Life in the Triangle Part 2: Service Smoked Fish

There was once a time when New York City was the smoked fish capital of America. As European immigrants traveled by boat to the new world and settled on the shores of New York City, they brought with them the craft and tradition of fish canning and pickling, curing and smoking; In the early 1900s, hundreds of factories popped up throughout the five boroughs, though most clustered in Brooklyn. However, as the kin of those immigrants assimilated to American customs and lost interest in cultural cuisine, and food safety standards became increasingly strict, nearly all of the original certified fish production and distribution facilities were shuttered, leaving only three still standing. But one of the three is now in danger of being forced to fold, and it isn’t due to health code violation or any lack of love—it is purely geography.
Service Smoked Fish finds itself nestled in the middle of the Broadway Triangle—the predominantly city-owned industrial 31-acre piece of land that is in the process of undergoing a residential rezoning—and is struggling to stay afloat. The hotly contested Broadway Triangle rezoning plan, of which the community board voted in favor last month, involves transitioning the parcel from industrial use to residential in order to establish approximately 900 new units of affordable housing for the surrounding communities. The plan does, however, involve eminent domain: nearly all of the businesses located in the Broadway Triangle have received letters from the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), alerting them of the possibility of property seizure and forced relocation. Service Smoked Fish happens to be the one exception: Under the plan, the factory will be grandfathered in and allowed to continue manufacturing and distributing despite the residential zone of the block. Though this seems like a victory for Service, it may be the opposite.
Jay Weiner, the president and majority owner of Service Smoked Fish, is concerned that though his factory will be allowed to stay put, once the block becomes residential the volume of noise and odor complaints will skyrocket, ultimately forcing the factory to shut down anyway—only under these circumstances Service will be ineligible for the theoretical relocation funding the city is working to secure for businesses forced out under eminent domain.
“Once this block is residential, they won’t want us here anymore,” Weiner said, his thin lips tightly pursed. “There will be noise complaints, odor complaints. It may take time, but a business like this—it will be impossible to coexist with residents. We will be shut down. We have four dumpsters full of fish garbage every day, we open at 2AM. Who wants to live next to that? Nobody considered us at all.”
Founded by Weiner’s grandparents 1934 in Greenpoint, Service Smoked Fish is a third generation family business. In 1955, Service relocated to Throop Street in the Broadway Triangle—a block described by Weiner as the “perfect location” in terms of proximity to bagel shops and specialty food stores. Weiner took over the factory in 1982, when Service consisted of 2500 square feet and five employees. In 1994, he oversaw the first of a series of renovations, expanding the square footage to just shy of 9,000. In 2004, and each following year after that, Weiner added to his factory, investing in updated equipment and building additional state-of-the-art smoke houses. Today, Services processes roughly 20,000 pounds of smoked fish per week, passing it through nine specialty smoking rooms before shipping it off for sale. According to Weiner, the equipment, which over the years has cost “millions and millions of dollars,” is virtually impossible to transport.
There are 25 full-time workers employed at Service, performing tasks that take several years to learn, let alone master. And, like so many family businesses, most of the employees have been working at Service for decades—“one guy has been here since I was 6 years old!” Weiner said. “If we shut down, where will they go?”

Like other business owners in the Broadway Triangle, Weiner feels as if he has been shut out of the planning process and left without a voice in the matter. Though Service is technically allowed to keep their property—Weiner owns the parcel—part of the rezoning arrangement prohibits Weiner from renovating, meaning there is no opportunity for growth or expansion of any kind—a disappointment considering that Service is surrounded by two vast vacant lots now slated for housing developments.
“The fact that I can’t ever expand my walls again—that could be it for me,” Weiner said. “Either you move forward as a business and grow, or you die. And we can’t move forward now.”
“I’ve invested my whole working life in this plant,” he continued. “There are a lot of unknowns happening right now. I’m not against rezoning in theory I just don’t think anybody is taking care of us. I have no leverage or power and in their minds, because we aren’t being eminent domained, they aren’t doing anything to me. But they are boxing me in, and manufacturing and residential housing aren’t the most natural of neighbors.”
The Broadway Triangle rezoning plan will be voted on by Brooklyn Borough President Marty Marowitz in the upcoming weeks before moving to the City Planning Commission and ultimately the City Council for a final vote.
“You know, smoking fish is half art, half science,” Weiner said. “And this business has been in the family for 75 years. You’d hate to see it die.”