Decades after the hulking Silvercup Bakery was transformed into a major film and television studio and the famed Fink Bakery was vacated due to bankruptcy, Long Island City is back in business as New York City’s breadbasket, a place where the air is heavy with yeasty aromas.
This summer, Amy’s Bread, the outfit that elevated humble baking to a public art form with its glass-walled kitchen in Manhattan’s trendy Chelsea Market, will join a dozen bakers that have flocked to the Queens neighborhood in the past decade.
Amy’s is shifting its main production facility to a new 33,000-square-foot space on 34th Street in Long Island City, one block south from its longtime Chelsea Market neighbor Eleni’s New York, which set up its cookie-making factory in LIC seven years ago. All come for the same reasons: cheaper rents; open, one-story spaces; and proximity via the Queensboro Bridge and Midtown Tunnel to clients and retail shops in Manhattan.
“We are excited to be in Long Island City,” said Amy Scherber, owner of Amy’s Bread, who will move 120 employees to the new facility.
Being just across the East River from midtown indeed has plenty of advantages. Tom Cat Bakery Inc. proved that 25 years ago when it became the first of the new wave of bespoke bakers to fire up their ovens in LIC, initially in a tiny 1,300-square-foot warehouse. Today, Tom Cat is the neighborhood’s top cat, boasting $30 million in revenue and 250 employees working in a 40,000-square-foot factory on 10th Street near the Queensboro Bridge. It’s just down the street from Lady M Confections, a cake-maker with an 8,000-square-foot factory.
In addition, close by is Dunkin’ Donuts’ 15-year-old central bakery, which serves 25 area stores, as well as the city’s new food incubator, which includes rentable commercial kitchens for baking.
“They all want to be in the neighborhood,” said Gayle Baron, executive director of the LIC Partnership. “It’s safe and well served by transportation, and rents are less than in Manhattan.”
LIC also gets high marks for public transit, including service via six subway lines. It’s unusual for any industrial area, but it does make it easier for bakers to get to their mixing bowls in the wee hours.
Manhattan has good transit, too, but not at LIC rents, which are at least 25% cheaper. Buying space—as did Pain D’Avignon, an artisanal bread-maker, in 2011 after 12 years in the area—is also far less expensive. The bakery paid $2.15 million for a 10,000-square-foot building on Ninth Street.
“We couldn’t find the same size building for less than $3.5 million even in Williamsburg,” said Uliks Fehmiu, co-owner of the bakery.
But the days of LIC’s sizable cost advantage could be waning. In the past four years, two decidedly nonindustrial neighbors have checked in within a couple of blocks of Tom Cat: the 100-room Z Hotel NYC and the 63-room Ravel Hotel.
“Thirteen years ago, it was desolate here,” said Jerry Goldman, director of operations at another Tom Cat neighbor, restaurant group BR Guest’s Long Island City Commissary. Its 12,000-square-foot facility bakes some 5,000 rolls a day for more than 15 of its restaurants, including Blue Water Grill and Primehouse.
Zoning laws and the fact that most residential development is clustered along the waterfront make LIC still a relatively safe bet for bakers, but rather than take any chances, Ms. Scherber said she made sure there was a “no-teardown clause” in Amy’s new 15-year lease there.
Back in the bad old days
The changes of recent years have been a happy surprise. James Rath, general manager of Tom Cat, recalls people getting robbed in the area in the mid-1980s.
“We love the neighborhood, especially now,” said Mr. Rath.
Many of his neighbors extol other virtues of the area, including the fact that it’s an easier place to rent a truck than Manhattan. For instance, Lady M does not own its trucks; it leases them from Ryder, which has a rental facility on 44th Road, two blocks away from the cake-maker’s factory.
“It’s a natural hub for bakers,” said Annie Gerson, marketing manager for Eleni’s. “We are very excited about the growing [bakery] population out here.”
But as many of them as there are, they typically have little to do with each other.
“We just bake our bread, load our trucks and hit the road,” said Mr. Fehmiu of Pain D’Avignon.
Bronx: A race for the record books
A turf war is heating up in Morris Park, where Democrat Mark Gjonaj is gunning for a seat in the Assembly, hoping to become the first Albanian-American elected to state office. But first he must unseat four-term incumbent Naomi Rivera.
“Mark’s an activist and community leader, but I don’t know if that translates into electoral success,” said one Democratic source. That hasn’t stopped Gjonaj—who heads M.P. Realty Group—from pulling out all the stops. He’s already carpeted the area with his posters, doled out roses to voters along Lydig and Morris Park avenues, and thrown neighborhood barbecues.
Though most of the Bronx’s 9,500 Albanian-Americans live in the district, demographics favor his Hispanic opponent. The area is 45% Hispanic, 21% black and 23% white. Still, Mr. Gjonaj is turning heads. “Naomi is going to have to work her butt off,” said a Democratic insider.
—Shane Dixon Kavanaugh
Manhattan: Last gasp for UES trash talk
Years after most Upper East Siders gave up the struggle to bar construction of a marine waste-transfer station on the East River at East 91st Street as a lost cause, some residents still can’t help but talk trash.
Nonetheless, time is running out. Last month, the city began soliciting bids for construction of the facility, one of several around the city where garbage is loaded onto barges. With work expected to begin later this year, it looks as though opponents have finally exhausted their legal options, but one group isn’t giving up.
“It’s not NIMBYism,” insisted Jed Garfield, a real estate broker and co-founder of Residents for Sane Trash Solutions. “There are perfectly viable alternatives.”
Most of them would also be better for the group’s primary funder, Glenwood Management, which owns several buildings across the street from the proposed facility. But environmental-justice advocates argue that poorer neighborhoods have borne a disproportionate share of the city’s trash-disposal needs for too long, and now it is the Upper East Side’s turn.
—Andrew J. Hawkins
