Real Estate

Some new things in the Queensbridge-Ravenswood area

It has been one and a half years since the last post on this blog. And for some reason, according to stats, people still visit this blog. Now would be a good time to make note of some new and potentially new things in the Queensbridge-Ravenswood area.

Vordonia

Quietly, Alma Realty’s 404 unit, double-tower building between the waterfront and Vernon Boulevard, has apparently opened and now has residents moving in. The site, formerly called Alma Towers, is now called the Vordonia Towers, ostensibly after a small Greek village, with a logo reminiscent of “Pointy Haired Boss” from the Dilbert cartoons. The Vordonia Towers took about seven years to complete since construction began in fall 2014, or more than twice the average time it takes to build a residential building in New York City. Astoria-based Alma bought the property in 2001, so we’re talking about a 20 year epic here.

So, what will it mean for the Ravenswood area? We can say that more than 400 residents will be added to our little, gritty, quiet corner of LIC/Astoria. Current listed rents range from $2,676 to $3,025 for one bedroom apartments. That’s average for Astoria, according to RentHop, but probably higher than average and the median for this corner of it, even among private rental buildings alone.

For sure, there will be population growth. The influx from Vordonia alone, might mean more people on the Q103/102, walking down 36th, 35th and Vernon avenues to the subways, getting coffee at Flor de Azalea or Château le Woof, using the Citibikes, going to Rainey and Socrates parks, etc. They won’t use the 9th Street Laundromat because they’ll have washers and driers, according to these cheesy promotional videos by real estate company, Compass’s “Irizarry Team.” One video is especially…. let’s say, avant-garde?: a woman looks out her window, drinks from a mug on her balcony, rides a stair master in slow-mo (as we see from below and behind), meditates, and in an epic sequence, struts up Vernon Boulevard in a black jacket and shades, returns to her apartment where candles are already lit, removes her bag and her coat revealing her crop top situation, then sits carefully down to look out the window again. Her window apparently does not face Big Allis.

The videos attempt to sell the towers by selling Astoria: its parks (Astoria Park, not Rainey or Socrates for some reason), shopping (aerial of Costco’s parking lot) and diverse cuisine. But the Vordonia Towers are barely in Astoria. I say this directly to the new and prospective Vordonia tenants: This area is sort of Astoria, or “South Astoria.” There is a distinct difference in ambience and geography from Astoria proper. In fact, I should change the name of this blog to “Not Astoria.” This neighborhood, from south of the Queensborough Bridge to Broadway, was actually historically called Ravenswood, which along with present Dutch Kills was the 19th Century third ward of Long Island City. Most of the neighborhood’s population lives in the Queensbridge and Ravenswood houses. That’s why I’m calling it Queensbridge-Ravenswood. There are delis and takeout spots but not many restaurants per se over here. (Queensview is part of it too, but that community is especially close to Broadway.) This is a largely industrial area, abundant with light manufacturing and warehouses. As Vordonia residents, you will live across the street from a drug and alcohol rehab and a vape store, and directly next to the largest power plant in New York City, the Ravenswood Generator/Big Allis, which periodically lets out huge plumes of steam from its side – recently, a misguided social media post got everyone thinking there was an explosion – and the air can smell odd nearby. In fact they call this asthma ally. By the way, if you take a picture or video of the plant from the sidewalk, a security guard might drive up to you in a truck and possibly harass you. From Vordonia, it’s a 20 minute walk/hike/trek to the main strips of restaurants and bars on Broadway or 36th Avenue. Also, this is the corner of Astoria but it’s also the corner of Long Island City. Why do real estate people seem so often to know the least about places they market? Why only mention the neighborhood to the north, not the neighborhood to the south, when the property being discussed is on the border of both? LIC has stuff too. Besides food, this whole area has a plethora of art institutions and cultural events. Vordonians will find a museum and an arts park with cultural programming less than two blocks up the street. Let’s not ignore or erase where we actually are.

35-01 Vernon Boulevard

Half a block south of the Alma thing, on the corner of 35th Avenue and Vernon, is a two story, wide, brick building with a bold marble doorframe. The building, according to City Planning’s Zola map, was built in 1931. The site’s 1995 Certificate of Occupancy listed it as a factory, office and warehouse. New York YIMBY reports obscure developer Agayev Holding is seeking to build a nine story, mixed use property on the site. YIMBY says the proposal involves 107 residential units, 27 of which would be below market-rate. The vision for this building also involves retail and light manufacturing, which I suppose means there’s a practical anticipation of what would be demanded of a building in this context. Both Vordonia and this thing are part of a series of large, new waterfront residential structures that have been cropping up along the lower Astoria and Ravenswood-East River waterfront, along with Vernon Tower and the 500+ unit Astoria West fortress with its bougie rooftop pool, north of Broadway.

Astoria West hung a banner with Florida-like colors over a rough patch of waterfront.

The proposed structure down at 35th Ave is much more inside the neighborhood historically known as Ravenswood, and would be a significant addition to this immediate neighborhood, not just in numbers of people and a possible gentrification effect, but in retail, of which we have very little here. The whole waterfront is changing. If Big Allis and the IBZ were to go, I’d have to get a better paying job.

Across from Queensbridge, meanwhile, those giant, graffitied, gray buildings are on their way to becoming Urban Yard, apparently a kind of office complex. When I started this blog in early 2018, I had my eye on those structures. I even tried calling the escalator repair business that I believe was there but no one would talk to me. Recently I noticed a tree growing out of a window. Sometimes I suspected squatters lived inside. On the day I moved here in 2015, got a coffee at Hot Bagels and stored some things at Cube Smart (I had fled a situation in the Bronx and had no apartment for a week or two), I felt like I was moving into an area on the figurative “edge of town.” I still feel that way, but I knew those large gray things looked too much like New York in the ’80s or something, and would be redeveloped soon.

I took this picture in summer 2021 when the Amazon warehouse opened on 21st Street.

In the very first blog post for Corner, I mentioned that the Green Apple supermarket unsurprisingly closed, I guess the final spark of inspiration to start this blog! Last summer, an Amazon warehouse opened at that site.

Since the summer of 2020, I wasn’t sure if I’d continue this blog. From the beginning it seemed like a possibly arrogant and annoying thing to do. But I had a kind of respect for hyper-local blogs, and I wanted to do some writing on my surroundings. While in quarantine in 2020, I started a potential blog post, which turned into a bigger project that I’m still researching. I also filmed the city council primary race for the 26th District. I still need to do a final edit on that. Thanks for coming to this site. As always, I never know if I’ll be back.

The enigma of the ‘lost coast of Queens’

Alma_broadshot_Vernonclose

In a 2017 piece titled, “Discovering the Lost Coast of Queens,” the New York Times profiled several of the developing residential building projects along the Astoria-area East River waterfront. The southern-most of those projects, Alma Realty’s 34-46 Vernon Boulevard, was just getting the “finishing touches,” the Times reported then. The double-headed, 17-story, 404-unit development squeezed between a Ravenswood power plant sub-generator and the film and TV warehouse by Rainy Park, was expected to be leasing, the Times had reported, by the fall of 2017. More than two years and a pandemic since that projected date, the yet-to-open set of towers sits behind a wall of deteriorated construction signs and has become a neighborhood enigma.

Alma-Workinprogress

“It is going to open,” an unidentified voice told me, this last July 6, when I called Alma. The building is “still in the process of construction,” the voice said. I asked if there was a delay. “No delay,” the voice said. I was transferred, as usual – I’ve called several times before the Covid-19 pandemic – to a line that went to voicemail.

One might use the pandemic as an explanation, but the state didn’t include non-essential construction in its stop-work order until April, and then didn’t, in actuality, fully include non-essential construction until late May. Besides, a document displayed at the site shows Alma was granted an essential business permit to proceed in April. In any case, these last few months don’t count for the five-plus years since construction began.

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Five-plus years is almost the same amount of time I’ve lived here, within a few blocks of the site. I’ve watched the building unfold slowly, sometimes having conversations with neighbors or roommates who were confused about the endless construction site/empty building by Rainy Park. One local business owner who’d set up shop after Alma’s construction began, was waiting for the building to open, counting on those hundreds of new potential customers. After the pandemic set in, that person has sold her business, a new cashier told me. Another neighbor is more weary, not looking forward to the influx of high-income tenants. And some people just ask me, because I’m a journalist, if I’ve figured out yet what the deal is with that huge empty building that’s been sitting there more than five years.

To put five-plus years in perspective, 432 Park Avenue, the stick-like super-tower known as the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere, just across the East River, took about three years to build. Skyline Tower, the Long Island City residential scraper known as the tallest building in New York outside Manhattan, is expected (New York YIMBY reported on March 30) to be finished by the end of this year, after construction began in late 2017, making work possibly only three years. Vernon Tower, one of the buildings profiled in the Times piece, seems to have been built in about three years. A two-decade analysis in 2018 by real estate site, The Real Deal, found, with the exception of hotels, the median duration of building construction in New York City to be about three years.

The Real Deal also reported, in 2016, that Alma bought the land at 34-46 Vernon Boulevard in 2001. Records show the company filed for excavation and foundation work in 2008. TRD reported in 2010 that the project, then called Alma Towers, had been “beset by construction snags and recession-related issues.” An architect told the outlet that during the economic crisis, rising steel prices necessitated a redesign, pushing the work back to 2012. Work kicked off in the fall of 2014, YIMBY had reported, bringing the site up to 13 or 14 stories by June 2015. The signage at that time projected a completion date of spring 2016.

From what I can tell, the usual real estate outlets stopped reporting on the project except for the Times’ real estate section with its “Lost Coast” piece, which also used the phrase “gold coast.” One of the developments mentioned, Alma’s other, more high-profile project – a five-building, 1,700 unit megaproject – Astoria Cove, was slated for a site by the Astoria Houses on the northern edge of the Halletts Point peninsula, next to the Hallets Point megaproject. After facing pressure from affordable housing advocates, organized labor and then-Borough President Melinda Katz, the Astoria Cove zoning proposal passed the City Council in late 2014, becoming the first development to fall under Mayor de Blasio’s Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning program, with 27 percent of the units below market rate. Alma never broke ground on the project, which was, in 2016, attributed to the expiration of state tax abatement program 421-a. The company put the site on the market, temporarily. In a 2019 post-mortem of sorts, Politico New York later said the project “didn’t actually have the correct breakdown of low-income units to qualify for the new version of [the 421-a] abatement.” The Politico piece ultimately portrays Alma as possibly an inept, minor developer in over its head.

The print version of the Times’ piece was titled, “The Lost Coast of Queens,” which suggests the Astoria-area waterfront had been known in the past. Maybe the point was developers had forgotten about it since the Shore Towers were built in 1990 or since East River Tower was built in 2007. The online article included the word, “Discovering,” suggesting, perhaps, developers had been unaware that desirable, as in convenient or scenic, waterfront existed north the Gantry Plaza State Park. The piece, apparently contradicting those notions, describes Alma as “a family-run firm that has invested in the area for decades.” That’s because Alma is part of the area. The company, which has properties all around the Tri-state area and more than a dozen branch offices, has its headquarters about 15 blocks away, or a 20 minute walk, from 34-46 Vernon Boulevard, at 31-10 37th Avenue in the Dutch Kills section of Long Island City. Alma’s founder, Efstathios Valiotis, came to the U.S. from Greece, a TRD profile says, in 1972. LIC-based Greek-American newspaper the National Herald toured Alma’s headquarters in 2017, describing Alma as “one, if not the only one, of the few expatriate companies from the concierge up to the supervisors in complex construction who speak Greek.”

The National Herald, which appears to have mixed up the Citigroup Building with Citicorp Center, misdating the arrival of the former by at least 10 years, and may have exaggerated Alma’s stock in the emerging waterfront (Astoria Cove and 34-46 Vernon Boulevard together would have surpassed Halletts Point by only about 100 units), was given a tour of 34-46 Vernon Boulevard. The Herald reported, back then in 2017, that the “apartments are functional,” set with washer-dryers and balconies, though I’m not sure the balconies were finished. The piece, which doesn’t get into delays or politics, is a warm portrait of Valiotis and his daughter, the company CEO Sophia Valiotis, involving a photo of them in an office, behind them a stack of cases of Crystal Geyser sparkling water. The short TRD profile of Efstathios (or Steve) Valiotis includes an alleged 1990s European bank-corruption scheme. In 2015, Politico New York reported, tenants rights group Stabilizing NYC included Alma on its offender list. The group found seven Alma buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan with reports of tenant harassment, disrepair and vermin. Con Edison was suing Alma for stolen gas. In 2016, then-Public Advocate Leticia James listed Valiotis as the number three worst landlord in New York City for racking up 1,141 total violations. Valiotis is not on Public Advocate Jumaane Williams’ current list. As of this post, Department of Buildings records show the project at 34-46 Vernon Boulevard has racked up 97 violations.

Alma-safetytraining

Community Land Trust Considered for Sunnyside Yards Master Plan

SSY4_Protester! — Activists disrupt Sunnyside Yards meeting at Aviation High School.

At a rowdy third* public meeting for the Sunnyside Yards master plan, the new head of the planning team, Adam Grossman Meagher, said the team is considering a public land trust as part of the financing scheme.

“You can imagine part of this that’s created through traditional means,” Grossman Meagher said. “You can also imagine,” he said, part of the site as a community land trust.

A CLT is a community-based non-profit that owns the land, allowing residents to control the use, and are used to maintain affordability. There has been a CLT movement and a push in the city council.

The idea of a public land trust has been on the lists of demands by activists who’ve made their presence felt at the master plan community outreach meetings throughout the year.

SSY4_Meagher_Lusskin_door — EDC’s Adam Grossman Meagher (right), LIC Partnership president, Elizabeth Lusskin (red dress) and a man guarding the door from protesters.

Protesters were a major part of this third general public meeting, holding an Occupy-style mic-check demonstration in the middle of the event. The lead protestor led the disruption from a table in the Aviation High School cafeteria where poster boards were on display around the periphery. The 50 or so participants in the call-and-response eventually targeted a small side-room where Grossman Meagher and lead consultant Vishaan Chakrabarti were leading a presentation on the emerging master plan. The protesters were not allowed inside but after they chanted a demand for entry, Grossman Meagher mentioned the CLT discussions off-handedly.

SSY_EmergingMasterPlan_slide — A look at how the Master Plan is beginning to shape up.

Asked (to confirm) if the Economic Development Corporation was discussing the possibility of a CLT, Grossman Meagher said “yes,” and that the idea was on one of the poster boards. I couldn’t find the idea on the poster boards except for one board of a list of ideas heard by participants at public meetings.

SSY4_WhatWe'veHeard — Sunnyside Yards BINGO? (Bottom left corner: CLT)

The team plans to have another meeting later this year and a master plan ready by sometime in winter. At this third general meeting, some ideas of how the plan is shaping up were on display. Check out those images in the slideshow below.

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*This was corrected: the EDC held the third, not fourth general public SSY master plan meeting.

Big gray box underway for Vernon Blvd

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At the large empty lot across from Halletts Cove, one block north of the landmarked Piano Factory building, will be a large, gray and white box complex of three apartment buildings. Cape Advisors says construction is planned to start this year.

An aerial rendering shows grass roofs and a swimming pool. A rending as shown from the middle of the East River shows a long, gray wall along a Vernon Boulevard that looks like a park promenade. The development at 30-77 Vernon Boulevard is set to have more than 500 apartments and, apparently, zero ground level commercial space.

Screen Shot 2019-08-21 at 9.18.54 AM.png — Current site.

H/T NY YIMBY

To connect Astoria to UES

Partial NYC Ferry route map: pink dots added.

An alliance involving the Durst Organization, the Waterfront Alliance and pols are calling for an NYC Ferry connection between the Astoria and East 90th Street stops. “We have the Hallets Point dock and we have the dock at 90th Street. We just need the city to provide us with the service,” Congress Member Carolyn Maloney said at an event on Saturday.

The event was held by the Halletts Point Alliance, which seems to be some sort of non-profit extension of the Durst Organization’s emerging Halletts Point development. Waterfront Alliance director Karen Imas said the connection would also benefit the Astoria Houses residents. She noted the hour-long trek it could take to get from the Hallett peninsula to the Upper East Side for “academic institutions, health care institutions, recreational centers.”

HT: QNS, Astoria Post

Where is the Long Island City-Astoria border? (response to LIC talk)

So we’re finally discussing this. On July 8, LIC Talk posted, “Where is the Northern Border of Long Island City?” The blog is right that there is no easy answer. The situation of the ambiguous border has complicated my life since I’ve moved here.

When I moved here, my apartment on 36th Avenue near 10th Street was listed online as “LIC-Astoria border.” I soon came to find “LIC” signage along the street and as north as Broadway, which LIC Talks insists is the border. My address came up alternately as Long Island City or Astoria in Google Maps. Certain websites listed my neighborhood as Astoria based on my zip code (11106.) My roommates used either name for their mailing address. At that time DNAinfo ran a crowdsourcing piece finding there was little consensus on the south Astoria border. I read a 2008 NYTimes piece placing the Ravenswood Houses in LIC. And I overheard someone by 36th Ave and 21st Street say she was going to Astoria. I read a Gothamist piece referring to the area I lived in as “South Astoria.” At an Astoria writers group at Panera Bread on 35th Avenue, someone said that actually, we were in an area traditionally known as Long Island City, when Broadway was the border. A book in the back of the Noguchi museum referred to the area as LIC. A famous 1980 NYMag piece declared the Queensborough Bridge as the upper Long Island City border. A 2011 NY Daily News piece said Little Brazil, centered on 36th Avenue, is in Astoria, while a 2017 NYTimes piece placed it in “a pocket of Queens.”

By the time I started this blog, I had already concluded that I lived in Long Island City, or a place traditionally known as Long Island City. But I knew that we had moved into an age where much of the area south of Broadway is thought of as Astoria. Also, when I told people I lived in LIC, they would say something about the area being up and coming. I would have to explain I actually live in a part of LIC that you can still call working class, an area with public housing and an immigrant community. I would say I lived within a field of warehouses and small factories. I explained there were few restaurants or bars here. In any case, it wasn’t the “LIC” people tend to think of. And it wasn’t the “Astoria” they think of either.

The problem, it seemed, was rooted in the fact that what traditionally separated LIC from Astoria was not a street, but the clustering of residential pockets with much industrial area in between. That industrial area was long sprinkled with homes and some fully residential strips such as Crescent Avenue as it runs through Dutch Kills. And I lived in a residential pocket within a greater industrial area. Adding to that, is how the upper rim of the Queensbridge Houses on 40th Ave feels like a solid border because it’s followed abruptly by an industrial zone. And as Queensbridge is known to be solidly in LIC, it’s easy for any residential areas north of it to seem like – well, now we’re in Astoria, or something.

I named this blog Corner of Astoria because it rolled off the tongue well. But I never felt satisfied with that designation. And I possibly never will.

Ravenswood-Dutch Kills top Queens in falling real estate prices

A RealtyHop analysis found that the Ravenswood-Dutch Kills area led Queens in falling median percentage real estate prices in June.

The area, identified as “Queensbridge-Ravenswood-Long Island City,” – the map shows Ravenswood, QB and Dutch Kills below 36th Ave over to Northern Boulevard – saw a median percentage price drop of 10.6% (-$133,475). What, no one wants to live here anymore?

Just behind us is East Elmhurst, followed by the Hammels-Arverne-Edgemere part of the Rockaways, followed by Jamaica, according to a closer read by Queens Courier.

We came in four citywide for top five highest median percentage price drops, sharing a category with four Bronx neighborhoods, and made the top five list for neighborhoods with highest median dollar price drops, at number two just behind SoHo-Tribeca-Civic Center-Little Italy. Yea, check us out.

H/T Queens Courier

“We don’t need any starchitects” -community lays heat on Sunnyside Yards planners

SSY_Chakrabarti_slideshow

Vishaan Chakrabarti – whom for some reason was only addressed as “Vishaan” – the head architect involved in the Sunnyside Yards master plan, had the P.S. 166 auditorium lights dimmed to better show his slide show, leaving him a silhouette against abstract layouts of the rail yard. He expressed how given the high rises at the Queens Plaza end of the yards and the near-suburban Sunnyside Gardens district at its opposite end, the team was looking into wider spread mid-rises, and not just high-rises. He said the team was looking for a “sweet spot” of human scale blocks. He said the yards is an opportunity to right wrongs such as trash piles and sludge puddles at curbs.

But the first question, from a Community Board 2 member, was how this was going to be paid for. Neither Chakrabarti or Cali Williams, who leads the master plan team, wanted to discuss the price tag, which has been projected at $16 to 19 billion. “This is a complicated and challenging site,” and the costs and funding will be figured out along the way, Williams said.

This was the second public meeting for the Sunnyside Yards, two years after a feasibility report was released. About a year ago, Chakrabarti’s Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, was tapped to join the master plan team, with Williams, an Economic Development Corporation vet, at its head.

When Williams tried to end the Q&A to get to the breakout sessions, a woman interrupted her to say there were more questions in the room, which filled out with a few hundred people. Many applauded the interruption. Williams caved and said she’d allow two more questions.

The first questioner then, thanked and praised the planning team. “What I hear is that you guys want to do the right thing,” he said. “Nobody gets shafted in this, generally.”

That guy set the whole thing off. A younger guy near me stood up and shot back about how his friends have been removed from Astoria, Ravenswood and the nearby neighborhoods. He said when the affordable units come, “good luck trying to win the lottery to get there in the first place!” Many people applauded.

I attended a breakout session on urban design. Somehow I wound up at the one table, apparently, that didn’t have any activists. First our guide showed us pictures of existing buildings, each from a neighborhood in Western Queens, with a corresponding grid showing how much Floor Area Ratio the building used per block. We were asked to put a sticker on the picture we thought would be most appropriate for the Sunnyside Yards. After examining all the pictures, I pointed out that the pictures were misleading – and I wasn’t trying to be especially clever. The tallest-thinnest looking building somehow took up more space on a block than a smaller and wider-looking building took up of a different block. And the buildings were all totally different styles, including public housing. Continue reading ““We don’t need any starchitects” -community lays heat on Sunnyside Yards planners”

Amazon to come to Anable Basin

The Anable Basin was controversial even before Amazon said it would show up. Less than a year ago, City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, other local pols and various LIC activists were there to protest a plan to turn the strip at 44th Drive at the waterfront into a development that would somehow involve residential and industrial uses altogether. Well — no one cares about that anymore, because Amazon is coming, which is apparently the biggest ~~business~~ story in a while and it’s down the street from my apartment. A memorandum of understanding shows where Amazon plans to set up shop for part of it’s HQ2, and it’s the same area, just south of Con Edison. JVB and Senator Michael Gianaris were initially down with Amazon coming to LIC, but held a protest at the site today saying this was a huge $3 billion giveaway that won’t involve any public review. The mayor says the 25,000 jobs or more promised over a decade is unprecedented and the governor says the return on investment would be nine to one. Continue reading “Amazon to come to Anable Basin”

Comptroller comes to LIC to take on City Hall

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A great grandfather at the front of the line for the microphone told Comptroller Scott Stringer he’s sick of bridges and streets getting named after politicians. Stringer said he admitted he fantasized of one day telling his son that “Stringerway” was once called “Broadway.”

Stringer, an almost-2013 candidate for mayor and thought-to-be 2021 mayoral hopeful, had the jokes at his Long Island City town hall at the CUNY School of Law. When one person insisted that City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer has his eyes set on being mayor, Stringer said, don’t you hate people who want to be mayor?

Stringer wasn’t just here to understand the needs of one region of Queens. He was here to make allies in his fight against City Hall – and probably for it. He knew that many of the complaints would be about housing and development. That’s everywhere, but in LIC, the towers are shooting up around us into the sky and the people are anxious about school space, train space, park space and sewage. Stringer is positioned as a high-level politician with views juxtaposed to the mayor’s housing strategy, setting himself as a more progressive alternative.

“I don’t believe that this is how we should build our city,” he said in reference to Alicia Glen, deputy mayor for economic development. “We’ve got to change the system. And the way we’re building our city is, we’re doing it backwards.” Continue reading “Comptroller comes to LIC to take on City Hall”