Bushwick · Brooklyn Neighborhood
Glass & Glazing Services in Bushwick, Brooklyn
Working light-industrial blocks, four-storey walk-ups with fire escapes across the front, and the busiest small-storefront retail strip in north Brooklyn. Bushwick glass work is as much about access and permits as it is about the glass.
Bushwick Glass Company
Glass for Bushwick’s Working Shops, Walk-Ups & Studio Fronts
Bushwick is one of the few parts of Brooklyn where a large share of the industrial buildings are still industrial. Along Knickerbocker, Flushing and Johnson Avenues we are working on buildings that have a shop running inside them while we are on site: steel sash with wired or obsolete glass in it, overhead door lights that have been broken and plated over, and shop-front openings that need security glazing rather than a shop-window look. Old steel frames are rarely replaced wholesale here — they are usually cut back, re-puttied and reglazed in place, because the opening is structural and the alternative is a masonry job. Where a building has been converted to studios and galleries, the request runs the other way: a roll-up door opening turned into a glazed front that gives an artist usable north light and still locks up properly at night.
The residential stock sets the second half of the agenda. Bushwick’s three- and four-family walk-ups mostly carry fire escapes straight across the front elevation, and a fire escape over the opening decides everything about how a panel is carried, turned and set — frequently it has to go up the stairs and out through the apartment rather than off a lift. Ornate Bushwick Avenue houses sit a few blocks from 1990s brick-and-aluminium infill with small openings and through-wall air-conditioning sleeves set right beside the glass, and a leak at that sleeve detail is blamed on the window far more often than it is actually the window’s fault. On the retail strips around Myrtle-Wyckoff and Knickerbocker Avenue the constraint is the sidewalk: footfall is heavy, kerb cuts are rare, and a full display pane usually has to be walked in before the stores open.
Bushwick Services
Glass Systems for Bushwick Properties
Our crews cover the whole range here, from reglazing a steel sash in a working shop on Johnson Avenue to a new glazed front on a studio building or an overnight board-up on Knickerbocker. We survey the access route before we quote, because in Bushwick that is usually what sets the price.
Where We Work in Bushwick
Property Types We Serve
Four kinds of building account for most of our Bushwick work, and each one brings its own access problem rather than its own glass specification.
Bushwick Glass FAQs
Before Your Project Begins
Can the old steel windows in my Bushwick building be saved, or do they have to come out?
In most cases they can be saved and it is usually the better job. A steel frame that is sound under the rust can be cut back, primed, re-puttied and reglazed in place, often with laminated or insulated units where the sightlines allow. Taking a steel frame out of a masonry opening turns a glazing job into a masonry job, with lintel and reveal work that costs more than the glass. We survey the frames first and tell you which ones are genuinely past repair rather than quoting for wholesale replacement.
There is a fire escape right across my windows — does that change the work?
It changes the method, not whether it can be done. A fire escape in front of the opening rules out setting a panel from outside off a lift, so the glass is sized to come up the staircase, through the apartment and out through the opening, and sometimes a single large light becomes two so it can make the turn on the landing. We measure the stair, the door widths and the turns during the survey, which is why we ask to see the inside of the building before quoting rather than just the elevation.
Do you need a permit to replace my storefront glass on Knickerbocker Avenue?
For a straight like-for-like pane replacement, usually not. Once the work occupies the footway for any length of time — a sidewalk shed, a protected walkway, a vehicle standing at the kerb on a street with no kerb cut — that needs permitting and it needs scheduling around the morning deliveries on that block. We handle those applications and we normally install before the stores open so the strip keeps trading.
My window leaks where the air conditioner sleeve meets the frame. Is that the window?
Often it is not. On the brick-and-aluminium buildings put up here through the 1990s the through-wall AC sleeve sits directly beside the glass, and water tracking in at the sleeve head or the sealant joint shows up on the sill inside and gets blamed on the window. We water-test the opening before quoting so you are not paying for a new window to fix a sleeve detail. Where the window is genuinely the problem, we say so and price the window.