A Brooklyn plumbing contractor that was once in charge of keeping water flowing at the Statue of Liberty and other major real estate sites appears to be no more.
The 57-year-old Greenpoint-based Pace Cos. has closed its doors and let go of all 214 employees, according to a worker adjustment and retraining notification notice that was made public Friday.
The layoff notices are intended to give workers a head’s-up about looming cuts so that they might begin looking for different work and are usually made public a couple of months before mass layoffs are to start. Pace appears to have filed its notice the same day it axed its staff, Feb. 7, however.
It’s not known what prompted the company to shutter. A message left for Pace human resources director Andrea Bondietti was not returned by press time. And no one was available at the company’s headquarters at 41 Box St. on Monday after several phone calls.
Also a message left at UA Local 1, the Long Island City-based plumbers union whose members were impacted by the closure, also went unreturned.
But the firm, which in addition to installing plumbing in commercial buildings also offers fire protection and mechanical systems, by some measures seemed to be doing well. Project sites through the years have included 4 World Trade Center, the Central Park Zoo and Madison Square Garden, according to Pace’s website, and clients have included Two Trees and other developers.
A privately held, three-generations-led company, Pace was also tapped in the spring of 2020 to help install plumbing and sprinkler systems at a four-tent, 1,024-bed Covid-19 facility on the Long Island campus of SUNY Westbury, a project it pulled off in under a month, according to news reports.
As for the Statue of Liberty, Pace was the beneficiary of five contracts to keep water flowing at the National Park Service site, though it’s not clear what years the work covered.
“We feel a little more patriotic. Projects like this make us different. This kind of work gives us a chance to show our versatility, our expertise, our ideas and our men. Besides, I want Pace Plumbing to be around in 100 years when the Statue needs to be restored again,” company founder Harold Block said about his acceptance of the federal job in the mid-1980s, according to Pace’s website.
Founded in 1968, Pace was most recently led by Block’s grandson Adam Levy, who also could not be reached.
According to the city register, Pace remains the owner of its headquarters, a 3-story, 34,000-square-foot building at 41 Box St. called the Block Building, where Pace occupied 11,000 square feet. Construction firms are some of the building’s other tenants, according to data service CoStar.
Once an industrial stronghold, Greenpoint has been awash in residential development and other kinds of neighborhood-altering projects in recent years. But on Monday there were no applications for building permits on file for No. 41 with the city’s Department of Buildings.
