Demolition crews have shown up at the 5 Roebling Street in Williamsburg, the building that used to be a cabbage processing plant and gained the name the “Giant Fart Cloud Building” from advice blogger and writer Bad Advice. The story of what is to come there will be of interest for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the structure is across the street from the Roebling Oil field and is listed as having hazardous material/environmental issues in need of monitoring. We opined recently that the odds are fifty-fifty that contractors will strike oil when they start digging on the site. (This is strictly a guess.)

It becomes more interesting because Bad Advice–which provided the photo above–noted that the demolition contractor on the project, MMG Design, has a very interesting history. We were reading an item about them that ran on Brownstoner last year, when it dawned on us that we’d reported the same story too after getting emails from unhappy neighbors. In that case, workers were said to be engaging in a variety of unsafe practices, even putting a child in danger in the eyes of parents who said they were unconcerned about a toddler playing in a yard nearby. Mr. Brownstoner used the word “pillaging” to describe their activity on Clifton Place.

In any case, here’s an excerpt from the email about the beginning of the end of the Giant Fart Cloud Building which is close to cutting its final cheese:

They’re digging up the sidewalk in front of the cabbage factory/5 Roebling. I have a feeling this is the beginning of an EXTREMELY loud fall…It’s now just a giant hole that some guy is working inside. I don’t think it’s a fence. I think there’s something wrong down there. There had been a steady stream of water oozing out from under the gate, so maybe there’s a main break or something. Who knows.

We have a feeling the work at 5 Roebling is going to provide the material many posts, for many, many reasons.

We’ve got to say that we don’t have any personal experience with calling 311 to file a complaint with the Department of Buildings, but we do have experience with people that have done so and become frustrated in the process. There are those that claim they call to lodge a complaints about things like after-hours construction that are not investigated or that are investigated in such a way that the original problem is gone by the time the building inspectors show up.

There are also those that complain they can no longer get information over the phone about what permits a particular building or contractor may or may not have. For instance, blogger Bad Advice recounts this tale of inquiring about whether a contractor had building permits in place:

I looked up the address on the DOB website, but couldn’t decipher whether or not the demolition permits had been granted. I could tell they’d been applied for but they use all this weird coding that normal people without an extensive construction background can’t understand. So I called 311 and attempted to talk to a human.

The operator connected me to the Department of Buildings, where a cheery young woman informed me that I’d have to look on the website to see if there were any permits.

I told her that I’d done that, but couldn’t decipher what the codes meant. I asked her to help me figure it out and offered to give her all identifying details. She refused.

I didn’t understand, as I just wanted to know what a bunch of letters meant. She cheerfully restated her position that the only thing she could do was direct me to the website and wondered aloud whether they were doing work without a permit.

BUT YOU WON’T TELL ME WHETHER OR NOT THEY HAVE A PERMIT!!!! I may have yelled.

Of course, anyone can access the Department of Buildings Building Information System (BIS) website. Fairly up to date information is available there on every building in the city. The problem is that the entire system is written in professional code and that the average person has little hope of deciphering the information.

The screen above comes from the page for 90 N. 9th Street in Williamsburg, which we posted about yesterday in relation to its very dangerous scaffold and overall look of abandonment. We understand what the each of the entries say, but does an average person stand a chance of determining if the workers banging away at 10:30 on Sunday morning have a permit? We do undertand that it’s a government website and that it contains technical information about permits. We also know that there are documents on the site explaining the abbreviations and codes, still, there should be a way for people to get information in a way that they can understand. (For instance, over the phone from someone who can translate into English.)

One would be tempted to suggest that the system has been set up to deliberately make it harder for citizens to find out what’s going on, but that would be cynical, wouldn’t it?

1) Jimmy’s Diner is now open at 577 Union Avenue. It replaces Union Picnic, which closed. The menu run–no surprise–to diner food, with a lot of burgers and sandwiches on the menu. When we passed by on Sunday, there was a fairly modest brunch crowd inside.

2) We got word of this a while ago and promptly put it aside: The William Taft Restaurant in Greenpoint has gone belly up. At least, it has been sealed tight since before Labor Day. The Taft, you might remember was a vegetarian effort, but as one email put it, it featured “too much macrobiotics and not enough spice.” It only lasted a few months.

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• The “Ebbets Field Fantasy” [AYR]
• Brooklyn Developer Goes Green [Sun]
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• Brooklyn Blogger Meet Up is Sept. 30 in Bed-Stuy [Bed-Stuy Blog]
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It looks like the city is saying no to several planters on Union Street in Park Slope. The concrete planters near Seventh Avenue contained small evergreen trees. News was posted over at Brooklynian:

The city in it’s infinite wisdom has revoked the permits we had for the planters along union street. They have given us 30 days to remove the concrete planters. The reason they gave was that there must be no obstructions on city property. Since the sidewalks are owned by the city, we must remove the planters that have been there for over 25 years. So in 30 days, the planters from BHS all the way to Tasti-d-lite and the bench will be removed.

The planters across the street at 92-7th Avenue will also have to be removed, because they were on the same permit. So say goodbye to the planters from Bank of America down to NuNu Gallery. If anyone knows how to stop this, please do so. It’s a shame that there will be no plant life allowed on these corners.

Not everyone is with the trees, however. There is a bit of a discussion about whether the planters were, well, ugly and might be replaced with something nicer. Otherwise, it does seem to be a rather arbitrary decision.

There are a couple of transportation-related Community Board sessions in Brooklyn tonight. One is a Community Board 6 Transportation Committee Meeting that is taking place in Park Slope. That session will take place at 6:30PM at Middle School 51, which is located at 350 Fifth Avenue. There will be a presentation by representatives from the Department of Transportation about PlaNYC 2030 Transportation initiatives, which includes a proposed Congestion Pricing pilot program. There will also be an update from DOT about the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Plan initiatives designed to make streets safer and discussion of needs along the Fourth Avenue corridor and nearby streets.

There’s also a Community Board 1 Transportation Committee Meeting tonight. That one will cover, among other things, designs for the reconstruction of Nassau Avenue and the “buildouts” of more sidewalks in Williamsburg for bike racks like the ones installed at N. 7th Street and Bedford Avenue at the L Train station exit. The meeting takes place at 6:30 at Our Lady of the Snow Facility, which is located at 410 Graham Avenue (between Jackson Avenue and Withers Street).

There’s a meeting coming up on Monday (9/24) that asks “What if the Atlantic Yards project isn’t built?” or is only partly built and presents some alternate visions for the site. It’s called UNITY and will take place on Monday. The subject is “A realistic, community-sensitive proposal for the development of Brooklyn’s Vanderbilt rail yards.

There will be a press conference at 11AM on Monday with project designers Marshall Brown, Ronald Shiffman, and Dr. Tom Angotti and a Community Forum at 6 PM with Mr. Brown and Dr. Angotti. The location is The Soapbox Gallery at 636 Dean Street (between Carlton and Vanderbilt Avenues) in Prospect Heights.

We return to 70 N. 9th Street in Williamsburg, site of our Scaffold Collapse Candidate, for this image, of a stop sign hanging from a splintering piece of the sidewalk structure.

A Williamsburg resident contacted us yesterday to say that pile driving was going at the southwest corner of the Robeling site, along N. 10th Street between Driggs and Roebling and that oil could clearly be smelled a distance away. We don’t know if the oil smell was being given off by the equipment, by creosote soaked piles that were being pounded into the ground or by oil, but given the history of the site and the fact that everything there is to know about the oil is not conclusively known, reports of Essence of Petroleum are worth noting.

Our purpose here is to not the hideous condition of the covering over the sidewalk. The only saving grace is that it’s in a part of the neighborhood with very light pedestrian traffic. Nonetheless, the state of its decrepitude–and the inability of the city to do anything about it–does not inspire faith.

There’s a meeting coming up about the impact that Atlantic Yards is going to have on neighbors, especially as efforts to prepare for construction move forward. It’s on Monday, September 24 at 7:30PM and it will take place at Immanuel & First Spanish Church, which is located at 424 Dean Street. The objectives of the meeting are described as follows:

Discuss expected effect of the Atlantic Yards’ construction on quality of life based on the Final Environment Impact Statement (FEIS) with representatives of NYC’s Department of Transportation (DOT).

Ask local politicians and community leaders to develop a structure by which we can relay our concerns to the appropriate officials.

Among the impacts listed if the massive project survives legal challenges and move forward:

You can expect SERIOUS NEGATIVE IMPACTS on AIR QUALITY, NOISE, TRAFFIC and PARKING:

• Nearly double the number of buses
• Up to 2,500 more cars
• Up to 400 new taxi trips
• Up to 80 additional trucks on weekdays
• NO PLAN for traffic on Saturdays, during basketball games, or other events
• GRIDLOCK resulting from proposed new traffic patterns
• CLOSED STREETS and REDUCED PARKING from new water lines and sewer mains

There is now NO SYSTEM in place to deal with these impacts.

WE NEED YOU – To attend the forum, let our elected officials and public agency representatives know that we need their help to represent our interests, and HELP CREATE AN EFFECTIVE SYSTEM TO ADDRESS THESE IMPACTS.

The forum is hosted by the Dean Street Block Association. Interestingly, there’s another meeting on the UNITY plan for Atlantic Yards the same night. This one at 6 PM at the Soapbox Gallery, which is located at 636 Dean Street (between Carlton and Vanderbilt Avenues). It will feature a Q&A with Marshall Brown and Dr. Tom Angotti and the presentation of “a realistic, community-sensitive proposal for the development of Brooklyn’s Vanderbilt rail yards.”

[Photo courtesy of Adrian Kinloch/Brit in Brooklyn]

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[Photo courtesy of mrthespy/flickr]

It can’t be, can it? Hotel Chatter reported that Le Bleu, the Gowanus hotel on Fourth Avenue with the white-and-blue themed interiors, glass showers and industrial neighborhood views, would be open around October 1. It described the vistas as follows:

As for those views, half the rooms do have a glimpse of the slimy Gowanus Canal and a sweeping panorama of U-Haul filled parking lots. From the higher floors, though, you also get the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline. (Not available from Manhattan hotel rooms.)

When we glanced at the Le Bleu website, we found they’re not accepting reservations until October 17. (We have seen that online calendar shift around many, many times since July, when the hotel was originally slated to open.) There are apparently issues with getting city inspections completed, although there has been some ongoing work on the building. (The video above was posted by Hotel Chatter. You can see pics of Rm. 602 here.) Construction, in fact, will continue on the rooftop restaurant, which won’t be open for months. See from a distance from the back, the top floor still shows yellow wallboard, so there may be some work ahead.

The days when Myrtle was known as “Murder Avenue” are long past. Thriving shops and restaurants line much of the street, in part thanks to the efforts of the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project and the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Business Improvement District (constituent members of the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership). But many areas remain where the street’s potential is going unrealized, and that’s what the collaboration with PPS was meant to address. “We were looking at streetscape conditions,” says Vaidila Kungys, the partnership’s program manager for planning and economic development. “There’s a lot of clutter, crowded sidewalks and problematic intersections.”

The plan reenvisions intersections and pedestrian spaces among other things, offering a number of options for resdesign. With the city’s new emphasis on creating livable streetscapes, there is actually a chance that some of the concepts will make the jump from the paper to sidewalk.

There’s a “localized plume” of oil at the Roebling Oil Field, according to a Department of Environmental Conservation official. The description is in an email that was sent yesterday after our post on new test wells being drilled on N. 11th Street in Williamsburg to several Williamsburg and Greenpoint residents as well as a variety of elected officials by Randall W. Austin, the local Chief of DEC’s Spill Prevention and Response Programs. The email was forwarded to GL by a reader.

The email was in response to a question about whether the contamination at the Roebling Oil Field and the Greenpoint Oil Spill might be related. It notes–quite accurately, we believe–that the Roebling Oil Field oil is not from the Exxon-Mobil spill in Greenpoint as some have speculated. It is believed to originate from localized contamination.

Here is the email from Mr. Austin:

The soil borings and groundwater wells that both the NYSDEC and Mr. Schwartz have installed along North 11th Street and Roebling Street (including ones the State just installed this past week) continue to show a localized plume adjacent to Mr. Schwartz’s property. [IE, the site we call the Roebling Oil Field.] Wells that have been installed to the east and north of where the oil was found emanating into the development’s excavation have not shown any product. If the oil was in fact channeling via a buried streambed from the ExxonMobil plume, it would undoubtedly intersect (and be entrained by) the countless building basements and subsurface utilities that lie between eastern Greenpoint and the Northside neighborhood, approximately a mile apart from each other. Furthermore, if this was truly a stream of oil, it would be readily recoverable in significant quantities. Such is not the case. The clays and silts located sub-surface underneath North 11th Street (which yes, can be from an old stream bed) seem to be both helping and hindering the flow of this oil. It therefore becomes difficult to investigate and capture said oil by placing wells in the ground.

The investigation continues in this matter. It is further constrained by the presence of a large gas main underneath North 11th Street, which makes drilling a limited operation. We have been having discussions with KeySpan about what we can do around their line to investigate and capture the oil contamination (hand digging with KeySpan supervison appears to be the only safe option).

Believe me when I say that no one wants to get to the bottom of what is going on here more than I do. I have my best geologist working on this matter with the remedial project manager, and we hope to define, contain, and remove this black oil plume from this location.

To be continued.

Related Post:
New Test Wells Drilled at Roebling Oil Field, Source of Oil Still Unknown

National Sawdust operated for years on the site, producing (drumroll, please)…yep, sawdust. It seems the biodegradable, non-toxic, renewable stuff was used as a packing material for industries who shipped glass and other fragile goods, before the better living through chemistry folks cooked up things like bubble wrap, Styrofoam, and our all-time favorite, those polystyrene packing peanuts we spend hours cleaning up after we’ve given up diving for the object they’re protecting and pour the damn things all over the living room floor…the plant used to mill several different grades of sawdust, and store them in huge bins in the large brick warehouse across the street at 78 North 6th, where nearby manufacturers could come and purchase the stuff in bulk. As recently as five years ago the mill was used to manufacture aquarium gravel.

Look for the demolition crews to have at the building as early as this week. The replacement building isn’t know, but it’s a safe bet it will be a condo in the six-story range with retail or a restaurant at street level.

The Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods held a press conference yesterday to note that the ombudsman promised by the state to oversee the Atlantic Yards development has not been forthcoming. The ombudsman was supposed to be on his/her way after problems like the parapet collapse in April at the Ward Bakery. Therese Urban, who co-chairs the CBN said that “We find it extremely troubling that the ESDC allowed our community just 66 days to review and comment upon the 4,000-page Atlantic Yards Environmental Impact Statement and General Project Plan, yet with twice that amount of time they haven’t been able to find an ombudsman. We are waiting for the ESDC to fulfill its promise.”

Here are links to coverage of the event and the issue:

• CBN Asks: Where’s ESDC’s Promised Ombudsperson? [AYR]
• Waiting on a Promise [Metro]
• CBN to ESDC: Where the Hell’s the AY Ombudsman? [Brownstoner]
• Oversight in ESDC’s Oversight? [No Land Grab]

[Photo courtesy of Atlantic Yards Report]

In this very, very off political year, even we had almost forgotten that today is primary election day in New York City. There are several races in Brooklyn, the most prominent of which is the one to elect a judge for the Kings County Surrogate Court. According to Gotham Gazette, which offers a very good primary guide, “No matter who wins the Democratic primary, it will make history. Either of the candidates, Diana Johnson and ShawnDya Simpson, would be Brooklyn’s first black surrogate.” There will also be two primaries for the Civil Court, which has jurisdiction over civil cases involving amounts up to $25,000 and other civil matters referred by the state Supreme Court. There are also races for county party committees and other positions. Check Gotham Gazette for the full rundown.

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• An Apple Store Grows in Brooklyn (Possibly on Atlantic Ave.) [Gothamist]
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