According to the city’s DOB website, there is currently a stop work on the property, apparently stemming from some older violations, all but one of which have been resolved.
It appears that construction at 2201 86th Street will not result in any major changes to the building’s current use. Work permits filed with DOB are for some minor demolition and renovation, citing “NO CHANGE IN USE, EGRESS, AND OCUPANCY (sic).”
We can’t say with any certainty what kind of business will be there, or if the building owners have even found a new ground floor tenant. However, at this time it appears the building will merely be getting a makeover.
The second location is on the corner of Bay Parkway and Bay 26th Street, the address of which Frank believes is 2038 86th Street. Unfortunately, 2038 does not have any major work permits on file. We also searched for filings on both 2036 and 2040 86th Street, to no avail.
If any readers have interesting info on either place, please contact us at jteutonico [at] bensonhurstbean [dot] com.
This morning, we spotted another new storefront on the corner of Bay Parkway and 65th Street. Unlike Pizza Daddy across the street, this convenient corner store appears to already be open for business.
What’s attracting all these new enterprises, you ask? Maybe it’s the eerily touching soundtrack of the promotional video below, which is presented by the building’s realtor.
A Legal Sea Foods Restaurant in Boston (by nlnnet via flickr)
Borough President Marty Markowitz has released his official recommendations to the City Planning Commission concerning Joe Sitt’s Bay Center.
Chief among Markowitz’s recommendations, such as suggestions for addressing traffic concerns, was the desire for waterfront dining to come to the Bay Center.
“Given Brooklyn’s population, the borough is truly lacking when it comes to having waterfront dining opportunities,” wrote BP Markowitz in a June 9, 2011, letter to Joseph Sitt of Thor Equities. “There are really only a handful of opportunities that I believe can entice destination restaurants such as Legal Seafood (sic) and Grand Lux Café to open the first venue in Brooklyn. This is the perfect site. Having such a dining opportunity would benefit the publicly accessible area by bringing more people to enjoy this waterfront, while the landscaping of the open space would provide the perfect foreground to the marvelous harbor vistas extending from Sea Gate to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.”
While public utilization of the waterfront is repeatedly brought up in the documents released by the Borough President, the exact words ‘public parkland’ was not.
As we had mentioned in our previous story, public amenities mentioned at CB 11′s meeting, such as an Eco Dock, were not mandatory for the down-zoning motion’s approval.
There’s a new twist in the tale of big box retailer BJ’s Wholesale Club coming to the Gravesend Bay waterfront, a story Bensonhurst Bean broke last Monday.
According to News Corp.-owned publication The Brooklyn Paper, Walmart has been talking with TerraCRG, the company hired by the Cropsey family to market land, located at Shore Parkway between Bay 34th and Bay 35th Streets, which sits directly in between Caesar’s Bay Shopping Center and the proposed future site of BJ’s.
The Cropsey family, after whom Cropsey Avenue is named, first purchased water rights to the location in 1895 to secure the future of their lumber yard, which sat on the site, after New York State threatened to sell waterfront access to the highest bidder.
‘”He was forced to spend a significant amount of money on something he was already using for free,” owner James Cropsey told the Brooklyn Paper, who added the state threatened to cut off his family’s access to the mill via the bay by selling water rights around it.
The Cropseys have owned the Shore Parkway property for nearly 400 years, when the Dutch government granted the land to an 17th century ancestor. In the early 19th century, Col. James Cropsey lumber company opened on the plot, and operated there for more than a century.’
Much like in the case of BJ’s Wholesale Club, the property would first have to be down-zoned from manufacturing to retail in order for Walmart to open up shop. However, unlike BJ’s, Walmart faces an uphill battle against local labor unions, activists and competitors who don’t want to see the big box store open in New York City.
The proposed site at 1752 Shore Parkway (from propertyshark.com)
While local groups continue to fight tooth and nail in order to prevent Walmart from opening up a store in New York City, another big box chain isn’t running into any trouble at all in Bensonhurst.
Joe Sitt’s Thor Shore Parkway Developers, LLC has applied for a change in zoning in order to build a two-story 214,000-square-foot retail space near Caesar’s Bay Shopping Center. The four-unit commercial project, to occupy 1752 Shore Parkway (at Bay 38th Street), is being called Brooklyn Bay Center, and the ground floor is expected to house a BJ’s Wholesale Club, with the three remaining retail units on the second flood floor.
There is a land use hearing on the proposal scheduled for today at 5:00 p.m. in Borough Hall in Downtown Brooklyn. Continue Reading »
