Real Estate 38 lic courier • march 2013 • www.queenscourier.com Reporting fr om the field Listening to the neighborhood’s business chatter is like experiencing multiple personality disorder. You’ll hear mixed messages of economic recovery and growth versus stagnation by david dynak David Dynak is a real estate broker at First Pioneer Properties and an LIC resident. He’s lived in Western Queens since 1993. ARTS EVENTS Calendar Courtesy of Plaxall Long Island City 2013 MoMA PS1 Noguchi Museum 22-25 Jackson Ave., LIC, NY 11101 718.784.2084 MoMAPS1.org 9-01 33rd Road (at Vernon Boulevard) Long Island City, NY 11106 718.204.7088 • www.noguchi.org Plaxall.com LICProperties.com Museum of the Moving Image 35 Avenue at 37 Street, Astoria, NY 11106 718.777.6800 • www.movingimage.us MARCH Sculpture Center January 14 - March 25, 2013 Double Life Presented through the In Practice Program Korakrit Arunanondchai, David Berezin, Paul Branca, Lea Cetera, Rachel Foullon, Molly Lowe, Shana Lutker, S. A. C. (Student Art Collective) with Justin Lieberman, Julia Sherman, and Bryan ZanisnikSculptureCenter is pleased to present the exhibition Double Life, which brings together a group of artists that share a performance-based approach to sculpture by re-staging completed artworks, readymades, and original selfsampled content. Objects and images are removed from specific institutional frameworks, historical moments, or modes of distribution in order to disrupt their assumed status and meaning. January 14 - March 25, 2013 Nairy Baghramian: RETAINER culptureCenter is pleased to announce the exhibition RETAINER by Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian. This will be her first exhibition in the United States. Baghramian’s work examines political and social systems of power and encompasses questions of context, production, and reception within contemporary art. 44-19 Purves St. LIC, NY 11101 718.937.0727 www.sculpture-center.org New Pictures of Common Objects On view October 21, 2012—April 14, 2013 Huma Bhabha: Unnatural Histories On view November 18, 2012 —April 1, 2013 Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt: Tender Love Among the Junk On view November 18, 2012 —April 1, 2013 Ed Atkins On view January 20—April 1, 2013 Metahaven: Islands in the Cloud On view January 20—April 1, 2013 CONFETTISYSTEM: 100 Arrangements On view January 20—March 31, 2013 Jeff Elrod: Nobody Sees Like Us On view January 20—April 1, 2013 EXHIBIT• 3-D Lenticular Posters for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey October 27–March 31, 2013 In Behind the Screen Presented with support from Warner Bros. Pictures, New Line Cinema, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Director Peter Jackson filmed The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in 3-D at 48 frames per second to invite the audience to enter Middle-earth for an immersive cinematic experience. Emblematic of this experience is a series of specially commissioned lenticular posters from designer Grayson Marshall, featuring seventeen of the main characters in the film, including Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf, Thorin Oakenshield, Gollum, and Galadriel. INSTALLATION • Pretty Loaded—Ongoing Pretty Loaded is composed of nearly 50 “preloaders,” animated graphics that show how much of a website has loaded. Big Spaceship, a Brooklyn-based creative agency, collected the preloaders on exhibit and created the application used to present them. These preloaders were originally produced by agencies (including Big Spaceship) and independent designers for websites primarily promoting films, television shows, and consumer products. Preloaders were initially intended to fill time while visitors waited for websites to load; in Pretty Loaded, they comprise the entire experience itself. Viewed one after another, they create a never-ending cycle, directing attention to the preloader as its own creative space and to the inventive ways in which designers communicate the simple idea of progress from 0 to 100 percent. Preloaders were pervasive in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when image- and video-heavy websites created in Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Flash) were delivered over home Internet connections with speeds limited to 56 kbps. Originally, preloaders were utilitarian, employing progress bars, pie charts, or text, but designers soon started working inside the form’s constraints to create playful, engaging, and even suspenseful graphics that hinted at what lay beyond the preloader. The wide availability of broadband Internet and the waning use of Flash have rendered the preloader largely an artifact of the past. The Pretty Loaded installation is made possible by Big Spaceship Hammer, Chisel, Drill: Noguchi’s Studio Practice Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - Sunday, April 28, 2013 This exhibition explores Noguchi’s working process through a handful of studios that he kept beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the Long Island City and Mure Japan studios that he split his time between until his death. The exhibition illuminates Noguchi’s practice during five studio periods over the course of his career including: the MacDougal Alley studio in New York (where he experimented with his slate and wooden interlocking sculptures in the 1940s); his Kita Kamakura studio in Japan (the origin of much of Noguchi’s bri ef experimentation with ceramic work in 1952); the 10th Street studio in Long Island City (his headquarters in New York for the last 25 years of his life); the Pietrasanta and Querceta studios near the Henraux quarries in Italy (where he rekindled his appreciation for direct stone carving in the mid- 1960s); and the studio at Mure, Japan (where from 1969 onward he spent half of his year working with hard stone). Art for Families - Give and Take – Collaborate! Saturday, March 23, 2013 - 10:30am Education Program Art for Families For families with children ages 5-11. Space is limited and reservations are required. Art for Tots - Playscapes Sunday, March 24, 2013 - 10:30am Education Program Art for Tots For families with children ages 2-4. Space is limited and reservations are required. and contraction, and anything inbetween. Sweet Leaf coffee shop has expanded to three locations in LIC and Williamsburg, and John Brown Smokehouse is looking into its second location in Queens. And with its partnership with Dutch Kills bar, Sweet Leaf also doubles as a bar where skilled mixologists can fix you a state-of-the-art cocktail for under $15. The way the place was built, you forget that you are inside a new construction cookiecutter retail store at the bottom of a rental building. Great job and good luck to them. Watch out, Starbucks! Perhaps not as clever would be opening yet another Italian cuisine restaurant next to Vernon Boulevard, but that’s exactly what’s coming across from the precinct on 50th Avenue. Is there really that much demand for Italian food in a four-block radius? Jackson Avenue stores are starting to fill in, with State Farm bringing exactly the type of retail that low foot traffic but high vehicular exposure block can support – retail office that does not rely solely on local neighborhood or passerby business. Having worked with insurance office proprietors who tend to open multiple locations and obtain licenses from multiple insurance carriers, I’ve learned that their balanced “diet” of personal, property, auto and business insurance, aided by the fact that premiums keep coming for years and years after initial sale is made, makes them a perfect fit for second and third tier retail locations in good, desirable neighborhoods like LIC, Astoria or Sunnyside. Unlike restaurants or clothing stores. And it is good to know that the failed macaroon pastry shop on Jackson Avenue is being taken over by an experienced and proven food entrepreneur like Leslie N. of Sage General Store, whose track record of running successful catering and restaurant outfits means the new shop is likely to stay here for a while! On the flip side, the number of locally operating wholesalers and importers who said “business is very bad now” and “we can’t afford our current rent” has now reached seven in the past three weeks. Why am I counting? Each of these businesses occupies 15,000- to 25,000-square-feet of warehouse space and specializes in toys, women’s accessories, fabrics, variety items for 99 cents stores, etc. All of them purchase in huge quantities for cheap abroad and wholesale in the US. And although you always hear tenants complaining about rent going up, all of my conversations led me to believe that they are not bluffing this time. Leases that are about to expire won’t be renewed, and in some cases existing leases will be broken. In order to survive, they say their rent needs to go down by 40 to 60% - from the already “value” low rents of $6 to $10 per square foot – meaning that their margins and volume of sales simply cannot support commercial rents in this neighborhood. Cause for concern? Perhaps, but it could also mean that trade in cheap, mass-produced items has reached a point of saturation and large numbers of those business types simply don’t need to be and don’t belong this close to Manhattan. As long as they get replaced by the next wave of “the next big thing.” Speaking about the next big thing… is raw, organic, sustainable food and locally made gourmet and wholesome food products a temporary hype or really solid business filling burgeoning demand? Large variety of producers of juice, wheatgrass, kombucha, etc., and established shops like Amy’s Bread or Tom Cat Bakery are now competing for commercial kitchen and food commissary space with start-ups, coming out of LIC’s food incubators and ready to rent their own warehouse space. Meanwhile, folks at the new TD Bank next to the P.S. 1 Museum would much prefer that the Five Pointz and Court Square area in general becomes a retail and commerce hub, not another cluster of condos and luxury rentals lacking basic neighborhood services and stability of national retail brands. As you can see, this month’s column attempts (pretends?) to be reporting from the field, passing on my observations made during the past month. It has been the busiest two weeks ever, even if not all result of rosy outlook or business picture, and that’s a good thing.
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