The building at 48 Box Street continues to be a miracle of virtually immaculate construction. Having been hit by a series of Stop Work Orders, the building has still gone up rather nicely and might even be called a “masterpiece of illegal construction.” It’s friend at 95 Clay Street, on the other hand, hasn’t even […]

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Will 333 Carroll Street lose the growth that it gained on top, which is visible from a great distance? It’s unclear, but neighborhood blogger Pardon Me For Asking reports that Council Member Bill de Blasio told the monthly Carroll Gardens Neighborhood Association meeting last night that the Department of Buildings has found issues with the […]

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One gets the feeling that very little is going to happen at the 360 Smith development that will not be noticed. Over the weekend, we got an email that said “Work went on at 360 without the MTA knowing. The arrangement is that the MTA is ALWAYS supposed to know when work happens at 360.” […]

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It would be tempting to blame the wind for opening up the construction site at 208 N. 10 to public access yesterday, but it would be wrong. In point of fact, we have found the site wide open more times than we have found it closed over the last six months. The only surprise yesterday […]

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We’re bored with 33 Roebling, the wide-open Williamsburg site that has become a neighborhood dumping ground. (Was it only a couple of weeks ago that we had an item about the DOB violation it got?) In any case, the wind on Saturday night delivered a death blow to the crapshow of a “fence” around the […]

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One would think that developers that can pay $20 million for a property on Union Avenue in Williamsburg can afford a few thousand dollars for a fence that isn’t held together with spit and glue or can, at least, afford to send over a dude with a hammer and some nails to put it back […]

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We can’t say we’ve focused on this building before, but it has risen at 1056 Bedford Avenue at Clifton Place and it is the work of architect Robert Scarano. Our Roving Correspondent Miss Heather sent in these shots, along with the comment that it’s “an argument for contextual zoning.” The building has been hobbled by […]

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The demolition of 340 Court Street is underway with windows now removed from the building. The fence and sidewalk scaffolding, which should be features of life on Court for 18-24 months are also completely up. The Union-Sackett Block Association had a meeting with executives from the Clarett Group last week, but haven’t disclosed what was […]

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When we last visited 333 Carroll Street, the troubled building with the Robert Scarano-designed growth on top that helped get the Carroll Gardens downzoning movement rolling, the lights were burning late into the night. Yesterday, the Carroll Gardens Hell Building was hit with another Stop Work Order and a “ten-day letter of intent” to revoke […]

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The site of the former Beauty Addiction Building, which had been the one lone holdout on Karl Fischer Row in Williamsburg, has been cited by the city for a problem again. We last featured 14 Bayard as a Construction Site du Jour in late January. Since then, the construction fence has been padlocked closed again, […]

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We have to say that Brooklyn 11211 did superb work pouring through very interesting data about how the Department of Buildings does, or doesn’t, do its job in Williamsburg (and citywide). 11211 concludes that the odds of a construction project being caught in the act of doing things like pounding steel beams at 8:30AM on […]

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The public safety horror show at 208 N. 10, (aka 199-211 N. 9th Street and 489 Driggs) which has included free public access to a dangerous demolition site, has carried over into the excavation phase. We’ve featured it repeatedly because it is one of the scariest demolition and construction sites we’ve seen in Brooklyn in […]

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We wandered past the backside rusting hulk of the controversial Finger Building in Williamsburg on Sunday to find the back door was open. Whether it meant that workers were on the job inside or brunch was being served or things were being repossessed, we don’t know. The building has been stalled forever and the lifts […]

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Those that actually look at building permits see the name Fekete constantly. This is because the Fekete Brothers are expediters hired to, well, expedite the filing of building plans and permits. They are responsible for thousands of building permits and regularly work for very busy architects like Karl Fischer. (The building above, our friend 525 […]

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We used to enjoy the murals painted on the side of the Manhattan Chocolate Factory in Williamsburg, but not nearly as much as we’ve been enjoying the mess created since 568 Union Avenue was demolished. The site has even been violated by the Department of Buildings, but that has not impressed anyone enough to fix […]

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The pile driver is gone from the future site of 33 Roebling, a perennial Construction Site du Jour due to the fastidious nature of the upkeep of the site, and a violation from the Department of Buildings led the developers to invest in better rope to keep the gate closed. Up next: a lock.

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We wondered why nobody was working at the site of the Modern, the controversial Burg building on N. 7 Street, when we passed by last weeked. Now we know why: the building was hit with another Stop Work Order. This time, the trouble is that it was causing damage to a neighboring building “causing water […]

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Looks like site of the huge 33 Roebling development that we mentioned last week (for the umpteenth time) for having a crappy, wide open fence and (now) a pile driver on the site got a visit from the Department of Buildings this week. We found a violation tacked to the cruddy fence (which has been […]

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This is not our first time tossing up some photos of the cruddy, dangerous conditions at our dear friend 80 Metropolitan in Williamsburg. In fact, today’s post makes 80 Met a Triple Crown winner (with other occasions having been here and here). Yesterday, we found the 80 Met construction site wide open, with some of […]

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Always count on high winds to cause some sort of construction-related issue. For instance, in Midwood, where a scaffold collapsed yesterday, “leaving a big mess on a nearby sidewalk but causing no injuries, firefighters said. The collapse happened at a site near East 12th Street and Avenue O in the Midwood section.A witness said the […]

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We are major fans of the uber-shitty fence at the huge site of 33 Roebling (aka 250 N. 10 Street), which has been a wretched mess and wide open for nearly a year-and-a-half and a major dumping ground for all kinds of crap. At one point, two of the gates were closed, but a third […]

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Anyone who likes to watch steel being put in place would have found the work at 405 Union Avenue (aka 68 Ainslie Street) in Williamsburg Sunday afternoon quite fascinating. It’s a Karl Fischer building that is rising quickly, with ample help from all the steel being hoisted on weekend. The Fischer will clock in at […]

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Here’s a fun email circulating via a Community Board 1 mailing list on Yahoo that gets at the subject of “after hours work” in a major way: Early this morning ( 2/2/08 ) at around 2 a.m. we were awakened by pile driving. The pile driving continued for over an hour. Our apartment is on […]

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“The city has used a brand new law to ban a rogue engineer for faking construction plans – but a loophole in Buildings Department rules let the alleged mastermind off scot-free. The Buildings Department barred licensed engineer Leon St. Clair Nation from city work on Jan 15…In trying to go after higher-ups in the scheme, […]

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On Tuesday, we ran an item about weekend work that developers hoping to build a 14-story Karl Fischer building at Grand and Driggs have been doing. Presumably, they are working to get out in front of a downzoning that would allow a four-story building on the site. If a foundation is complete before the downzone, […]

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