I swung on by the Bay Ridge Spite House/Wall yesterday and this is what it looked like…a complete and utter mockery of the bureaucratic and ineffective mess that is the government of New York City and the Department of Buildings.
Evil doers on the left, the good people of the world on the right with American flag proudly displayed – wall still up.
I took a closer look at the illegal spite wall and found that a fresh violation was served…
Not only is the cinderblock wall completely illegal, but the Cunningham’s wooden fence to protect the illegal construction site is now also illegal.
According to the official DOB website, their fence permit expired on April 1st and apparently did not renew it.
This Stop Work Order appears quite fresh even though it has been served a year and a half ago – almost looks as though it was up on the fence for just a few hours and not for a year and a half.
Such a shame the DOB inspector couldn’t have issued a violation for lack of a posted SWO…
Bottom line is this, based off of this illegal building site, you could very easily start building a house in the middle of Central Park, fence it off, dig a moat and the City of New York can do absolutely nothing to stop you.
The Stop Work order must have been re-posted onto the new fence. Are the people constructing ever around? Do they get tomatoes thrown at them? I just hope there isn’t too much damage to the neighbors’ house, and hopefully no one gets hurt due to shoddy work practices.
I’ve heard that the people who live at the construction house tend to say that they don’t own the construction – despite showing up to hearings to keep the illegal construction.
The whole thing is a mess, which you can read about in these two posts…
http://beehivehairdresser.com/2009/03/23/bay-ridge-spite-wall-gets-even-more-spitey/
http://beehivehairdresser.com/2009/02/13/blight-of-bay-ridge-update/