Bklink: Sheepshead Bay Cell Phone Pic Collection

“I took a few minutes during my travels in the past few days to both shoot some photos with my cell phone, and send some of the old ones that have been there for months to my email. Here’s a little slice of Brooklyn for the lot of youse who’ve never been here.” Definite slice of life.–Erica’s Blog

Bklink: Gutting Lundy’s

The former landmark Lundy’s Restaurant in Sheepshead Bay is being gutted for conversion into a high-end food market. Check out the pics of a space that is impressive, even in a diminished statew.–GerritsenBeach.Net

Bklink: Huge Sheepshead Bay Deal

There’s been a record $20 million land deal that could mean “the landscape of Sheepshead Bay is about to be changed forever.” The site could end up with a 100,000 square foot retail center.–GerritsenBeach.Net

Lundy’s in Sheepshead Bay Morphing Into Upscale Grocery

The last we had heard the building housing Lundy’s, the closed venerable Sheepshead Bay restaurant, was rumored to be coming back to life as an Outback Steakhouse. GerritsenBeach.Net relates news that was deep in a Courier Life story a couple of week back about a WWII memorial plaque on the site the local civic association wants back that the building is slated to become a “‘Whole Foods’ style market selling both international and organic products.” The new market will open sometime next year. It’s not clear if part of the space is still slated for an Outback’s or if that deal fell through. What is certain is that Lundy’s, which dated to the 1930s, is done and that neighboring businesses in the building are gone too.

18 DOB Site Inspections Ignore Major Problem in Sheepshead Bay

We missed this in our sleepy Saturday morning reader yesterday, but the New York Times featured a development story from Sheepshead Bay that could serve as a Poster Child for everything that is wrong with the (non) regulation of development and construction in Brooklyn. It’s about a six-story condo development called Homecrest that’s going up in a neighborhood of two-story homes. 18 DOB inspections either failed to find or refused to note a major issue. It is so absurd that even the Times, which doesn’t normally devote space to one of the biggest issues in Brooklyn, found it worthy of a long story. Here are some excerpters:

a zoning battle featuring bluntly worded threats; an obvious construction flaw unremarked upon by building inspectors on 18 site visits; and, ultimately, a red-faced city agency, confronted with inconvenient facts, reversing itself after a year and a half of insisting on the legality of a widely opposed condominium project.

For now at least, residents of the area, a section of Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn known as Homecrest, have blocked the project, a six-story condo block that they say would be far out of scale in their cozy neighborhood of two-story homes with tidy lawns.

Such fights have become common across the city during this decade-long real estate boom, as residents trying to preserve the feel of their neighborhoods face off against developers seeking to cram as many square feet and stories into a building site as possible. Occasionally, the residents win.

But while the understaffed Buildings Department, outmatched by aggressive developers, has often been shown to fumble inspection and enforcement, rarely has the department so repeatedly rebuffed complaints about a project that it now admits it should never have approved.

Homecrest is a Beat the Rezone project where developers rushed to get a foundation in place before a zoning change happened–only they didn’t and 18 building inspections failed to notice. If you missed it, it’s worth checking out.

Brooklyn Nibbles: Special Sheepshead Bay Edition

An interesting development to report from Sheepshead Bay, where the venerable (if recently bedraggled) Lundy’s shut down at the beginning of the year. Kinetic Carnival‘s O. Robau left this information as a comment on an older post, but it’s interesting enough to pass along on its own. All credit to Mr. Robau for the intel:

Yesterday I was informed, from a source close to the landlord of Lundy’s that Outback Steakhouse has officially been in the process of taking over Lundy’s Restaurant and will turn it into an Outback. So far, a few calls to Lentek Realty and the landlord have yielded no calls.

Outback has long been reported as a possibility for the space. A little sad to see such an important Sheepshead Bay landmark be replaced by a chain restaurant.