Miscellaneous rumors overheard this afternoon while the 10-alarm blaze at the Greenpoint Terminal Market rages on...
1) Regarding the new development renderings featured here earlier today, a commenter clarifies: "The images you're showing are architectual drawings of what the developers wanted, not what they were going to build. The buildings were up for preservation—several were exepected to pass. The property is owned by Joshua Guttman, a landlord who has a history of his buildings burning down when its rezoning time. When the buildings burned two things happend: the chance for preservation dropped, making the architects renderings more likely; instead of paying for cleanup and abatement of toxic materials, all that shit burned into the air. Yay world-trade-center style cancers." [More on Guttman at Gothamist—scroll down]
2) Notes another commenter, "Demo Permit was issued on 3/24, and pre-filing for the sidewalk bridge was filed YESTERDAY. Guess they started last night."
3) More rumormongering, this from an email tipster: "Word on the street is... party A recently wanted to purchase entire 1 million+ sf of terminal space from Party B. Party B refused because he/she thought that they could make more money by renting it out to film and TV entities. The word is that Party A burned it so that Party B could no longer make any money with it. Heard this from four different sources in Greenpoint this afternoon."
4) Another email tipster reports, "I work on the corner of water and whitehall street in manhattan, all the way downtown. The wind must have shifted or something after the greenpoint fire because our entire floor now smells like smoke. More specifically, it kind of smells like gross hot dogs on a grill. I miss the maple syrup!"
Photo by JustinNYC from the Curbed Photo Pool, home to many fire photos.
· When Smoke Clears, Greenpoint Towers Set to Rise [Curbed]
· Greenpoint Clearing Land for Waterfront Development [Curbed]