NY Post – December 05, 2016
by Bruce Golding
New York City may have narrowly avoided an inferno like the one that killed at least 33 people in Oakland when authorities pulled the plug on two industrial-space dance venues recently.
In May, the FDNY shut down a pop-up nightclub at a Brooklyn warehouse after finding the site was chock-full of “combustible material” and didn’t have sufficient staff to keep a potential fire from raging out of control.
The Brooklyn Mirage in East Williamsburg was allowed to reopen, but the Buildings Department slapped it with a “full vacate” order in June when an inspection turned up a slew of violations, records show.
The Mirage was run by the New York arm of Swiss party promoter Cityfox, which was also behind an aborted Halloween 2015 rave in a former Greenpoint plastic factory.
That event was shuttered moments before its midnight start, as thousands of would-be partiers waited outside for admission to the deserted NuHart factory, which is on the EPA’s list of toxic Superfund sites.
At the time, Assemblyman Joseph Lentol (D-Brooklyn) called for a probe into how Cityfox scored authorization for the event in just a few days, despite what the DOB admitted was an “inaccurate and incomplete permit application.”
In a letter to state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, Lentol said allowing a massive dance party “in an old industrial building . . . without a sprinkler system installed defies all rational judgment.” Lentol on Sunday said he got a “canned response” from Schneiderman but had not heard back since.
Schneiderman press secretary Amy Spitalnick said: “We have been looking into this specific issue as a result of the Assembly member’s complaint. Building permitting and safety-code enforcement fall within the jurisdiction of local government.”
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