Hipster "beach" replacing affordable housing project in Ridgewood

From QNS:

Several Ridgewood residents at Wednesday’s Community Board 5 meeting in Middle Village spoke out against the Rockaway Brewing Company’s pop-up urban beach beer garden, La Playa NYC, which is set to open on June 4 at 176 Woodward Ave. on the Ridgewood/Bushwick border.

“We are opposing the pop-up beach and a liquor license,” said one resident who wished to remain anonymous. “We don’t want the noise that’s going to come with this, the traffic, the littering, the smoking and we have a lot of working people who work days and evenings in the neighborhood, the elderly, the physically sick.”

La Playa NYC is being billed as the city’s first pop-up urban beach beer garden and will ship in 140 cubic yards of Long Island sand and be fully decorated in a beach theme with beach chairs, sun umbrellas, a thatched palapa, beach volleyball courts and kiddie pools.

The pop-up beer garden will run from June 4 through September. It will operate Mondays through Thursdays from 5 p.m. to midnight, and from noon to midnight on Fridays through Sundays and will feature local talent including DJs, guest chefs, beer talks and special performances.

As a brewery, Rockaway Brewing Company is allowed to have five remote sites where they can conduct business, CB 5 Chairperson Vincent Arcuri said. However, Rockaway Brewing Company has not named 176 Woodward Ave. as one of those sites as of yet, he added.

According to CB 5 District Manager Gary Giordano, Rockaway Brewing Company has secured a two-year lease with the owners of the Woodward Avenue corner property.

I had to read this several times to fully absorb the abject stupidity of it.

1) We live in a city and on an island surrounded by beaches, yet a bunch of dopes are going to go to a filthy truck lot in Ridgewood, which has no water at all, to grill food and drink beer on a fake beach? And they're going to bring their toddlers?

2) To create this fake beach, they will truck sand in from Long Island, where we're spending hundreds of millions of tax dollars on beach replenishment in an effort to avoid more storm damage. How environmentally and fiscally friendly!

3) Why are the local papers going ga ga over this idea while failing to report the actual news here, which is that the owner of the lot obtained a zoning change in order to construct a mixed use project, and only won the approval of the local council member when affordable housing was included, but now is opening a douchebag paradise for the brahs for at least 2 years? What's going on with the housing? No comment from the council member about the switcheroo?

We're now expected to fawn over the thought of a bunch of lame millenials getting skin cancer and dancing around a polluted former garbage dump? What the hell happened to journalism in this town?

977 rental apartments proposed for Rheingold site

From the Daily News:

A Brooklyn-based developer hopes to build high-rise apartments on the Bushwick site that was once home to one of the city’s great blue-collar breweries.

But when Read Property presented its plans for the gleaming complex this week, the local community board questioned whether the proposal set aside sufficient space for working families.

The 10 buildings would rise up to eight stories and include 977 rental apartments and ground floor retail space.

Community Board 4 delayed its decision on whether to give the plans the thumbs-up, putting it off until the developer provides more information about the project’s affordable housing component, its impact on local schools and its inclusion of adequate parking.

Brewery to open in Astoria

From the Queens Courier:

Queens will soon be home to its first brewery in decades with the opening of SingleCut Beersmiths in Astoria later this year.

The company’s president and owner Rich Buceta said that the new brewery, which will be located at 19-33 37th St., is a natural fit for the borough.

“Queens has not had a brewery to call its own in a very long time,” said Buceta, 48, who was born in Jamaica.

SingleCut will feature a Tap Room with beer tastings and a stage for live musical performances, Buceta said. Visitors will also be able to take home half-gallon growlers. Though there will be no bar on the premises, Buceta said he may consider that option in the future and will hold several events a year utilizing the 5,000-square-foot-space and its stage.

If construction stays on schedule, Buceta plans to begin distributing beer throughout New York City in September.

Recession benefits some businesses

From the NY Times:

Less than two years ago, the Brooklyn Brewery found itself in a bind that had squeezed many companies out of New York. It wanted to expand, but the rapid gentrification of its neighborhood, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, had pushed rents beyond what it could afford.

That was before the recession took hold in the city. Now, the brewery is taking advantage of the softer real estate market to grab a bigger chunk of space before it could be snapped up and converted into another hotel, store or apartment building.

But tenants and property managers called Brooklyn Brewery’s new 15-year lease an exception to the continuing trend of industrial operations being pushed out of areas of the city that once were reserved for them.

In mid-2008, Mr. Hindy said...sales of Brooklyn Brewery’s premium beers, which it cooks up in Williamsburg, were rising steadily, but it had no room to expand its brewhouse. Landlords in the neighborhood were asking as much as $30 a square foot a year in rent, more than triple what the brewery was paying.

“They were all hoping to get the next bowling alley or boutique hotel or Whole Foods or a bank,” Mr. Hindy recalled.

Indeed, a hotel is being built across the street from the brewery, and the bowling alley-nightclub has opened next door. But the boom that spawned those concerns ended with the implosion of New York’s financial industry last year.

When the market cooled, Mr. Hindy signed new 15-year leases for the brewery and an adjacent building, at an average cost of about $15 a square foot — significantly higher than he had been paying but only about half of what landlords sought at the peak of the boom — he said.