A six-member panel consisting of Amanda Fung of Crain’s New York Business, restaurateur Sara Obraitis, developer Doug Partrick of Heatherwood Communities, Bill Connor of FedEx, Flint McNaughton of Sun Cap Property and Amy Scherber, head of Amy’s Bread, spoke to a capacity crowd on the ground floor of the United Nations Federal Credit Union building at the Long Island City Partnership (LICP) real estate breakfast May 15. After Long Island City Business Improvement District Executive Director Gayle Baron welcomed the six and marked the first year of LICP’s operation as the marketing arm of the Long Island City Business Improvement District and the Long Island City Business Development Corporation, moderator David Brause of Brause Realty spoke optimistically about Long Island City, which he said has developed five million square feet of new space and lately welcomed such new tenants as Jet Blue Airlines and City College of New York (CUNY) Law School.
First to speak was Fung, a Hunters Point resident, who for three years has written about commercial and residential real estate for Crain’s New York Business. Obraitis, who has been in the restaurant business in Long Island City since 1999 as co-proprietor of M. Wells restaurant, followed. M. Wells was closed last summer but is soon to reopen at both 43-15 Crescent St. and P.S. 1, under the same name but offering different cuisine. Third was Doug Partrick, owner of Islandia, Long Island-based Heatherwood Communities, who said he sees “fantastic growth” in rental communities in Long Island City and finds it easier to develop there and in other parts of the city than in suburban Long Island. The fourth panelist, Bill Connor of FedEx Ground, said he is glad to be in Long Island City, where Fed Ex Ground is opening a 140,000-square-foot warehouse; the fifth panelist, Flint McNaughton, principal of Sun Cap Property, is helping him develop it.
Scherber, the last panelist, has been head of Amy’s Bread in Manhattan for 20 years and will soon open a baking facility at 34th Street and 48th Avenue. Scherber said that with her business, and with Tom Cat Bakery located several blocks away and other bakeries developing in the general vicinity, Long Island City could now be called “the flour district”. She said that when she was located in Manhattan (and had been since 1992) but had to expand, she spent nine months looking for new space. She found a place in Harlem that she liked, but the ground floor was too small. She also said she didn’t want space that would likely be good for further development in five years, making her perforce a real estate dealer. The Long Island City purchase allows her a place that’s best for baking bread, she said, calling it advantageous that her workers can get there at midnight and later to make and deliver the wares in the early morning.
Obraitis said that perhaps as many as 80 percent of her patrons at the old restaurant were from Long Island City and she’s looking to succeed on a lot of good will. Brause asked her about the new choice of cuisine, compared with the French Canadian fare she and her partner, Hugue Dufour, used to feature. She said she has called the new place a steakhouse, but it might more accurately be called a “meathouse”, since Dufour is a butchering expert. Look for rabbit, for instance, and other meats her clientele might not be used to, she said. She was surprised and disappointed that the greenmarket on 48th Avenue ceased operation. Partrick said that there would be a new greenmarket, since the burgeoning populace would demand it. For her part, Scherber said she would love to have a garden on the roof of her building but doesn’t know if the roof could support the required tons of soil.
Partrick is building a narrow apartment building near Queens Plaza South, at 42nd Avenue and 27th Street and plans to build another. He said that rents there are certainly lower than those in Manhattan. Brause asked him what sort of rents he plans to charge when the building opens. Partrick said only that construction costs were lower than he expected them to be, and also that he was able to employ a number of people. He has built in Williamsburg also, and there he had to set a rent rate higher than he’d anticipated it would be, though he plans to continue building in that locality. FedEx’s Connor said the company’s future warehouse will be “right in the middle of an area where we’re servicing our customers’ needs”. He said the area provides a good work force, too. McNaughton of Sun Cap said he found 23 acres in Long Island City on which to build the FedEx facility, an amount unimaginable in Manhattan. The property comprises two adjacent lots between Borden and Hunters Point Avenues, both of which were owned by one family, making the purchase easy for Sun Cap, McNaughton said. Anticipating what he might have to go through to get FedEx the right place for the right price, he started out planning for the worst, but also hoping for the best. He got the latter, he said.
Fung said apartment rents are 10 to 30 percent lower in Long Island City than in Manhattan. She praised the move by the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene into the new Gotham Center building at Queens Plaza South and Jackson Avenue. She sees the long-term construction of the Cornell-Technion scientific campus on Roosevelt Island as a boon to Queens. Its very inception quite possibly provides a gateway to scientific educational facilities in the borough, she said. Partrick interjected that Cornell-Technion students and faculty should find his apartments affordable. Fung said there is a lack of stores on Queens Plaza and in Hunters Point at present, but new stores will need to come to suit the 2,000 or more residential units that will be filled in the next two years. Obraitis, who has lived in Long Island City 13 years, agreed that neighborhood development in this respect has been slow during her time there. She said she likes living near a Duane Reade drugstore, but would appreciate smaller and more individual stores as well. Partrick said that the mom-and-pop operations add to the quality of a neighborhood.
At the close of the breakfast meeting, Baron invited attendees to the LIC Business Improvement District annual meeting Wednesday, June 20 at the Queensboro Room of MetLife Plaza, 27-01 Queens Plaza North, beginning at 8:30 a.m. The BID meeting’s keynote speaker will be George Fertitta, CEO of NYC Company.
