I’ve Been Crushing Aggregate, You Little Punk While You Were Still Swimming In Your Daddy’s Balls

Contractors bemoan the closing of Red Hook Crushers (another great band name), which means they’ll be forced to travel to Maspeth (gasp!) to dump concrete detritus from Brooklyn construction sites:

The “new” Brooklyn is being built, stoop-by-stoop, gut-rehab-by-gut-rehab, bluestone-by-bluestone, in neighborhoods like Boerum Hill, Prospect Heights, Gowanus, the South Slope and Clinton Hill.

But a big problem has emerged: Where will the “old” Brooklyn be thrown out?

In Queens, actually.

Last month, the city shut down Red Hook Crushers, a company that played a vital, and often-overlooked, role in the borough’s surging construction industry.

For two decades, the company’s crushing equipment along the banks of the Gowanus Canal have taken in broken up cement, demolished brick walls and other debris and churned it into base material to be used again in roads, runways and sidewalks.

But since Red Hook Crushers closed on Feb. 8, hundreds of small-time contractors — the thick-calloused guys who rip up an old concrete stoop and turn it into a Yuppie’s bluestone dream — are now being forced to truck that unwanted cement all the way to the closest similar facility in Maspeth.

And all that driving is driving them nuts.

. . .

“I work in all these up-and-coming neighborhoods, fixing sidewalks, rebuilding stoops, renovating backyards,” said John Kiamie, owner of Sure Foundation.

“Now I have to drive to Maspeth — it’s two hours, back and forth on the BQE! — to dump the old stoop or sidewalk after I fix it. If I make two trips, I lose half a day on the road while my workers just sit around waiting for me to get back.”

Kiamie said he’s now turning down the small jobs that were his bread-and-butter.

“They shut this guy down without a contingency plan!” he said. “What am I supposed to do?! It’s clinical insanity! It’s a good thing it’s not our busy season or I’d never be able to stay calm!”

And don’t pretend like thick-calloused guys don’t have a keen sense of irony:

The reality is that the Crushers once-desolate Gowanus site has become very desirable. Whole Foods, whose first Brooklyn supermarket is being slowly built next door, is said to covet the space, and new apartment buildings are springing up in an area once written off as a waste land.

“The irony is that Whole Foods dumped plenty of concrete with us,” said Crushers co-owner Tom Saccomanno Jr., a copy of Pit & Quarry magazine on his desk.

Like Saccomanno, Kiamie said he certainly welcomed newcomers.

“If they want to turn the Gowanus Canal into a new Venice, God bless ’em,” he said. “It’s great. They’ll need us to do the work. But I need a place to dump the garbage or else the BQE will be a parking lot all day and all night.”

The Department of Sanitation, for its part, says that contractors will just have to “deal with it.”