By Ben Joravsky
“I love many of our new residential neighbors, but they have to recognize that we have a right to be here too,” says Marilyn Labkon, who owns General Iron, the scrap-metal recycler at Clifton and Kingsbury. “We don’t want to leave.”
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“Our customers are mostly alley entrepreneurs or peddlers with factory accounts and wreckers who buy reinforcing bars and beams,” says Labkon, who runs the business with her two sons, Adam and Howard. “Everything that goes through our shredder comes out in fist-size pieces. We recover everything–we get the squeal out of the pig.”
“They wanted us to do things, put up barriers and the like, that would have put many of our competitors out of business,” says Labkon. “We agreed to make all the changes they asked us to because we wanted to stay.” (For their part, city officials praise the company and say they want it to remain in the area.)
“You’ll still be able to get from one point to another relatively quickly– our traffic studies showed that closing Kingsbury for 600 feet would not be a major inconvenience,” says Greg Longhini, a spokesman for the city’s Planning Department. “It’s important to the city that businesses like General remain. We need a balance between industry and commercial.”
Yet Morton Skolnick has passionately denounced General Iron at various meetings. And the Kingsbury-Marcey Betterment Association has gone to court, asking a judge to overturn General Iron’s settlement with the city.
“It’s still a go-go economy, but it’s not going to last forever. What happens when there is a downturn? Will those large-box developments close their doors? Will we be stuck with vacant buildings? It’s better, I think, to build a residential base.”
