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Businesses near Shea bracing for uncertain future

Wallace Matthews

March 18, 2008

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In the foundry behind Howard Feinstein's cramped office, men were fabricating structural steel, some of which would be used across the street in the construction of Citi Field.

As the Mets' new home moves closer and closer to completion, the Feinstein Iron Works, along with 100 or so other businesses in Queens' Iron Triangle, moves closer to extinction, with the help of some of the I-beams and plate girders being forged right in Feinstein's basement. To borrow a phrase from that great urban philosopher Don King, Feinstein is acting as a collaborator in his own demise, but as he said yesterday, "We still gotta do business."

For how much longer is anyone's guess. Opening Day at Citi Field is little more than a year away, and still, Feinstein, who along with his brother Dan is the third-generation owner of a business that has called Willets Point home for 36 years, has no idea if they will be around to see it.

Same goes for Daniel Sambucci Sr., owner of Sambucci Auto Salvage, a tenant since 1950, and T. Mina Supply, which manufactures most of the city's sewer pipes but, like every business and resident of Willets Point, must depend on a cesspool because the city refuses to build a sewer beneath its streets.

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That is soon to change, of course, once the city, as is its plan, grabs the land with a declaration of eminent domain, throws them all out and sells this suddenly priceless sliver of real estate to a developer.

No one in city government will admit it, of course, but as Feinstein said yesterday, "We know what they're going to do."

Their one hope seems to lie in the new governor, David Paterson, who as recently as 2005 called for a moratorium on eminent domain while a member of the state senate.

At the time, Paterson, from Harlem and a disciple of Mario Cuomo, who saved the same area from conquest 25 years ago, pegged the use of eminent domain for the benefit of private business for what it is: "A gold rush." Now Willets Point hopes Paterson has experienced only a change of title, not principles.

"Maybe Gov. Paterson can save us," Feinstein said. "Because it seems like Mayor Bloomberg is determined to get this thing done before he leaves office. He needs something to hang his hat on."

So far, in terms of public works projects, all Bloomberg and his former deputy mayor, Dan Doctoroff, have done is fill a 55-gallon drum full of industrial-strength failure with their losing attempts to bring the 2008 Olympics to the city and build a stadium for the Jets on the West Side of Manhattan.

Creating a multimillion-dollar tourism and entertainment center across from Citi Field, built over the graves of businesses that have survived there since the Great Depression, seems to be Bloomberg's last shot to leave something behind. And Feinstein and the other Willets Point business owners believe he is getting some behind-the-scenes help.

"I cannot believe that the Wilpons made a deal with the city to produce this stadium without some sort of side deal to take this area over," Feinstein said. "They've made it pretty clear they want a Camden Yards situation over here."

The Mets repeatedly have said the fate of Willets Point is solely up to the city, but last May, a city councilman passed along a message he said he got from Fred Wilpon: "The junkyards gotta go."

That is why Feinstein and the others know that a sit-down they had with city representatives a couple of years ago - at which they were asked, "What do you want?" - was nothing but lip service.

"We told them we wanted to stay here," Feinstein said. "But the city has to make the improvements they're legally obligated to make. Right now, we patch our own streets, we shovel our own snow. We're the only location in New York City that still has cesspools."

Still, Feinstein and the other businesses pay upward of $54,000 a year in real estate taxes for the right to inhabit a rutted chunk of land that is the physical equivalent of downtown Baghdad.

Across the street, the Mets, beneficiaries of nearly a quarter-billion dollars in city and state tax subsidies, a sweetheart deal on parking revenues and a legislative end-run around a 1986 law prohibiting the use of tax-exempt bonds for the construction of sports facilities, amounting to an additional $105 million in savings, pay not a nickel in taxes on Shea and will pay not a nickel on Citi Field.

Last time we checked, they had plumbing at Shea and probably will in the new crib, too. Their garbage is carted away, their parking lots plowed, their potholes filled by city maintenance men being paid not by Fred Wilpon but John Q. Public.

And when their beautiful ballpark finally opens, it will have 15,000 fewer seats than the one it is replacing, meaning a lot fewer John Q. Publics will be able to buy their way in.

"They're pricing guys like us right out of the ballpark," Howard Feinstein said.

While running them out of the neighborhood.