Forest Hills: private streets on one side, elevator towers on the other

The co-op towers along Queens Boulevard, Yellowstone Boulevard, 108th Street and the streets around Austin Street are mostly 1950s and 1960s: 100 to 400 units, a single attended or unattended lobby, a service entrance, a rear courtyard door and in many cases a below-grade garage. This is the concentration of elevator buildings in a borough where only about 31% of units have an elevator at all, and it is where floor restriction actually gets bought.

The part that surprises boards is that elevator access control is not primarily a low-voltage job. It is a low-voltage job that depends on an elevator contractor. A reader in the cab has to send its data down the traveling cable to the machine room, and the traveling cable is the elevator company’s property, their labor and their schedule. If there are no spare conductors in it, someone has to add or replace that cable, and that single line item is the most common reason an elevator access quote comes back at twice what the building expected.

So the first thing we do on a Forest Hills tower is not spec a reader. It is get the traveling cable conductor count and the elevator controller make and model, in writing, before anyone quotes anything.

Forest Hills Gardens was laid out from 1909 and its streets are private, maintained by the residents’ corporation rather than by the city. Practically, that means parking, vehicle access and anything that crosses or occupies a street is the corporation’s decision, not the Department of Transportation’s. A contractor who turns up and parks the way they would on Austin Street will be having a conversation. We ask about the corporation’s rules before scheduling, and we plan a job around the fact that the van may not be at the door.

The building fabric matters just as much. The Gardens’ stucco-and-half-timber and brick Tudor houses are frequently stucco over metal lath over sheathing. An anchor set into stucco alone cracks the finish and pulls out within a season, taking a fist-sized patch of render with it. Where a camera or reader has to land on a stucco elevation, we find the framing or the brick beneath and mount into a joint, or we relocate to a soffit or a masonry pier a few feet away that gives the same field of view without the repair bill.

Slate and clay tile roofs are the other Gardens constraint. Cable routes that would normally go over a roof do not, because walking a hundred-year-old tile roof costs more in broken tiles than the whole job is worth.

Austin Street from roughly 70th Road to Ascan Avenue is the neighborhood’s retail spine, with Metropolitan Avenue carrying a second, lower-density strip and Station Square sitting inside the Gardens itself. It is small-format retail, restaurants and professional offices above ground-floor frontage rather than big-box, which sets the pattern of work: entrance identification cameras, a rear service door that is propped during deliveries, a roll gate contact, and an office suite upstairs that wants a credential rather than a key handed around six employees.

The recurring failure here is the office suite door with a magnetic lock on a glass entrance and nothing else. A maglock with no request-to-exit device, no door position switch and no verified fire alarm release is a code problem and a liability, and it is what we most often find behind a glass door on a second floor above Austin Street. Fixing it is not expensive. Discovering it during an inspection is.