December 15, 2014 | VOL. 50, No. 50
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NEW RO CONSIDERS EMINENT DOMAIN
INSIDE
City studies new site for public works yard
CBRE ACQUIRES IVI • 3
SPECIAL REPORT • 18
FURNISHING DREAMS PAGE 2
FACES & PLACES • 35 Kate Bialo inside the Furniture Sharehouse.
Tellin’ it like it was
Memorabilia line lets athletes write it in ‘In Their Own Words’ BY LEIF SKODNICK lskodnick@westfairinc.com FORMER METS OUTFIELDER MOOKIE WILSON wants you to know something about the moment for which he is most remembered. “It’s not Bill’s fault,” Wilson handwrote as part of a paragraph on a 20-by-24 photo
describing the most transcendent moment of his 12-year major league career for a new line of memorabilia for Steiner Sports. In the photo, Wilson is running after hitting what announcer Vin Scully described as a “slow roller up along first, behind the bag,” seconds before the moment that every Mets fan remembers — and every Boston Red Sox Sports, page 6
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BY MARK LUNGARIELLO mlungariello@westfairinc.com
he letter from City Hall came on a Saturday in September. It was the first Maria La Rocca said she had heard that the city of New Rochelle was considering eminent domain proceedings and that her family’s contracting company was one of the businesses that could possibly be uprooted. “We’re not for sale,” La Rocca told the Business Journal in a phone interview last week. “We were never for sale. We never even made that an option that we were for sale.” Flavio La Rocco and Sons Inc., which has been in business for nearly 17 years, is one of 11 properties on 4.2 acres near Flowers Park being studied by the city for its potential as the site of a new Department of Public Works yard. The current dilapidated site on Main Street is to be vacated and handed over to Twining Properties pending a deal to build a mixed-use development on Echo Bay. The letter’s arrival, La Rocca said, only gave her two days’ notice of a meeting with city officials the following Monday. She said she had been told that if the site is decided to be appropriate, negotiations to buy the properties at market rate would commence with the goal of having the properties vacated by December 2015. Flavio La Rocca, Maria’s husband, said he didn’t think the situation constituted a proper use of eminent domain. He said he was New Rochelle, page 6
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