Brooklyn Fire Sale

Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY - The charred ruins of the city's biggest fire in more than a decade are being used to line the already deep pockets of the ravaged site's owner - who is literally selling the rubble off brick by brick.

Dozens of century-old, giant wooden beams and thousands of bricks from the destroyed Greenpoint Terminal Market are being carted away and sold.
The red bricks from the warehouse's crushed walls are priced at 15 cents for lots of 10, and the magnificent roof beams - cut from durable wood that can be recycled into new flooring - are being hawked for about $1,500 each.
Even the beams that were scorched black are selling fast, wood is just like toast. Scrape off the burnt part and it's like new.

The bricks and beams began being carted away in huge trucks when the elder Guttman, 58, the site's owner, made a rare appearance at the site, escorted by his son.
"You and the media make me guilty," Joshua Guttman yelled at a photographer before driving away in an SUV.

Several Greenpoint residents whose homes were temporarily shrouded by the blaze's black smoke were outraged. "It's disgusting, but that's business as usual for a person like Guttman," said Phil DePaolo, 45, of the community group the People's Firehouse. "Their interest is always money. That's the bottom line of a developer."