SHEEPSHEAD BAY'S ONLY INDEPENDENT NEWS BLOG

The grilled whole salmon from the newly-reborn Amberjack V Mediterranean restaurant.

Amberjack V

The Amberjack V (Emmons Avenue, Pier 10), a long-time staple of Sheepshead Bay’s harbor cruise fleet, was reborn when it reopened on Friday as a Mediterranean restaurant operated by the same folks behind Anatolian Gyro (1605 Sheepshead Bay Road).

The new seafood restaurant, cafe and bar will keep the old name to honor its former owners, but won’t be making the trip out into the open ocean anytime soon, said Metin Turan, Anatolian’s owner and now partner in the Amberjack. Instead, they’ll be serving their Turkish and Mediterranean fare dockside, only leaving port for special event cruises.

The restaurant has a full bar and the menu is dominated by seafood, befitting its location on the waters of Sheepshead Bay. It has two floors, seating approximately 150, and in good weather will also have outdoor seating. Belly dancers and live music will take place on the ship’s deck, luring in would-be patrons.

“People want to come and eat and enjoy the city’s waters, and listen to a little music,” Turan said. ”It’s something new and something interesting [for the Sheepshead Bay marina].”

The 120-foot-long vessel was previously owned by Fred Ardolino, who also owns the Atlantis, a larger cruise boat docked in the Bay. The Amberjack V has made history twice – first when Ardolino became the first in the Bay to convert a fishing boat to a dinner cruise ship in the late 1980s; and again on September 11, 2001, when she and the captain, Vincent Ardolino, played a pivotal role helping evacuate survivors from Manhattan to other boroughs in the largest sea evacuation in history.

And if anyone thinks opening a restaurant on a ship in the Bay is a bad business decision after Hurricane Sandy, Turan is undeterred.

“This was here in Sandy and nothing happened to it. The good thing about the boat, as long as you [give the rope slack], the boat goes up with the water,” Turan said. “And you can always take the boat out to a safer place.”

The Amberjack V will celebrate its grand opening at noon on Sunday.

Community Board 15 helped clear the way for a new storage facility on Knapp Street, voting in support of a waiver to existing zoning restrictions at their meeting last Tuesday despite objections from community groups.

The proposed location. Click to enlarge. (Source: Google Maps)

Metro Storage NY came before the Board in a process to repeal a “restrictive declaration” on the property at 2713-2735 Knapp Street, a wedge of land that juts into Plumb Beach Channel at Voorhies Avenue. The 28-year-old declaration prohibits any use other than a retail and marina development, a clause that has caused the land to stay desolate since the original plans fell through years ago.

“It’s derelict. What do I see here? I see some trucks, I see some cars,” said Metro Storage’s attorney, Howard Goldman, before the Board.

Goldman said the restrictive declaration and the lot’s proximity to the Coney Island Wastewater Treatment Plant means that few plans can get through the process to make use of the property. In 1996, an application was submitted for a two-story retail development was squashed, and, in 2005, a plan for a residential development was opposed by the Department of Environmental Protection.

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I don’t think there’s any secret that there’s no love lost between myself and the Breakers condo development (3128 Emmons Avenue), which I’ve alternately referred to as “fugly,” the “fanciest storage unit complex in the borough,” and marketed by unscrupulous wags (who ultimately pushed the development into bankruptcy). So when the pier’s surface – built less than five years ago – totally separated from the pilings it stood upon during Superstorm Sandy, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a matter of shoddy construction or if somehow was hit by more force than some other older structures that took the water’s might with little damage.

Chances are, we’ll never know. But one of the development’s residents sent the above photo to us today, letting us know work on rebuilding the pier is well under way. We hope that it’s being built to be a little more future-proof, and capable of withstanding a Sandy-like event.

Oh, and after it came off and collided with the dilapidated club house of the Greenlawn Bungalow Colony, it settled next to the club house’s old pilings, and we got a shot of it a few days after Sandy.

Top photo by Albert.

The FDNY’s Marine 3 headquarters in 2009. (Source: Vlad Iorsh/Flickr)

The fire eaters of the FDNY’s local marine unit will have to rebuild their summer headquarters – or find themselves homeless, thanks to Superstorm Sandy.

The Marine 3 summer vessel. (Source: FDNY)

The unit – FDNY Marine 3 – operates a summer base at the tip of Kingsborough Community College (2001 Oriental Boulevard) in Manhattan Beach. When the waters whipped through the campus, it ravaged the unit’s four-year-old quarters, rendering them useless.

“Marine 3′s quarters sustained damage from flood waters,” confirmed an FDNY spokesperson.

It wasn’t alone. Several firehouses were damaged and many have not reopened since the storm. All are in the process of being repaired, and trucks have been stationed throughout the affected communities to provide quick response.

Marine 3′s headquarters will also be rebuilt, the spokesperson said, although he was unable to provide a timetable or estimated cost for the repairs.

In the meantime, local mariners need not worry. Marine 3′s vessel – used only during the summer, when boating and other water sports are at their peak – was pulled out of the area ahead of the storm, and was unharmed. When summer rolls around, it will again be stationed at Kingsborough, whether the headquarters are rebuilt or not.

“There is no impact to fire protection or fire service in that area,” the spokesperson said.

The Marine 3 headquarters opened in September 2008, featuring 24-hour security, a new kitchen and bathroom, and a state-of-the-art floating concrete dock. The location also became a training center for members of the Fire Department’s Marine Division, which was given access to Kingsborough Community Colleges’ Maritime Technology Program, a high-tech sailing simulator that puts students at the helm of various vessels to prepare them for careers on the water. It helped grow the city’s small vessel program, which FDNY brass lauded as allowing them to provide faster, more efficient responses to water-related emergencies.

YOU READ IT HERE FIRST: Local mariners have something to be happy about this New Year: the Department of Environmental Protection reversed course on plans to destroy a 78-year-old navigational aid between Manhattan Beach and Breezy Point that mariners say makes them safer and shows them the way home when gizmos can’t.

According to documents released under a Freedom of Information Law request filed by Sheepshead Bites, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection decided to leave a wastewater diffuser pipe that locals affectionately refer to as the “roundhouse” after sailors and other mariners objected to its removal.

“Comments received questioned whether it would be more advantageous to leave the existing outlet chamber in place,” DEP reps wrote to partnering agencies in a September 2012 letter. “If kept, it could serve as an underwater fish habitat and provide opportunity for sea birds to perch.”

It wasn’t just the environmentalists that the DEP sought to please; the agency determined the now defunct roundhouse served a crucial purpose for navigation, and as a marker for underwater infrastructure that could damage vessels.

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According to a release by the New York Times, the city environmental officials lifted an advisory on recreational water activity issued last month after Superstorm Sandy. The environmental advisory applied to the East River, Hudson River, New York Harbor, Jamaica Bay and the Kill Van Krull.

The advisory was put into effect after power outages caused wastewater treatment plants and pumping stations to discharge untreated wastewater in New York City waterways.

The recreational advisory urged against activities such as swimming, canoeing, kayaking, windsurfing or any other water activity that would entail possible direct contact with the water.

In related news, the Gateway National Recreational Area announced that it reopened both the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge and Great Kills Park, however Floyd Bennett Field is still closed.

None of those advisories stopped the local Brighton Beach resident featured above from testing out the cold waters of Brighton Beach by going for a risky swim six days before the advisory was lifted.

Photo by Ray Johnson

Cherry Hill Gourmet Market opened its doors to the public for the first time last Tuesday, and you can barely tell floodwaters ever entered its storefront in the historic Lundy’s building (1901 Emmons Avenue).

“We were working night and day, day and night, 24-seven, to get back on our feet,” said owner David Isaev at a grand opening party last week, attended by Assemblymembers Steven Cymbrowitz and Helene Weinstein, Councilman Michael Nelson, and Community Board 15 Chairperson Theresa Scavo.

During the worst of Superstorm Sandy, several feet of water rushed over the Bay’s walls and barreled into the building – ruining the building’s interior, alongside tens of thousands of dollars worth of items and equipment. Cherry Hill provided the video below to Sheepshead Bites, showing the damage after the water receded.

Keep reading and view the video, featuring a cameo with Paul Randazzo or Randazzo’s Clam Bar.

In an act of incredibly selfless sacrifice, a local woman is promising to swim across Sheepshead Bay, on a presumably freezing December 2 afternoon, all in an effort to raise money for her Hurricane Sandy-displaced friends, Morti and Shira.

Morti and Shira Lebovich are a young Manhattan Beach couple whose basement apartment was flooded, causing them to lose most all their things, and forcing them, their two young children and dog, out of their home. Ilana, the woman promising to swim the Bay, has invited people to donate, take the plunge, or do both through her impromptu website.

According to Ilana, her biggest fear seems to be the freezing water she expects to wade through come December 2, but who knows what other disgusting obstacles await her in those treacherous Bay waters, so you know she isn’t kidding around and that the welfare of her friends mean a great deal to her.

She’s already raised over $1,o00, and if you’d like to donate, or risk your own hide swimming for a good cause, check out Ilana’s official page with more information on the event here.

Aside from the destruction of Emmons Avenue’s waterfront bungalows, Hurricane Sandy also left disaster and devastation at Sheepshead Bay’s boating clubs.

The worst hit was the Sheepshead Bay Yacht Club (3076 Emmons Avenue), where boats, moorings and marinas all swept in from the ocean approximately 80 feet to the yacht clubs’s back porch, as you can see above.

Keep reading, and view more photos.

Port Sheepshead Marina, nothing but rubble.

Despite more than a week of cleaning, Emmons Avenue’s eastern end, a strip of waterfront condos, bungalows and boating clubs, remains in shambles.

We visited Emmons Avenue’s two waterfront bungalow colonies earlier this week, and, though Hurricane Sandy destroyed several homes and left families for the streets, there had been no visits from FEMA, Red Cross or any examples of the volunteer frenzy other neighborhoods have received.

In the absence of outside help, neighbors banded together to help each other.

Keep reading, and view a photo gallery of the destruction in the bungalow colonies.