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Re-printed from the Queens Chronicle - February 17, 2005

Green Building Supplies Store Opens 300 Doors In Astoria

Photo by Neille Ilel

by Nellie Ilel

Western Queens Editor

Last Monday, two days before Build It Green!'s Astoria warehouse store was scheduled to open, Justin Green and Theophilus King were eyeing an enormous curved wood stage.

We’re trying to figure out what to do with it, said Green, program director for the organization. In a former life, the seven-square-foot wood pieces were part of a Tommy Hilfiger reality television show. The stage was donated to Build It Green!, and now it’s waiting to be resold for another use instead of thrown away.

Build It Green!, a project of the Community Environmental Center, has an 18,000-square-foot warehouse filled with recovered and salvaged items that it hopes to sell as low as half the price of new. The goal of this endeavor is to recycle and keep all these perfectly good materials out of the landfills, Green said.

The warehouse, located at 3-17 26th Avenue in the Hallets Point section of Astoria, already has several hundred doors, 2,000 square feet of flooring, 50 sinks, 7 urinals, 8,000 linear square feet of wood trim and a host of other building materials for sale.

The Community Environmental Center started Build It Green! after partnering with the Durst Organization, one of the largest developers in New York City. Durst, hired Build It Green! to take away everything salvageable from two of its current large Manhattan development projects. One is the Bank of America building at 42nd Street and 6th Avenue and the other is a residential high-rise being developed at 31st Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues.

What normally happens, explained Durst’s environmental consultant Pamela Lippe, is a demolition crew comes in.
They raze the building and then recycle whatever they can afterward. What green developers want to do is get recycling started at an earlier phase. In order to do that, they need a place to sell the saved items.

It’s not so much the environmental impact of those two buildings, Lippe explained of Durst’s developments, but getting a whole industry established. There is infrastructure in cities like Philadelphia and Portland in place to reuse perfectly good doors, windows and fixtures, but none has yet been successful in New York City.

That’s where Build It Green!’s giant warehouse comes in. The warehopse is a lot like a Home Depot, but less organized, quirkier and a lot cheaper. Solid core maple doors are $45. Sinks are $35. Green hopes that everyone from homeowners and landlords to artists and film production companies will end up as customers.

There are old windows that have been removed because they are not properly sealed that Green thinks artists might want. There are props like the Tommy Hilfiger stage that could be reused for other shows. He has a pair of wall-mounted potato slicers, a dozen matching chandeliers salvaged from a bar and three shelves worth of air conditioning vents and lighted exit signs.

In the coming months, the organization is planning to sell a line of environmentally friendly building supplies, as well as integrating a green-building consultancy into its business.

The warehouse is open Wednesday through Saturday, 11a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Drop-off and pick-up donations are by appointment. For more information, or to inquire about Build It Green!’s deconstruction services, call Justin Green at 718-777-0132.

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