In the meantime, commercial tenants like Steinway Cafe-Billiards, who occupy spaces where landlords have made purchase option agreements with entities under the development’s consortium of developers - Silverstein Properties, BedRock Real Estate Partners and Kaufman Astoria Studio - are stuck in limbo. Members and sponsors make THE CITY possible. All eyes are now on the neighborhood’s Councilmember, Julie Won - who has so far opposed the plan she says doesn’t provide sufficiently affordable housing - as the council tradition of “member deference” generally means the local member has an effective veto on land use projects in their district. If and when that would happen depends on an imminent City Council vote. Looming over this one-story neighborhood mainstay, along with that court battle, is Innovation QNS - a $2 billion mixed-use, five-block development plan envisioning 2,845 apartments and 200,000 square feet of commercial space and - including a glass tower rising from the land that the pool hall sits on now. These days, the pool hall is open and surviving month to month as a rent dispute case pends in court. And when the city ordered all non-essential operations to halt at the peak of the pandemic in March of 2020, Nikolakakos struggled to make rent. “We had the idea to open a place with windows on the street level so people can see inside and women can come in,” said Nikolakakos, who worked as a waiter and taxi driver before opening Steinway Cafe-Billiards.īusiness boomed, Nikolakakos recalled, even before it was supposed to officially open, as strangers kept looking in and he simply opened the doors and let them play.īut after the city banned indoor smoking in 2003, traffic got slower. Large street-level windows peer into a room of 26 pool tables, unusual visibility for a pool hall that opened in 1990, when most others were in basements or up a flight of stairs, according to 67-year-old owner Georgios Nikolakakos. A green awning stands out among an inconspicuous strip of car body shops in Astoria: “STEINWAY CAFE-BILLIARDS,” it reads, namesake of the bustling commercial street that anchors the neighborhood.
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