Crown Heights · Brooklyn Neighborhood
Glass & Glazing Services in Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Two things set Crown Heights work apart: the sheer volume of 1920s apartment-house casement openings, and commercial frontages that live behind roll-down gates. NYC All Glass quotes for both every week, and we schedule around our clients’ own calendars rather than assuming everybody works the same days.
Crown Heights Glass Company
Apartment-House Casements, Gated Shopfronts & Wide Row Houses
More of Crown Heights is 1920s and 1930s apartment house than anything else, and that single building type generates most of our volume here. Six storeys of brick, a central or side entrance, fire escapes on the front or the court, and rows of steel or early aluminium casement openings that have been reglazed piecemeal for ninety years. The practical consequence is that no two units in the same building are reliably the same any more: somebody replaced a run of them in the seventies, somebody else did a different run in the nineties, and the frames now sit at three different depths with three different bead profiles. We survey by stack rather than by apartment, record what is actually in each opening, and price a programme that can be released floor by floor. A single failed unit gets fixed on its own, but we will usually point out when the rest of that elevation is on the same clock, because the per-opening cost drops sharply when they go together and the scaffold or lift is already standing.
The commercial corridors — Nostrand, Utica, Franklin and Kingston Avenues — work differently from a brownstone retail strip. Almost every frontage here closes behind a roll-down gate at night, and the gate is the thing that complicates the glass: the track and the housing sit directly in front of the opening, so a display pane often cannot be lifted straight out and the gate assembly has to come off or be lifted clear first. We allow for that in the quote instead of discovering it on site, and where a shop has been broken into more than once we will recommend laminated rather than tempered glass behind the gate, because laminated holds together long enough to matter. The neighbourhood’s institutional buildings add a third strand — shuls, churches and schools with tall arched openings, stair-hall glazing and corridor screens — and with many of those clients the working week is the deciding constraint. We do not book glazing that runs into a Friday sunset or a Saturday for anyone who tells us not to, and we check the holiday calendar before proposing a date rather than after.
Crown Heights Services
Glass Systems for Crown Heights Properties
A court-facing casement off Eastern Parkway, a display pane behind a roll gate on Utica Avenue, an arched stair window in a shul on Kingston — all of it sits inside these six service lines.
Where We Work in Crown Heights
Property Types We Serve
Four types account for nearly all of our Crown Heights work, and in each one the constraint that decides the schedule is different.
Crown Heights Glass FAQs
Before Your Project Begins
My building has dozens of casement windows in different conditions. Where do we start?
With a survey by stack rather than by apartment. We record what is physically in each opening — original steel, a seventies aluminium replacement, whatever came later — because these buildings have almost always been done in patches and the frame depths and bead profiles no longer match. From that we price one representative line, install a single unit so the board or owner can see the finished sightline, and then release the rest floor by floor. Doing a whole elevation while the lift is already up costs far less per opening than calling us back six times.
Does the roll-down gate have to come off to replace my shop window?
Usually the gate housing or the track has to be lifted clear, yes, because it sits directly in front of the opening and there is no room to swing a pane past it. That is a normal part of the job and we allow for it in the quote rather than adding it later. If your frontage has been broken into more than once we will also suggest laminated glass rather than tempered: tempered collapses into fragments on impact, while laminated stays in its frame long enough to be a real deterrent even with a gate in front of it.
Can you avoid working on Shabbos or during the holidays?
Yes, and you should tell us at the first call so we build the schedule around it rather than rearranging later. We will not book a glazing crew into a Friday afternoon that could run past sunset, we do not schedule Saturday work for clients who observe it, and we check the holiday calendar before we propose dates. For an emergency board-up that genuinely cannot wait, call 718-758-5515 and we will arrange whatever cover the situation allows and do the permanent repair on a day that works.
Why do the court-facing windows in my building fail first?
Interior courts and the elevations behind fire escapes get less sun and far less air movement, so they dry out slowly after rain and the glazing beads, putty and sealed-unit edges stay wet longer. That steady moisture, not age alone, is what takes those units out first. They are also the most awkward to reach, which is why we look at the access on the survey and put a real figure against it in the quote instead of assuming a ladder from the yard will do the job.