If you rent a $2,500+ apartment next to a live poultry slaughterhouse in an evolving industrial neighborhood, should you really complain that chickens are being slaughtered next door...and that it smells? That's the question the NY Times raises in an article about the conflicting forces in Greenpoint's gentrification today. Of course, this is a topic that Miss Heather brought up on New York Shitty two years ago!
Residents at 118 Greenpoint Avenue, a converted air-conditioner factory, are apparently fed up with the fowl smells at the slaughterhouse. Aaron Rodgers, the tenant of a $2,650/month two-bedroom on the ground floor, told the Brooklyn Paper last month, "It’s dirty, there’s always feathers flying around, and there’s a nasty smelling liquid that leaks out occasionally," and said that his broker implied the slaughterhouse would be gone soon. Rodgers, who has been selling his belongings via stoop sale and Craigslist and trying to move out, also tells the Times, "It smells like death, like rotting garbage, like rotting flesh. You can hear the chickens clucking and screaming and the truck guys cursing and carrying on. These guys are delivering chickens to a slaughterhouse. It’s not exactly Goldman Sachs."
Poultry market owner John Lee has been trying to move the market (which was grandfathered into the current zoning) and claims the city has been holding up his plans. but makes this point to the Times: "Why did they move next door? They knew it was a slaughterhouse." P.S. Future Greenpoint residents: There's also a wastewater treatment plant in the vicinity.
