By Chris Fuchs
Before he picked up a newspaper last week, Daniel Sambucci Sr., who opened his auto-salvage business in Willets Point 50 years ago, had heard nothing of the mayor’s and borough president’s proposal to demolish the bazaar of auto-body shops and salvage yards that comprise the Iron Triangle near Shea Stadium.
In earlier decades, he remembers incessant talk about condemnation, back when the city wanted to build a football stadium in the 1980s to keep the Jets from defecting to New Jersey. (The New York Jets and their stadium are still nestled, for now, in the Garden State.) There were other abortive attempts as well, when the city Economic Development Corporation, for example, proposed in 1991 that Willets Point maintain its commercial character and be redeveloped for heavy-industry businesses.
And then there was Carmine Agnello, son-in-law of jailed Gambino family mob boss John Gotti, who has fed the perception that auto-body businesses are run by organized crime families. Agnello ran a business in Willets Point and was arrested last year for trying to drive out a competitor — which was actually a ruse shop set up by police — through various means of intimidation. His racketeering case has yet to come to trial.
With all this in mind, Sambucci Sr., 70, muses over whether he should believe what he reads in the newspapers, over the fate of the auto-salvage business he has built during the last 50 years and what will come of it. So far, the mayor’s office has said nothing to him, he said, and neither has the borough president’s.
No city official has come around offering even a paltry per-square-foot price for soon-to-be-condemned property, despite the Queens borough president having filed papers to begin the process of declaring the Iron Triangle an urban renewal area fit for development.
Over the decades, the triangle, a 55-acre landfill built in 1939 and fenced in by Northern Boulevard, Roosevelt Avenue and 126th Street, has deteriorated into an unsightly collection of auto wreckers, salvage yards, auto salvage shops and warehouses, Sambucci Sr. said. The size of many businesses has shrunk, and today, the owners of small auto part shops stand outside each day shilling their wares.
His son, Sambucci Jr., 43, who oversees the stripping of nearly 2,000 cars a year at Sambuccis, has witnessed the change, too, and can’t help but wonder one thing: Has the city let Willets Point fall into such a state of disrepair so that it would have good reason to condemn it?
“What’s holding the property down is the threat of condemnation and that there are no (sanitary) sewers down here,” he said. “Maybe something is going to happen, but either drop it or do it.”
But Queens Borough President Claire Shulman disagreed with Sambucci’s theory.
“There are only three or four of what we would consider important businesses there,” she said in a phone interview Monday. “There’s always been rumors about where they come from.”
In a four-page summary on Willets Point, the borough president’s office describes the triangular encampment as “one of disorder and blight,” adding that malfunctioning storm sewers only compound the problem. Willets Point mostly supports “illegal auto-related businesses,” the report says, and thus demands a “higher and better use than what is there now.”
That higher and better use might include an office building, a convention center or an entertainment facility, the report says, three proposals that make the Sambuccis cringe.
Their story begins in 1951, when auto salvage yards first began moving into Willets Point. Daniel Sambucci Sr. was 18 1/2 and had no shoes. Looking to earn some money, he and his brother began driving around Queens in a truck, searching first for derelict cars and later for ones to buy.
Like adept lobster eaters, the brothers extracted every saleable part from every car they junked. They bought a 40-by-100 foot lot down the road from the 1-1/2-acre parcel they own now, on the corner of 126th Street and 36th Avenue, to strip the cars. They named their business the Sambucci Bros.
Fundamentally, the process of stripping a car has remained the same. Over the years, though, auto manufacturers have dropped certain materials and added others that go into the making of a car, and the government has become more stringent with environmental laws governing how and where fluids from cars can be dumped.
“Still, it’s a messy job,” said Sambucci Jr. “People thumb their noses down on it. They say it’s a dirty business, a messy business. It’s a necessarily evil.”
There are ways of tidying up, though. The Sambuccis’ yard is tidy and they are proud of that. Back in the 1980s, they bought racks to stack cars on three levels, creating a feeling similar to that of walking down an aisle in a grocery store.
Off on the side and shielded by a shed are all manner of automotive parts, neatly inventoried with the aid of a computer. Some parts are shipped overseas; some are sold to buyers who walk in.
But not all of the shops in Willets Point have followed in the Sambuccis’ footsteps, lending credence to the borough president’s description of Willets Point as “an eyesore that has plagued the borough of Queens for decades,” Sambucci Sr. said.
“I do admit there are some sloppy places here,” he said. “There are a lot of new people here.”
The Sambuccis haven’t given much thought to what they’ll do if Willets Point is deemed an urban renewal area. Most likely, the city would declare eminent domain and buy the land the Sambuccis have owned since 1951. But where would they take their business?
Unlike Willets Point, few communities in Queens are zoned for heavy industry. Alternatives do exist, like Jamaica, Brooklyn and Hunts Point, in the Bronx, but those would involve transplanting a 50-year-old business into unfamiliar surroundings.
“To talk about our land like they own it — it’s annoying,” Sambucci Jr. said. “I’m here myself. I bought it. Who are they to take it?”
Reach reporter Chris Fuchs by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 156.
