For years, residents of Crease Street in Fishtown have been tormented by noisy trash trucks that pick up from a neighboring La Colombe cafe as early as 4 a.m. or 5 a.m., six days a week.
Belching exhaust onto the narrow street and occasionally knocking down overhead wires, Republic Services trucks park by the cafe’s rear door for as long as an hour at a time, load up on waste, and leave behind stinking, viscous puddles of garbage juice.
“Probably the largest trash truck you have ever seen, and loud,” said Jack Inacker, who’s lived across the street from the back of La Colombe for seven years. “The hydraulics on it are screeching, are piercing. It is impossible to sleep through.”
In addition to suffering through the noise and sleep disruptions, the neighbors also 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 racket, pools of muck, and struggles navigating the sidewalks, he actually enjoys living so close to La Colombe, which fronts on Frankford Avenue. “I go there all the time,” he said. “It’s a great meetup spot.” He likes being close to the many restaurants and other small businesses that have helped make Fishtown one of the city’s hottest neighborhoods in recent years, he said, and a good place to raise his two young kids.
He and his neighbors have tried working things out with La Colombe, which has its headquarters in the building. For years they’ve been calling and emailing cafe managers to see if the trucks can pick up out front, or at least later in the day, but with little effect.
That finally started to change around the end of August, when their complaints turned to outrage.
A few doors down on Frankford Avenue, a new building is going up that will have a Sweetgreen, Shake Shack and 61 apartments. Its developer Roland Kassis, who is also La Colombe’s landlord, and the local business association applied for a loading zone on Crease Street that would let trucks service both properties — and remove several parking spots from the already crowded street.
“It would have encouraged more trucks to be coming in and parking there, instead of less,” Inacker said. “And that was kind of the final straw.”
Broken lines of communication
La Colombe and its parent company, the giant New York-based yogurt-maker Chobani, didn’t respond to requests for comment. Kassis, however, was deeply apologetic about the truck situation and said he acted quickly to fix it once he learned about the problem.
“I felt very bad that they were going through that pain,” he said this week. “I said, we want to make it right.”
Kassis owns much of Frankford Avenue in Fishtown and properties throughout the area. He’s credited with sparking its transformation from a rough, post-industrial landscape studded with vacant buildings into a top dining destination and popular place to live. He and Stephen Starr created the pioneering Frankford Hall restaurant in 2011, he redeveloped the La Colombe building, and he’s a co-owner or partner at Suraya, Cafe La Maude, Pizzeria Beddia, and other businesses.
Kassis considers himself a member of the community, and said he’s given his cell phone number out to many people in the neighborhood. Somehow, though, Crease Street’s problems had never really been brought to his attention, he said.
Residents were directing their complaints to a couple La Colombe managers they knew, who didn’t seem to be able to do much to improve the situation.
One aggrieved resident, Gennadiy Ryklin, a physician with experiencing in union organizing, took to snapping pictures and recording videos of trucks idling and blocking the street and emailing them to everyone he could think of — La Colombe managers, the Fishtown Neighbors Association, Councilmember Mark Squilla, and the Fishtown Kensington Area Business Improvement District or BID.
“Traffic was backed up for almost 20 minutes, cars had to drive up dangerously over our sidewalk, and trucks including USPS mail delivery could not get through,” Ryklin wrote in a recent email to a La Colombe staffer, with several photos and videos attached. “In fact, I was almost hit by a car while just trying to snap this picture [of a truck] that drove up onto the sidewalk. This occurs multiple times a day, every day.”
When it emerged that La Colombe and the BID were applying for the loading zone on Crease Street, the block’s WhatsApp group lit up with comments, he said. “Neighbors were like, whoa, this is really gonna affect us,” Ryklin said. “People started to really get loud at that point.”
Eventually a cafe manager realized La Colombe had a bit of a crisis on its hands and got in touch with Marc Collazzo, the Fishtown BID’s executive director. “It was becoming a little more overwhelming than just one or two complaints,” said Collazzo, whose organization serves as corridor manager for businesses along Frankford Avenue. “This was really escalating pretty quickly.”
Collazzo, who used to work for City Council and for a state House representative, withdrew the loading zone application and got to work on the neighbors’ issues. He pulled in Councilmember Jeffrey Young, whose district includes that stretch of Crease Street, as well as the Streets Department and Kassis.
Booting the waste hauler
The neighbors finally got heard on the first Friday in September. Chobani representatives came down from New York to meet with Inacker and other neighbors, Collazzo, a staffer from Young’s office, and Kassis out on the Crease Street sidewalk.
Kassis and La Colombe had already started to address the trash issue by installing a hose in the back of the building and having employees clean the street every morning. But what Inacker and others wanted to know was: Why can’t La Colombe just get its trash picked up out on Frankford Avenue like everyone else?
“Look, there are tons of businesses up and down Frankford that empty their trash out of the front of the house, and they manage to keep their front of house clean,” Inacker said.
That was a non-starter, Collazzo said, because La Colombe’s building is designed with waste storage in the back. Hauling trash through the cafe to the front and having a giant garbage truck blocking traffic on Frankford Avenue for 15 or 20 minutes every morning wasn’t viable, he said.
But what about at least rescheduling trash pickup to 10 or 11am, rather than at the crack of dawn or earlier?
Kassis said efforts to get the trash hauler, Arizona-based waste giant Republic Services, to pick up later had failed. “One of the biggest issues we had with the trash company [was], they’re coming anytime they wanted,” 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 address them promptly.”
“We worked with La Colombe to explore schedule adjustments 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 resolution.”
Chobani and La Colombe will pay a penalty to get out of their Republic contract early, according to a memo that came out of the meeting. By November, 1 they’ll switch to local hauler PhillyWide, which will do a single late-morning pickup from La Colombe and eventually Kassis’ new development.
Kassis will apply to create a truck loading zone on Frankford Avenue, and all trucks except UPS and trash will do pickups and dropoffs there.
The pains of redevelopment
Not everyone is satisfied with the plan. Ryklin wants the city to post signage on Crease Street indicating trucks shouldn’t be stopping there, and he’s still calling for garbage pickup for La Colombe and the future restaurants and apartments to be moved to Frankford Avenue
“Roland thinks he’s going to solve the problem by doing a combined pickup of all four entities,” he said. “You can just imagine how the cars are going to be piling up. People are going be coming out of their cars, they’re going be yelling, they’re gonna be honking. So that pickup is going to be a disaster.”
Inacker, a Democratic political organizer and former City Controller candidate, said the plan is a “great, positive step,” but he needs to see how it works out in the long term.
“I want to make sure that they’re going to be able to live up to their expectations and the pledges that they’ve made to the street, and we’re going to be able to hold them accountable if they don’t live up to those expectations,” he said.
In particular, he hopes La Colombe has worked out its internal communication issues so that complaints to cafe managers reach company higher-ups, rather than getting stuck in limbo as they did for years, he said.
He credited Kassis for being generally responsive to residents’ concerns, for example when he moved a fence that had been blocking the sidewalk along one of his construction projects on Frankford Avenue.
Kassis chalked up the dispute to redevelopment growing pains. “Whenever you do this, there’s going to be issues,” he said. “But as long as you work with the community — I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, okay — as long as you work with the community and resolve the issue, then it’s good.”
In a neighborhood like Fishtown that is seeing a continued “explosion of residential and commercial density,” people who buy homes near business districts sometimes find that the systems and infrastructure needed assure harmony between different uses aren’t in place yet, Collazzo said.
“On a commercial corridor, for it to succeed and for it to continue to grow, there has to be a meshing — it’s not always easy — of residents and commerce,” he said. “That’s where communication comes in. That’s why it’s always important.”
