NYC Repipe & Repair handles repiping Forest Hills properties need on both sides of the LIRR tracks. In Forest Hills Gardens, that means 1910s Tudor houses whose precast concrete walls change how new pipe is routed. Along Queens Boulevard and Austin Street, it means apartments in 1930s buildings whose galvanized branches and risers are past their life. All of it is Type L copper, filed in DOB NOW and priced in writing first. An apartment usually takes a few days, a house about 5 to 10 working days.
What repiping in Forest Hills actually involves
Forest Hills Gardens was a planned suburb. Margaret Sage bought 142 acres from the Cord Meyer Development Company in 1908, Grosvenor Atterbury designed it, and most of its Tudor Revival houses, with stucco walls and red clay tile roofs, went up between 1910 and 1917 around Station Square and the 1906 LIRR station (Wikipedia). Many were built from about 170 precast concrete panels each, cast off-site and set by crane. That matters for a repipe. You can't fish copper through a concrete panel the way you can through a stud wall, so new lines follow the existing chases, closets, the basement ceiling and any furred-out walls. That makes the opening plan the main design task. The original galvanized has had more than a century of NYC's soft, mildly corrosive water, so the usual symptoms are rust at the tap, weak second-floor pressure and pinhole leaks at the threads.
North of the tracks, Forest Hills is an apartment neighborhood. Zoning changes in the late 1920s allowed 15-story buildings, and the population nearly doubled, from 9,500 in 1927 to 18,207 in 1930. The Queens Boulevard subway arrived in 1936, and Philip Birnbaum's seven-building Forest Hills South followed in 1939, along with the Grover Cleveland, Van Buren and Thomas Jefferson. Those buildings are now close to a century old. Above about six floors they run on house pumps and a roof tank, and where the original galvanized risers and branches remain, they're past their working life. For an owner, the job is an apartment repipe back to the riser valve under the board's alteration rules. For a board, the job is a riser replacement planned line by line. Weak flow on a high floor may be the tank or pump, not the pipe, which the apartment pressure guide helps sort out.