Blanchard Building Archives • lictalk.com

THE New York Times is out today with a story on the emptying out of the Blanchard and Paragon buildings on Borden Avenue, in order to make way for higher-paying office tenants. Whole businesses are vacating the premises, typified by the protagonist of the story, a furniture upholsterer who is leaving for Long Island. LICtalk has previously profiled two businesses in the Blanchard. The first BklynBooks (aka iPodMeister) was mentioned in the Times story, and is moving to Paterson, NJ. The second, Manhattan Fruitier, has moved a little further east to the LIC/Sunnyside border. Prophetically, the owner of the latter sent me this quote when I asked him about the sale of the building a year ago: [Read more…] about THE DOWNSIDE OF GENTRIFICATION IN LONG ISLAND CITY

Admit that the waters around you have grown

A new beer hall is coming to the Blanchard Building on Borden Avenue according to Patrick Sweeney of Related Companies, which is the new owner of the building. This information was buried in an article in yesterday’s New York Times about how the fashion industry has been gobbling up commercial space in LIC to the extent that it very well may become the second coming of the garment center, or actually replace it all-together. We’re happy to mine the crumbs of this esteemed newspaper to wring a great headline1- even if unlike the NYT we can’t get a call back from Related. We’re also very happy to have yet another tremendous beer offering coming to LIC.

//I’d also be very happy to be acknowledged by said newspaper as being [Read more…] about BEER HALL COMING TO BORDEN AVENUE

and scoop? [↩]