A Start

Litfuse Cyclery, this being our first blog post let us introduce you to our situation, check back often as we will keep it updated weekly with how the process of transforming this space into a bike shop will go down. Locaded in an abandoned chicken down-feather plant located in what was formelry considered Clinton Hill and now is claimed by the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn is a 4 story red-brick warehouse building at 409 willoughby avenue. The mortar is turning to dust from age and abuse inside and out. Floors of massive timbers hewn from the 19th century old-growth forests of New England. These ancient forests nurtured strong and long-lasting timbers that are the back-bone of the building. Years of abuse and neglect turned this noble down feather sanitizing factory into a dangerously dusty, filthy, rat-infested, mess with dead pipes covering the ceiling; covered in feather dust and chicken lice exoskeletons and rat fecal chloroform dust. The basement was like something out of Saw with the exception that the saw movie sets were much cleaner and didn't have the sheer volume of dusty trash. In the real world when old factories are abandoned they sell the valuable heavy machinery and replace them with their trash All the drain pipes leaked into the basement, there is still a swamp there after we fixed most of the leaks in the plumbing. But the amazing thing was when we started to remove the garbage. It kicked up a feather/dust storm. It was like a blizzard with muddy rivers in the basement. We took several tons of metals to the scrap yard and over 90 cubic yards of dust heavy garbage. Those dumpsters aren't cheap so we squeezed every last drop out of each cubic yard. A few tenants in the building have brought their bikes by but we are not at full capacity as a repair shop yet. We have no windows, the bathroom is not finished and the store still is quite dusty. We have repaired the floors extensively and cleared space for storage and workspace and hope to be open in 2 weeks.

  Bathroom under construction Damian, Angel, and Jerry the three man team behind the renovation/construction.