GL's Construction Site Du Jour: 157 & 173 Kent Avenue

What you are looking at is 224 Wythe Avenue It's part of a group of properties that includes 157 and 173 Kent Avenue, making up about 2/3 of a Williamsburg block. The building has had two gaping holes punched in it and the entire property has been serving as a locale for photo shoots. The properties were acquired by the Chetrit Group and will no doubt be the site of a very, very large development.

If you're into weird demolition and building stuff, the site has been offering up great fun all year long as some demolition appears to maybe have been done without any permits being issued or fences going up. Well, a full fence did go up. Then, oddly, it came down, leaving what you see above available as the newest neighborhood hipster playground. A, uh, stop work order was issued in January. The property has been half-surrounded by a fence for a couple of months, since the above mentioned fence went up and came down. One "failure to maintain" violation notes, without any irony whatsoever:

LARGE CONCRETE BLOCK 6' X 2' W X 2'D WEIGHING SEVERAL POUNDS IS NOT SECURED AND IS LEANING OUT OF PLUMB, ON EDGE OCCURRING AT VARIOUS AREA ALONG NORTH 4TH ST AND KENT AVE

This would have been written at a time when there was a lot of stuff "out of plumb" on the wide-open site. There is also a pending violation for--duh--work without a permit, which was issued after weeks, if not months of work on the site:

WORK W/O PERMIT. ON INSPECTION EXISTING CONCRETE PLANT HAS BEEN DEMOLISHED APPROX. 3 SILO HAS BEEN DISMANTLED EXISTING BLDG HAS BEEN DEMOLISHED, DEBRIS ON SITE & CUTTING OPERATION IN PROGRESS OF STEEL MEMBERS

Whoever would have expected that a city agency could be such a rich source of irony and humor? And all this time, we thought bureaucracies were without any mirth whatsoever.