For years, residents of Crease Street in Fishtown have been struggling with the noise of garbage trucks that collect trash from the nearby La Colombe coffee shop as early as 4 or 5 a.m., six days a week.
Republic Services trucks, spewing exhaust fumes onto the narrow street and occasionally snapping electrical wires, park outside the cafe’s back door for up to an hour, loading up on waste and leaving stinking, sticky puddles of garbage juice behind them.
“It’s probably the biggest garbage truck you’ve ever seen, and it’s loud,” said Jack Inacker, who has lived across the street from the back of La Colombe for seven years. “The hydraulics in it squeak, it’s shrill. You can’t sleep in it.”
In addition to suffering from noise and sleep disruption, neighbors also have to put up with delivery trucks — Amazon, UPS, the post office — that constantly block the street and park on the sidewalk.
Inacker notes that aside from the terrible noise, puddles and the difficulty of navigating the sidewalks, he actually likes living so close to La Colombe, which is located on Frankford Avenue. “I go there all the time,” he said. “It’s a great place to hang out.” He likes being close to the many restaurants and other petite businesses that have helped make Fishtown one of the hottest districts of the city It had been a good place in recent years, he said, and a good place to raise two youthful children.
He and his neighbors have tried to resolve the matter with La Colombe, which is located in the building. For years, they have called and emailed the cafe’s managers to see if trucks could pick up outside the building, or at least later in the day, but to little avail.
That situation began to change in overdue August, when their complaints turned into outrage.
A few doors down on Frankford Avenue, a novel building is being built which will have Sweetgreen, a Shake Shack and 61 apartments. Its developer, Roland Kassis, who also owns La Colombe, and a local business association have applied for a loading zone on Crease Street that would allow trucks to service both properties — and remove several parking spaces from the already congested street.
“It would encourage more trucks to come and park there, instead of fewer of them,” Inacker said. “And that was the final straw.”
Broken communication lines
La Colombe and its parent company, New York-based yogurt giant Chobani, did not respond to requests for comment. Kassis, however, deeply apologized for the truck situation and said he acted quickly to fix it once he learned of the problem.
“I felt really bad that they were going through this pain,” he said this week. “I said we want to fix this.”
Kassis owns most of Frankford Avenue in Fishtown and real estate throughout the area. He is credited with causing its transformation from a stark, post-industrial landscape dotted with empty buildings into a top dining and living destination. He and Stephen Starr created the pioneering Frankford Hall restaurant in 2011, remodeling La Colombe buildingand is a co-owner or partner in Suraya, Cafe La Maude, Pizzeria Beddia and other businesses.
Kassis considers himself a member of the community and said he has given his cellphone number to many people in the area. However, he said the problems of Crease Street have never been really brought to his attention.
Residents directed their complaints to the known managers of the La Colombe resort, who were apparently unable to do much to improve the situation.
One disgruntled resident, Gennady Ryklin, a doctor with a background in union organizing, began taking photos and videos of idling trucks blocking the street, then emailing them to anyone he could think of—managers at La Colombe, the Fishtown Neighbors Association, Councilman Mark Squilla, and the Fishtown Kensington Area Business Improvement District, or BID.
“Traffic was backed up for almost 20 minutes, cars had to dangerously drive onto our sidewalk, and trucks, including a USPS mail truck, couldn’t get through,” Ryklin wrote in a recent email to a La Colombe employee, along with several photos and videos. “Actually, I almost got hit by a car when I tried to take this photo [of a truck] who drove onto the sidewalk. This happens multiple times a day, every day.”
When it was revealed that La Colombe and the BID were bidding on a loading zone on Crease Street, the block’s WhatsApp group lit up with comments, he said. “The neighbors were like, wow, this is really going to affect us,” Ryklin said. “People started protesting really loudly.”
Eventually, the cafe manager realized La Colombe was in a bit of a crisis and contacted Marc Collazzo, executive director of the Fishtown BID. “It was becoming a little more overwhelming than just one or two complaints,” said Collazzo, whose organization serves as the corridor manager for businesses along Frankford Avenue. “It escalated really quickly.”
Collazzo, who has worked for the City Council and the state House, withdrew the loading zone application and took up the cause of the neighbors, bringing in Councilman Jeffrey Young, whose district includes that stretch of Crease Street, as well as the Streets Department and Kassis.
Turning off the garbage truck
The neighbors finally got a hearing on the first Friday in September. Chobani representatives drove from New York to meet with Inacker and other neighbors, Collazzo, an employee of Young’s office, and Kassis on the Crease Street sidewalk.
Kassis and La Colombe had already begun to address the trash problem by installing a hose behind the building and having workers neat the street each morning. But Inacker and others wanted to know: Why can’t La Colombe just pick up trash on Frankford Avenue like everyone else?
“Look, there are a lot of businesses throughout Frankford that put their trash out in front of their homes, so they manage to keep the area clean,” Inacker said.
That didn’t make sense, Collazzo said, because the La Colombe building was designed with a waste dump in the back. Having the cafe’s trash hauled out front and a giant garbage truck blocking traffic on Frankford Avenue for 15 or 20 minutes each morning just wasn’t feasible, he said.
What about moving garbage collection to 10:00 or 11:00 AM rather than early morning or earlier?
Kassis said attempts to get the garbage hauler, Arizona waste giant Republic Services, to pick up later have been unsuccessful. “One of the biggest problems we’ve had with the garbage hauler, [was]“They will come whenever they want,” he said.
A Republic spokesperson said in an email that the company is committed to “being a good partner in the communities we serve. We take all customer and community concerns seriously and strive to resolve them quickly.”
“We worked with La Colombe to explore scheduling changes and other potential solutions within the constraints of our operations and their service needs,” the company said. “We were unable to reach a mutually satisfactory solution.”
Chobani and La Colombe will pay a penalty for early termination of their contract with Republic, according to a memo that emerged from the meeting. By Nov. 1, they will switch to local carrier PhillyWide, which will operate a single late-morning pickup from La Colombe and eventually the novel Kassis development.
Kassis will apply to create a truck loading zone on Frankford Avenue where all trucks, except UPS and garbage trucks, will be able to pick up and drop off goods.
The pains of rebuilding
Not everyone is joyful with the plan. Ryklin wants the city to put up signs on Crease Street saying trucks shouldn’t stop there, and he’s still calling for trash pickup at La Colombe, and future restaurants and apartments are to be moved to Frankford Avenue
“Roland thinks he’ll solve the problem by combining all four entities,” he said. “You can imagine how the cars will pile up. People will get out of their cars, shout, honk. So this pickup truck will be a disaster.”
Inacker, a Democratic political organizer and former candidate for city controller, said the plan is a “big, positive step” but needs to see how it works out in the long term.
“I want to make sure they are able to live up to their expectations and the promises they made on the street, and we are able to hold them accountable if they don’t live up to those expectations,” he said.
In particular, he hopes that La Colombe has resolved its internal communication issues, so that complaints made to cafe managers will reach their superiors and not remain in limbo as has been the case for years, he added.
He praised Kassis for generally responding to residents’ concerns, such as when he moved a fence that blocked a sidewalk along one of his developments on Frankford Avenue.
Kassis considered the dispute growing pains of rebuilding“Whenever you do this, there are problems,” he said. “But as long as you work with the community — I’ve been doing this for 20 years, OK — as long as you work with the community and solve the problem, it’s good.”
Collazzo said that in a neighborhood like Fishtown that has seen “continuous increases in residential and commercial density,” homebuyers near business districts sometimes find that the systems and infrastructure necessary to ensure harmony between different property uses have not yet been put in place.
“For a trade corridor to be successful and continue to grow, there has to be an interaction — it’s not always easy — between residents and trade,” he said. “That’s where communication comes in. So it’s always important.”
