The time has come for this longtime Long Island City watchmaker to move.
Luckily, E. Gluck Corp. was able to find a way to stay in Queens. With the help of the New York City Economic Development Corp., it recently secured the lease to the vacant Leviton plant site in Little Neck.
“We’d love to have stayed in Long Island City,” said Murray Stimler, the senior vice president of the company, which makes watches for brands like Anne Klein, Nine West and Armitron. “But the amount of industrial space was shrinking and the availability of the size we need is not there.”
The company, one of the city’s last remaining manufacturers of timepieces, will vacate the 240,000-square-foot factory it rents on Thomson Ave. before the end of the year to make room for more classroom space for LaGuardia Community College.
The owners searched far and wide for a space that would enable them to keep their business nearby, but ultimately they came up empty.
Industrial businesses looking to move or expand in Long Island City face an increasingly tight market, as rents have climbed in the aftermath of rezonings, in 2001 and 2004, that opened up much of the former manufacturing area for residential uses.
Vacancies in western Queens’ industrial spaces are as low as 1%, according to Elizabeth Lusskin, the president of the Long Island City Partnership.
Stimler says residential conversions in particular have greatly chipped down on the available stock for industrial businesses.
“We looked at every space that was physically available or about to come available,” he said.
The company’s watches are mostly made in China now, but it wanted to keep its base in Queens for design, marketing, final assembly and distribution.
“We’re a family-run business,” said Stimler. “We don’t want to displace any of our people.”
Enter the city’s Economic Development Corp., which secure about $13 million in sales- and property-tax breaks over 25 years to help E. Gluck with the move.
Neighborhood leaders in Little Neck, who had been worried the industrially zoned site would turn into a large retail store or residential conversion, cheered E. Gluck’s pending move.
“People were pleased it would be a business similar to what Leviton was,” said Susan Seinfeld, the community manager for Community Board 11. “Employees come in and employees come out. It’s not a noisy business. The reaction was that at least it fit into the neighborhood.”
