An undistinguished building at first glance but this structure in South Williamsburg is not just an ordinary brick property building. It is a house to over 1,000 LLCs. It has compartments that extend above plus a small retail store.
Located at 199 Lee Avenue with 3,500 square feet land size stands the Williamsburg Building. Landlords coming from the Orthodox community own some of the mailboxes there as well as some of the city's mysterious property owners. These mailboxes help hide their true identities. It is also used in collecting rent checks from these hundreds of landlords. According to a report from The Denver Post, some landlords hide their individuality because they incurred risks from people who thought of them as wealthy thus sends them monthly checks.
Since 1973, there were already 1,391 companies that were registered to the Williamsburg Building based on the report from The Real Deal, with 13 new companies registered from last month alone. Although not all these are coming from the real estate market, but hundreds are.
Based on the same report, many people don't want to know other people where they are residing or they just want to hide their identities, thus, they opt to using the address 199 Lee Avenue.
The 199 Lee has at least one LLC for every space of 2.5 square feet with registered names that are nearly unsearchable. This includes Italian Bambinos which has just registered some two weeks ago.
MFY Legal Services tenant lawyer, Michael Grinthal, narrated that when he was just a new lawyer, he thought of the Williamsburg Building as a gigantic office building since he would always see 199 Lee Avenue on every paper until he saw it personally and realized it was a corner mailbox store. He added that 199 Lee became famous due to word-of-mouth from the community within Satmar Hasidic and members came to adopt the same business practices.
