SHEEPSHEAD BAY'S ONLY INDEPENDENT NEWS BLOG

It's (going to be) back! Victory! (Photo by Allan Rosen)

YOU READ IT HERE FIRST: After petitions, public workshops and letters from local officials, the MTA will announce today that the B4 bus line will be fully restored by January 2013.

The fate of the line, which had weekend and off-peak service axed in 2010 east of Ocean Parkway, was unclear earlier this week, when Sheepshead Bites reported that the agency was considering major improvements across the borough. But local leaders told Sheepshead Bites that MTA officials informed them this morning that the agencies plan to announce that the B4, as well as other diminished lines across Southern Brooklyn, will see full or partial restorations.

The B4′s restoration already has locals elated, including members of the Sheepshead Bay – Plumb Beach Civic Association, which collected more than 2,000 signatures to a petition demanding the agency bring back the line to Emmons Avenue, Shore Parkway and Knapp Street.

“I am just so glad. Everybody is going to be so thrilled,” said Kathy Flynn, president of the SBPB Civic, upon hearing the news. “This is going to help everyone who has to go to the hospital, the clinic, the businesses, anyone who has to visit, as well as the disabled in the area. People who commute to Manhattan every day, they only have to take one bus to the station. It’s going to save a lot of people a lot of time and a lot of stress.”

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Source: Google Maps

The gas station at 2472 Knapp Street and Avenue Y is on the market for $2,900,000. The 1,512 square foot property, which currently houses a Shell gas station, is located across the street from the recently closed Burger King.

The station is still open, but at least one readers says that they often and inexplicably run out of gas. It’s also one of the few gas stations and mechanics left in the area, as several have shuttered in the last decade.

And with the edge of the shit factory wastewater treatment plant there, along with a shuttered Burger King and an abundance of Sanitation trucks – is Avenue Y and Knapp Street officially a blighted intersection?

“Bullet Points” is our new format for Community Board 15 meeting coverage, providing takeaways we think are important. Information in Bullet Points is meant only to be a quick summary, and some issues may be more deeply explored in future articles.

Boardmembers push to beautify Manhattan Beach, oppose aesthetic improvements at Knapp Street sewage plant: Parks Department’s Brooklyn Chief of Staff Martin Maher came before the Board last night to provide the community with updates on ongoing projects in the district – including at Bill Brown Park, Galapo Playground, Brigham Street Park and Emmons Avenue – but the presentation quickly turned to Manhattan Beach as members barraged Maher with questions and complaints (video above).

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We reported last week that the Sunoco gas station at 2701 Knapp Street is proposing to shutter its automotive service station and replace it with a new 24-hour convenience store.

In the video above, the owner’s attorney Eric Palatnik elaborated on the business’ needs to make the switch, saying that service station revenue has been dwindling nationwide, while convenience stores have been popping up in their place. Following his presentation, Community Board 15 voted to approve the proposal.

Palatnik adds in the video that the gas station will remain open, though they will be filing with the Department of Environmental Protection to replace the underground storage tank.

We called the service station this morning to ask if, when and where they would be moving, but the owner wasn’t on site. His nephew said he did not know of any current plans to replace the service station with a convenience store.

The owners of the Sunoco gas and service station at 2701 Knapp Street are seeking approval to open a 24/7 convenience store at the location, right across the street from 7-Eleven.

Representatives for the property owner will come before Community Board 15 tomorrow night, where they will ask for the go-aheadto remove the automotive service center and construct a convenience store. They will continue to operate the gas station.

“[The owners] are shutting it down because all around the country that’s the way of automotive service centers,” said Eric Palatnik, the owners’ attorney. “They can no longer run in a lucrative manner without providing a secondary means of income. It’s no longer the case that cars are serviced at service stations,” he said, adding that cars are often leased and brought back to dealers when problems arise.

Community Board 15 is required to make a recommendation to the Board of Standards and Appeals for the conversion since the property has been without a Certificate of Occupancy since 1965, when the BSA first gave approval to construct the gas station and required them to obtain one.

“Sometimes the Certificates of Occupancy aren’t obtained when they should be,” said Palatnik, who did not represent Sunoco in any of their previous filings. “I don’t know why they didn’t. They should have, and that’s wrong,” he said, adding that they will obtain the certificate when the convenience store is built.

The conversion to a convenience store mirrors Sunoco’s nationwide business strategy of emphasizing their retail offerings.

“An area of opportunity for us to unlock even more value out of our real estate is by changing our mind-set from a fuels retailer that also sells some convenience items, to a convenience retailer that retails fuels,” said Sunoco’s CEO Lynn Elsenhans in 2010. “We do a good job of retailing fuels and believe we can up our game in convenience retailing.”

But it also puts the store in direct competition with 7-Eleven, directly across the street. Regardless, the conversion – combined with an overhaul and rebranding effort on the premises – will help reinvigorate a blighted intersection, said Palatnik.

“It’s going to improve the heck out of that corner,” he said. “It’s going to be nice.”

UPDATE (3:56 p.m.): We clarified the article by noting that the gas station will continue to stay open. It is only the service station – ie. the mechanic – that will be converted to a convenience store.

A reader sent in the above photo over the weekend, showing a former sidewalk tree well that has taken on a new life as some sort of insatiable garbage filtering organism.

It looks pretty gross to us, but the reader provided a rather succinct description that hammers home just how nasty this is: “It stinks like atrophying, rotten shit in the area.”

Well, it is on Voorhies Avenue, near the 7-Eleven on Knapp Street and across the street from the shit factory sewage treatment plant.

Regardless, this is something we’re always seeing in the area – tree wells that local businesses, homeowners and the city have failed to maintain, and which collect cups, bags, cigarettes and whatever other crap uncaring individuals drop on the streets.

A little tip to the city and property owners: the group of children who cleaned up a stretch of East 14th Street have found that planting flowers and other niceties in these wells has resulted in less litter found in them. So summon up some neighborhood pride and buy a freakin’ bulb, would ya?

Photo by Robert Fernandez

Oh. My. Goodness. Isn’t this America? We thought this was America. We believe it is, and, yet, in less than six months two fast food chains – McDonald’s and Burger King – have shuttered in Sheepshead Bay. It must be a tough economy…

We noticed it yesterday, but we’re told the 2481 Knapp Street location closed on Saturday. According to a worker who was there yesterday taking out kitchen equipment, the landlord refused to renew the lease.

The employee does not know what is planned for the property, which is now entirely stripped of all Burger King signage, except for the large sign on the pole in the parking lot.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this.

An 18-year-old Rockaway woman is in police custody, charged with leaving the scene of a car accident in which she allegedly struck and killed a Chinese food delivery man. The incident occurred at approximately 8:30 p.m. yesterday, near the merge of Gerritsen Avenue and Knapp Street.

Photographer Eddie Velinskie was on the scene and shared the following report with both us and GerritsenBeach.net:

A white Nissan SUV type plate FHV-9034 New York,,,,, traveling south on Gerritsen Ave. at a high rate of speed and blew through the red light at Gerritsen Ave. &  Avenue V, struck a delivery man from Lucky Star on Knapp St with such force that it threw him out of his shoes and socks and left blood on the plate,,(see photo), the delivery man landed on the hood of the car and was taken half way down the block before falling off,,,,and the scooter landed one quarter down the block from the impact. Engine 321 arrived at the scene and started CPR on the delivery man due to being in Cardiac Arrest,,, EMS arrived and they all worked on him for five minutes before taking him to the hospital. I then noticed the Lucky Star menus in the street by the scooter and went and informed the Lucky Star about there man and they went to talk to the NYPD about him.

As of 11:00 PM NYPD said he passed,,,They have in custody an 18 y/o female in Rockaway Queens.

View more photos from the incident.

Readers of Sheepshead Bites might be surprised to learn that some people still pay for news. Not only that, this news is actually printed (yes, printed!) on sheets of pulped, chemical-laden murdered trees! They kill trees to produce news for you to pay for! Injustice!

Well, one such place that sells these antique news delivery systems is Just In Time Pharmacy at 2126 Knapp Street. And the buggers have found that a bunch of fools who think paper grows on trees (wait, huh?) are just taking them! Without paying for them! Paying for the news! They didn’t pay for the news!

Be still, my beating heart. Though nothing could be so tragic as the idea that citizens could be coerced  to pay – to pay for news! – through tricks originating from the most deviant, obscene recesses of a publisher’s dark, insipid mind – yes, though all of this may be true in its own sick, twisted way – we take comfort. We take comfort in the fact that a lone hero stands on the side of citizens and democracy, providing information daily and for free. Yes, a hero, a media messiah, if you will, which may one day perish for all publishers’ sins (and they, believe it, are many), for now rides high on the horizon, casting the warm, comforting glow of knowledge upon its unappreciative public at no charge.

And, yet, there are scoundrels who steal by forcing those to pay – to pay for news! – and then there are those scoundrels, in turn, thieving from the thieves. Who here is the greater villain? Who is the douchiest douche of them all?

Oh, right, the dog walkers and bicyclists who are stealing from a locally-owned small business. That’s pretty douchey.

Photo and tip courtesy of Rob S.

Locally-elected politicians, Borough President Marty Markowitz and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly were among those on hand at the Brooklyn Amity School’s grand opening in the former Golden Gate Inn – and all swooned over the community-boosting transformation.

The site at 3867 Shore Parkway was once a fixture of local lore, rumored to be a pay-per-hour motel that saw more johns than journeyers. But administrators of the Brooklyn Amity School took over the property early this year, and have spent the past several months making it a second home for students.

Keep reading and view a photo gallery from the ribbon cutting and our tour of the school.