garage would incorporate 162 existing spaces and add 388 during the construction of the second office tower.

Members of CB 2 were outraged that the city would consider reducing spaces when the already-congested area is expected to swell with an influx of new employees and residents. On April 7, they voted 24 to 12 to prevent the reduction.

Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer (D-Sunnyside) represents the area and said he is not yet sure how he will vote regarding the parking, which must still be approved by the City Council. “I am concerned about the loss of parking spaces and possible reduction here, but it is far from a done deal,” Van Bramer said. “I look forward to meeting with the city’s Economic Development Corp. and other members of the community to discuss it.”