The entrance to the former Trelleborg/Uretek plant. A cigarette-smoking, N95-mask-wearing man shoos this reporter away as the man walks in and out of the ex-factory complex. A Queens-based investor has purchased the former Trelleborg fabric-coating chemical factory complex on Lenox Street — two years after a different investor won permission to convert the site into self-storage units and a micro-manufacturing “flex workshop.” That property transaction was recorded on the city’s land records database on May 29. According to the warranty deed documenting the sale, 5910 Yang’s Properties LLC paid $1.575 million to Trelleborg Coated Systems US, Inc. to buy three former factory buildings at 30 Lenox St. That 2.07-acre property was last sold for $930,000 in 2017, and the city last appraised it for tax purposes as worth $1,951,900. The property’s new owner is a holding company controlled by Bi Fang Zou of Maspeth, N.Y. The seller is an American outpost of a Swedish manufacturing company that previously used the Lenox Street complex to laminate fabrics to make them resistant to water, chemicals, and flames. (The plant was previously owned by the company Uretek, which Trelleborg acquired in 2014.) The city’s land records database also shows that Zou’s company received a $1.1 million mortgage loan from the Flushing, N.Y.-based NewBank on May 29 — the same day that it bought 30 Lenox St. Zou, the property’s new owner, did not respond to email requests for comment by the publication time of this article about his plans for the shuttered industrial property. The state’s business registry shows that Zou also controls a company called 58 Place Seafood Inc. Representatives from Trelleborg did not respond to requests for comment about the 30 Lenox St. sale, either. On Tuesday afternoon, a grey minivan with New York plates was parked outside of one of the Lenox Street factory buildings. A man smoking a cigarette and wearing an N95 mask around his chin walked in and out of one of the buildings. The man declined to talk with the Independent, shooing this reporter away after he exited the complex. (He tried to get back in, but every door was locked. He then walked around the building trying to find another way in.) The property sale comes roughly two years after Trelleborg won City Plan Commission approval to convert up to 65,000 square feet of the ex-factory complex into self-storage units. At around that same time, Trelleborg won Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) approval to convert part of the property into a micro-manufacturing “flex workshop” — with a mix of private studios to be occupied by artists, small business owners, and small-scale manufacturers. The applicant who pursued that self-storage/micro-manufacturing plan in 2024 is Frank Taliercio of Ridgewood, N.J. On Thursday, Taliercio told the Independent by email that he is no longer involved with this property in any capacity. Why did he never follow through on buying 30 Lenox St. and converting it into a self-storage/micro-manufacturing facility? “The market shifted,” Taliercio wrote, “and Self Storage was not as promising as it previously was.” The post Ex-Factory’s Future Unclear After Sale appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less