If you live near the corner of Bushwick Avenue and Siegel Street, your block is being closed across two weekends. Siegel Street between Bushwick Avenue and White Street is shut to through traffic from 3 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday so a contractor can assemble a crawler crane. The closure notice does not say what the crane is for. It is the first heavy machine going up for Echelon Studios Bushwick, a six-soundstage film and TV production complex at 242 Siegel Street, more than twice the size of the Netflix studio a few blocks over.
According to a notice sent to Community Board 1 Brooklyn on June 4 by Kaitlyn DiGraziano, project manager and authorized agent for JC Steel Erectors, the block will be shut from 3 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays from June 6 through June 14, four days across two weekends. A revised notice, filed the day after the first one, pushed the start time four hours earlier (the original opened at 7 a.m.) and added forklift use to the scope alongside crawler crane assembly. Local and emergency vehicles can still reach the block from both ends, DiGraziano noted. The work runs under NYCDOT permit number B152026153A05. A crawler crane is a large tracked lifting machine used in heavy construction, and assembling one takes several days, which is why the street is closed for two full weekends and not an afternoon.
JC Steel Erectors is a structural steel and precast concrete erection contractor founded in 1977 and based in Islip, on Long Island, that says on its own site it has completed over 1,400 projects across the New York metro area, per the company’s about page. Residents with questions can call them at (631) 624-4088.
The site at 242 Siegel Street is the future home of Echelon Studios Bushwick, developed by Bungalow Projects in partnership with Bain Capital Real Estate. In October the developers closed $304 million in construction financing covering both Echelon studios combined, the Bushwick site and a four-soundstage campus in Red Hook, structured as $156 million in Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) financing from CounterpointeSRE and $147 million from an affiliate of Farallon Capital Management, according to Construction Review Online and a Business Wire release carried by Yahoo Finance. That C-PACE piece is the largest such clean-energy deal in New York State and the first used for ground-up new construction in New York City.
The Bushwick site is a roughly 355,000-square-foot, six-story facility on a 135,345-square-foot lot, with six column-free soundstages totaling about 102,000 square feet, 40-foot clear-to-grid ceiling heights, 86,000 square feet of production support space, 76,000 square feet of office space, and about 91,000 square feet of below-grade parking for more than 230 vehicles, per BKReader and Construction Review Online. It is designed to host three large, high-budget productions at once. The complex is all-electric, with rooftop solar covering more than a quarter of its energy needs, and is built to LEED Gold and the city’s Ultra-Low Energy Building program, per the same reporting.
Echelon Bushwick is more than twice the size of the Netflix production studio that opened on Johnson Avenue near the Morgan L stop, which Bushwick Daily covered when it arrived and which runs about 170,000 square feet, per Bushwick Daily’s own reporting on the deal. The crawler crane closing your block this month is the start of a soundstage operation bigger than the Netflix studio that already films in the neighborhood.
The Bushwick complex is one half of a twin development. Echelon’s other campus is rising at 176 Dikeman Street in Red Hook with four more soundstages, and the two sites together represent a $552 million package put together with the New York City Economic Development Corporation, delivering over 600,000 square feet of studio space, per BKReader and Deadline. BKReader reports the city is providing roughly $90 million in incentives across the two projects.
The pitch from the developers is jobs. The two studios are expected to generate about 2,400 jobs across construction and operations, and the developers have lined up workforce-training partners, including Reel Works and Hook Arts Media, with a tie-in to the New York City Housing Authority, per BKReader. “With the State’s expanded Film Tax Credit Program fueling more production activity, Echelon Studios will be ideally positioned to capture this wave of demand while creating thousands of jobs for New Yorkers,” Bungalow Projects co-founder Travis Feehan said, per Deadline. NYCEDC President and CEO Andrew Kimball framed it as a play for film-industry market share: “As the top destination in the country for talent, and leader in innovation, New York City is ripe to grow its presence as a global production destination,” he said, per BKReader.
Bungalow assembled the parcels in 2023, buying the Siegel Street site from Fortress Investment Group and Aview Equities for $41.5 million in December 2023 and a neighboring Moore Street parcel from Fortress for about $26.7 million, then filing to demolish a row of vacant low-rise warehouse buildings at 201-207 Moore Street to fold into the campus, per Commercial Observer. Those warehouses have to come down before the soundstages go up, and the crane that lifts the steel is the machine being bolted together on the closed block now.
The two-weekend, 3-a.m.-to-11-p.m. shutdown is the first visible move of an all-electric studio that the city, a Bain Capital partnership, and a Long Island steel crew are putting up two blocks from where Netflix already films. The permit names a contractor and a phone number, but not the project behind the crane.
If the closure or the construction affects you, Community Board 1 Brooklyn received the closure notice and takes resident comment on it, and you can reach JC Steel Erectors directly at (631) 624-4088 with questions about the crane work. NYCEDC is the public agency behind the deal. Bushwick Daily will keep tracking 242 Siegel Street as the steel goes up.
Featured image: 100yen / CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
