Remembering The Greenpoint Terminal Market Fire Just Gets You In The Gutt, Man

The Landmarks Commission stokes, er, fans the, er, throws oil, er, should we say provocatively draws a link between the Greenpoint Terminal Market Fire and current preservation efforts around the neighborhood:

A city panel has landmarked Greenpoint’s Eberhard Faber pencil factory and several surrounding buildings — just in time, one commissioner remarked, to protect the building from “development fever [and] fires.”

In addition to the most famous of the Eberhard buildings — the factory at 61 Greenpoint Ave. with its distinctive pencil-shaped adornments . . . — the Landmarks Preservation Commission also protected eight other 19th- and 20th-century factory buildings, placing them all in the “Eberhard Faber Pencil Company Historic District.”

The district abuts the Greenpoint Terminal Market, a warehouse complex that burned in a suspicious fire last year — an incident in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that was evoked by Brooklyn Commissioner Elizabeth Ryan during Tuesday’s hearing.

“Development fever is raging through the neighborhood — as well as fires — so the sooner this is protected, the better,” she said.