Scoop

NYDN: Hasidic battle brews over state Senate primary

Elizabeth Benjamin

Sunday, September 7th 2008, 11:15 PM

A warring Brooklyn Hasidic sect is divided in a key Democratic state Senate primary that involves some of the city's most powerful political figures - and could affect the '09 mayoral race.

The Satmar faction led by Williamsburg-based Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum rebuffed an eleventh-hour plea by Mayor Bloomberg to support his candidate, political newcomer Daniel Squadron, in the 25th Senatorial District.

Zalman loyalists are backing Squadron's target, incumbent Sen. Martin Connor, who is championed by Brooklyn Democratic Party boss Vito Lopez and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

The Zalman camp received a visit last week from Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey. He pleaded Squadron's case, but left without a deal, said a source close to Zalman's political adviser, Rabbi David Niederman. Mayoral spokesman Stu Loeser declined to comment.

Zalman supporters are gambling that the mayor's potential bid to change term limits and seek a third term will fizzle, said one Jewish political operative.

"Honestly, Bloomberg's disappearing, Vito's not," the operative said. "Who would you choose?"

The Zalman faction is still angry at the mayor after the city Health Department got involved in a ritual Hasidic circumcision procedure deemed risky to the child's health.

And it was infuriated when a nonprofit it supports, the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, lost $150,000 worth of City Council funding in the fiscal 2009 city budget.

Meanwhile, followers of Rabbi Aron Teitelbaum - who is based in Kiryas Joel in Orange County but has a presence in Williamsburg - are supporting Squadron.

That gives the Kiryas Joel faction an in not only with Bloomberg, but also with Squadron's powerful former boss, Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is backing his former aide.

"I have nothing bad to say about Marty Connor, but I think it's time for a change," said Rabbi Leib Glanz, a political adviser to Aron Teitelbaum.

Glanz insisted he had not been lobbied by Bloomberg to support Squadron, but Aron backers have seen their star rise at City Hall.

A new nonprofit they support, United Jewish Community Advocacy Relations and Enrichment, received Council cash for the first time this year to the tune of $205,000.

The Brooklyn Satmar community could prove crucial in tomorrow's primary. Its members vote in a bloc, and a few thousand votes could decide the race.

In 2006, Bloomberg personally appealed to the Kiryas Joel Satmars to back Republican Rep. Sue Kelly over her Democratic challenger, John Hall. The plea fell on deaf ears, and Hall ousted Kelly by a few thousand votes.

Both the Zalman and Aron factions have waged voter-registration drives in Brooklyn this year and claim to have signed up some 10,000 new Hasidic Democrats in recent weeks.

"This is a big test for the Hasidic vote," said the Jewish political operative of the Connor-Squadron primary. "If they can't bring it out this year, I wonder about their chances to be able to flex any muscle in the mayor's race."

September 3, 2008

By SANA SIWOLOP

Squeezing a large urban retail center onto a small, oddly shaped building site is almost never easy in New York, and the task can become particularly daunting when a prominent national retailer decides to make the center a home for its largest store anywhere.

Such were the hurdles that had to be cleared at the 300,000-square-foot Triangle Junction in the Flatbush section of central Brooklyn.

Triangle Equities, a developer based in Whitestone, Queens, began working with New York City eight years ago to rejuvenate an anemic mix of mostly small retailers at Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues, one of Brooklyn’s busiest hubs.

At first, Triangle planned to create a large shopping center at the intersection, with Kmart as the anchor. After that company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002, it scrambled to find another tenant. Last April, the center’s first store finally opened: a two-level Target, which at 225,000 square feet is the discount retailer’s largest ever.

Target, which is based in Minneapolis, occupies the top two levels of the three-story center, which last week received yet another national retailer on its ground floor: a 20,000-square-foot Circuit City.

According to Peter Botsaris of the Botsaris Realty Group in Manhattan, the leasing broker, tenants that have already signed on include a large David’s Bridal store; a Children’s Place; a Payless ShoeSource, which is owned by Collective Brands; and an Applebee’s restaurant, owned by IHOP. Two ground-floor spaces have yet to be leased, he said.

National retailers have already flocked to other parts of Brooklyn, including the part of lengthy Flatbush Avenue that passes through downtown Brooklyn. But local real estate brokers say that until about two years ago, when it became clear that Target was really going to open a large store at the point where Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues intersect with Avenue H, they were generally reluctant to enter this area. This was the case even though it had heavy foot traffic (partly because of nearby Brooklyn College), was home to one of the busiest subway stops in Brooklyn and also was a stopover for a half-dozen bus lines.

One of the biggest obstacles that Triangle Equities faced in creating the Junction was the site itself, which formerly had two parking lots, a car wash and an open portion of the Long Island Rail Road bordered by two bridge abutments.

Because a third of the Junction was to sit in air space over the railroad, structural engineers working for Triangle Equities first had to design a special platform that would serve as a base for a retail center. The company also needed to build a wide pedestrian sidewalk to seamlessly connect the center to two narrow bridge abutments on the north and south sides of the center.

Meanwhile, the project’s architect, the New York office of Cooper Carry, a group based in Atlanta, designed the center so that instead of looking like a very large single building — which local community groups strongly opposed — it would actually look like six smaller separate buildings, to more closely resemble other low-lying retail buildings in the area.

All this was not inexpensive. When Triangle Equities bought the site for the center from the New York City Economic Development Corporation in 2004, the project was expected to cost about $70 million. Costs are now expected to add up to about $150 million.

Target also had design challenges. The retailer had already shown that it was adept at building large, vertically oriented urban stores elsewhere, including at the Atlantic Terminal mall in downtown Brooklyn. But here the company had to take a standard rectangular-shaped store format and fit it onto a relatively small building site of irregular shape.

“It was like taking a rectangular-shaped peg and fitting it into a trapezoid-shaped hole,” said Ben Wauford, a principal at Cooper Carry’s New York office.

Mr. Wauford said that Cooper Carry skewed the layout of the floors slightly and then designed the rest of the building so Target could use leftover space for storage and a street-level entrance lobby. The company also gave the center many elevators — 12 in all — so the upper-level store could be easily reached from the street as well as from an adjacent 500-car covered garage.

“This was the most complex construction project that Target has ever taken on,” said Bridget Hammond, a spokeswoman for the company, which as of July had 1,648 stores.

She said her company decided to install an unusually large store at the Flatbush-Nostrand intersection because the area was so heavily trafficked.

Many of the retail properties around the intersection sit on relatively small lots, so it is not clear how many other large national retailers will be able to come to the area soon.

Real estate brokers agree that the asking rents for ground-floor retail space within a two-block radius of the intersection have doubled, or in some cases tripled, over the last two years, to about $100 a square foot annually.

Some established property owners in the area say they are already considering renovating their properties to make them more appealing to retailers looking for larger spaces.

One of those owners is Stanley Liker, who, along with a group of investors, has owned for 20 years a 20,000-square-foot building across the street from the Junction, a building that used to be the old College Theater. “This is an area that used to be completely dead,” Mr. Liker said last week.

For now, retail space in the area is tight. “It’s one of the tightest retail corridors in Brooklyn right now, and availability is scarce,” said Zach Mishaan, a senior managing director at the Winick Realty Group in Manhattan.

Timothy King, the founder of CPEX Real Estate in Brooklyn, says he thinks the combination of so-called destination retailers at Triangle Junction, as well as its very large parking garage — a rarity in Brooklyn — will be a strong draw for shoppers outside the immediate area.