The “new”
Brooklyn is being built, stoop-by-stoop, gut-rehab-by-gut-rehab, bluestone-by-bluestone,
in neighborhoods like Boerum Hill, Prospect Heights, Gowanus, the South
Slope and Clinton Hill.
But a big problem has emerged: Where will the “old” Brooklyn
be thrown out?
In Queens, actually.
Last month, the city shut down Red
Hook Crushers, a company that played a vital, and often-overlooked,
role in the borough’s surging construction industry.
For two decades, the company’s crushing equipment along the banks
of the Gowanus Canal have taken in broken up cement, demolished brick
walls and other debris and churned it into base material to be used again
in roads, runways and sidewalks.
But since Red Hook Crushers closed on Feb. 8, hundreds of small-time contractors
— the thick-calloused guys who rip up an old concrete stoop and turn
it into a Yuppie’s bluestone dream — are now being forced to
truck that unwanted cement all the way to the closest similar facility
in Maspeth.
And all that driving is driving them nuts.
“I work in all these up-and-coming neighborhoods, fixing sidewalks,
rebuilding stoops, renovating backyards,” said John Kiamie, owner
of Sure Foundation.
“Now I have to drive to Maspeth — it’s two hours, back
and forth on the BQE! — to dump the old stoop or sidewalk after I
fix it. If I make two trips, I lose half a day on the road while my workers
just sit around waiting for me to get back.”
Kiamie said he’s now turning down the small jobs that were his bread-and-butter.
“They shut this guy down without a contingency plan!” he said.
“What am I supposed to do?! It’s clinical insanity! It’s
a good thing it’s not our busy season or I’d never be able to
stay calm!” (This is calm?)
As Kiamie was ranting, his cellphone rang.
“How the hell should I know? I’m talking to a reporter about
it right now!” he blared into the phone, and hung up.
“It was a friend of mine doing a job in Bay Ridge,” he said.
“He wants to know where he should bring the concrete. What am I supposed
to tell him? Maspeth? He’ll lose a whole day.”
Kiamie was certainly not the only contractor complaining about the demise
of the Third Street facility.
“I would work for a few hours, load up the truck, come down here,
unload and be back on the job in a few minutes,” said Jim Buscarello,
owner of Jabus Building, a Red Hook-based masonry contractor.
“I’d make 10 trips a day, but now I make two to Maspeth. Productivity
is shot. Plus, it’s more diesel being burned and more air pollution.”
In the closing of Red Hook Crushers, Buscarello saw a metaphor for Brooklyn’s
future.
“Industry is being pushed out of Brooklyn,” he said. “But
how can I do all the renovation that these new people want if I can’t
dump the debris here?”
The reality is that the Crushers once-desolate Gowanus site has become
very desirable. Whole Foods, whose first Brooklyn supermarket is being
slowly built next door, is said to covet the space, and new apartment
buildings are springing up in an area once written off as a waste land.
“The irony is that Whole Foods dumped plenty of concrete with us,”
said Crushers co-owner Tom Saccomanno Jr., a copy of Pit & Quarry
magazine on his desk.
Like Saccomanno, Kiamie said he certainly welcomed newcomers.
“If they want to turn the Gowanus Canal into a new Venice, God bless
’em,” he said. “It’s great. They’ll need us to
do the work. But I need a place to dump the garbage or else the BQE will
be a parking lot all day and all night.”
When he looked out on the Crushers’ empty lot — once filled
with crushed up concrete and bricks ready for use in new projects —
he finally got subdued.
“I look at this and see all the work that’s not getting done
in Brooklyn right now,” he said. Nearby, scrap metal workers turned
a pile of metal junk into next year’s finials, doorknobs and antique-style
tin ceilings.
But that junkyard is just as susceptible to the soaring real-estate prices
that have driven other industry out of the canal zone.
The Department of Sanitation says it closed Red Hook Crushers because
the company had “honesty and integrity issues,” said spokesman
Keith Mellis.
Internal documents link Red Hook Crushers to a mobbed-up construction
company that Red Hook Crushers says is merely the landlord.
“It’s guilt by association,” said co-owner Tony Santilli.
But on the larger issue — where are guys like Kiamie and Buscarello
supposed to dump their debris — Mellis said the department had little
sympathy.
“Our decision stands,” he said. “Those contractors have
to deal with it.”
But dealing with it will have lasting ramifications.
“If I can’t afford to do somebody’s stoop anymore, you
know who will? Riff or Raff — and they’ll just dump their stuff
illegally,” Kiamie said. “Every dead-end street will become
a dumping ground. There’s your follow-up story.”
