Where We Work

Breakara Demolition works across Queens, and takes demolition work across New York City.

We are based on Van Loon Street in Elmhurst, which puts most of the borough inside a short run. What follows is what actually changes from one part of Queens to the next, because the building you have decides how the job runs far more than the address does.

Elmhurst, Woodside, Ridgewood, Glendale, Middle Village and Astoria. Attached and semi-attached brick houses on lots built out to the property line. This is where a party wall decides a building demolition, and where a rear slab has to come out by hand as concrete removal. Two things follow from that. Every wall you share is somebody else's wall, so anything happening near it is planned around them from the start. And there is no driveway and no yard, so there is nowhere on the property to stage material or stand a container. The job works off the street, which makes curb space and carry distance real numbers in the price rather than details.

Jackson Heights, Rego Park, Forest Hills, Woodside and Sunnyside. Prewar elevator buildings and a great deal of co-op ownership. In these buildings the demolition is rarely the hard part. What the building asks for is: an alteration agreement, a certificate of insurance naming the building and the managing agent, approved working hours, and a booked service elevator. Those are set by the board and the managing agent, and they decide the schedule before a single wall moves.

Walk-ups, anywhere in the borough. Plenty of Queens buildings have no service elevator at all. Everything that comes out goes down a staircase by hand, past doors people live behind. The same volume of material takes considerably longer to move, and that is worth knowing before the schedule is set rather than on day three. This is the condition that shapes interior demolition here more than any other.

Long Island City and the commercial corridors. Storefront and office fit-outs where the constraint is usually time rather than access. The neighbouring units are trading, the work happens around their hours, and the space has to be handed over clean for whoever is fitting out behind us.

Three things tell us most of what we need to know.

What the building is, and roughly when it was built. Prewar, postwar, attached, detached, walk-up, elevator. That sets what is likely behind the surfaces and what the building will ask of you.

Whether anyone is living or trading in it while we work. An occupied building changes protection, dust control, hours and sequence.

How material can physically leave. Door to a container at the curb is the straightforward case. Down three flights, along a shared hallway, through a lobby, or from behind an attached house is the one that decides the schedule.