Nearpara Rubber Company: From Tire Reclaiming to Toxic Brownfield

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The Last Days of Nearpara Rubber I smelled it before I saw anything worth photographing. That warm, faintly sweet bite of old rubber, the kind that hits you somewhere between a tire shop and a summer highway, drifted through the first building the moment I stepped inside. The structure was burned out, charred and broken, rubble underfoot. But the smell was alive. And then I saw the pile. In the corner of the room, faded brown and heaped maybe two feet high, was a mound of baby bottle nipples. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of the small rubber tips, just sitting on the floor of a collapsed industrial building in Trenton, New Jersey. I stood there for a moment, genuinely confused, and then kept moving. Nothing like the smell of warmed-over rubber. Twenty minutes later, I understood even less. Through another door passage, I found the main source of the smell: six open metal trailer containers, still loaded with bagged baby bottle nipples, sitting in open air. Bags of them, mountains of bagged n...
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Crown Palace Hotel Razed For New Housing

 

About six years ago, I wrote a small piece on this mystery hotel building. At the time I could not find any history or a name associated with the three-story building that was built in 1931. The property was mostly fenced off and used mostly as storage for school buses and other private vehicles. The building entranceways were always bricked off but occasionally I would see someone had busted through the lower cinder-blocked doorway probably looking for scrap metal inside. However, recently I came upon an entry in "The Jewish Chronicle Guide" listing the Crown Palace Hotel under the address 570-600 Crown St, Brooklyn. I always knew the structure eerily resembled a hotel based on its architectural facade and the wide swath of open land that goes back decades in the 1940s and 1980s satellite imagery. It also matches the demographic makeup of the Crown Heights neighborhood to have a hotel for traveling Jews in the area.





Sadly, the building was demolished sometime earlier last year since the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) application for it was submitted in May 2021 and signed off on December 22, 2021. The adjoining lot was also cleared of the wild-growing trees as seen above in Google Street View in July 2021. Making a way in its place will be a 75-foot-tall condo development with a combined square footage of 185,149. A community space is also allocated to the building as well as two loading berths. Currently, the lot is used as an off-street private parking lot.


Status: Demolished

Location: 600 Crown St & 630 Crown St, Brooklyn NY



Source:


1. "Two Buildings To Be Built On Empty Lot On Crown and Troy", October 24, 2021, CrownHeightsInfo

2. The Jewish Chronicle Travel Guide. (1997). United Kingdom: Jewish Chronicle Publications. [Page]

3. Londono, Vanessa, "Permits Filed For 600 Crown Street In Crown Heights, Brooklyn", NY Nimby, December 21, 2022


Location: 630 Crown St, Brooklyn, NY 11213, USA

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