All Affairs Potty Rentals in the New York City borough of Brooklyn serves a booming spring, summer and fall market for community festivals, concerts, parties and like events. Isaac Grazi’s father, Sam, started the parent business, All Affairs Party Rentals, in 1979. Today the portable restroom part of the business employs five — a fraction of the 30 that the party-rental business employs.
Isaac Grazi, who is in charge of the portable restroom subsidiary, talked to PRO about the joys and challenges of running a portable restroom operation in the nation’s largest city. “It’s pretty exciting,” he says. “You meet a lot of people. It’s a good business in the city.”
1. FINDING SYNERGIES WITH PARTY BUSINESS
Grazi is relatively new to the portable restroom business, but it was a natural outgrowth of the party rental company. “We go mostly for special events,” Grazi explains. “We’re a rental company, with chairs, tables, and tents. About five years ago we decided to expand; we got a lot of phone calls for portable toilets, so we decided to go into that.” Party or potty, the main customers are church festivals, community concerts and house or block parties. The portable restroom business supplies some to the construction industry, particularly in the winter. Grazi says the portable restroom business surprised even him. “It was busier than I expected.” The average event uses
10-20 units.
2. IF YOU CAN MAKE IT THERE …
Based in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst, All Affairs gets most of its customers from its home borough and neighboring Queens. Manhattan provides a small additional business, but Staten Island, “not so much.” Crews transport waste to the closest of three New York sites operated by the Department of Environmental Protection, the city’s sewage disposal and treatment agency: one in the Bronx, one on Staten Island and one in Brooklyn.
Summer is the busy time. One big event was Pepsi Smash Live, a concert held in Brooklyn Bridge Park that drew 5,000 people in 2006; All Affairs supplied 30 units.
Another source of business distinctive to the Big Apple is the film and TV industry. “We do a lot of movie shoots, and shoots for HBO (Home Box Office) and shows like Law and Order, ” Grazi says. They provided restrooms for a film shoot for The Departed, a Martin Scorsese movie starring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg. But despite the glamorous sound of that assignment, Grazi admits he’s never gotten to rub shoulders with the big stars. “I’m not on site that often,” he says. “The drivers do tell me about them, though.”
3. TAKIN’ IT THROUGH THE STREETS
Disposal regulation is relatively painless in New York, Grazi says. But the traffic police are another story. “It’s very hard to move here,” he says. “If you want to service a unit, they’ll give you a ticket for double parking and things like that.” Traffic on the city’s crowded streets is perhaps the biggest challenge Grazi’s company faces. “The driving in general is very difficult, especially in Manhattan. You don’t want to get the trucks too big, especially when you’re turning on narrow streets.”
All Affairs keeps its inventory moving, thanks to a fleet of two vacuum trucks and another eight general-purpose hauling trucks. All Affairs relies on Isuzu trucks: A 2006 NQR with a 300-gallon waste/100-gallon freshwater steel tank from Lely Manufacturing; a 2004 NQR with a 700-gallon waste/300-gallon freshwater steel tank from Keith Huber Inc.; and another eight Isuzu trucks from Bruno Truck Sales in Brooklyn that are used strictly for hauling party rental supplies. “As we replaced them we had them custom made to fit toilets,” Grazi says of those vehicles. “Each one of them can fit about 10 to 12 toilets.”
All Affairs’ inventory includes PolyJohn Enterprises Corp., Armal Co., and Five Peaks Technology units. The PolyJohns include 35 PJN3 units; 16 PJN3s equipped with sink and flush; four Fleet models with sink and flush; two Bravo hand-wash stations and two four-person hand-wash stations; and six Comfort Inn handicap-accessible units. The ARMAL units include 35 Starlight models and 116 older units. The 30 Five Peaks units are all Aspen models with flush and sink.
4. UP ON THE ROOF … AND OUT TO AN ISLAND
All Affairs has had its share of challenging assignments. The company supplied 15 restrooms a month to construction crews working on Governor’s Island, a 172-acre New York City landmark located a half mile off lower Manhattan and a quarter mile from Brooklyn. “The only way to get there is by ferry,” Grazi says. But that wasn’t the most challenging job. “In Brooklyn we had a rooftop Fourth of July party.” The customers needed 12 to 13 restrooms. “We had to haul them up in freight elevators.” Getting them up was one thing. Getting them down — full, because after all, who can get a tank truck up on the roof? — was the really hard part. It was a learning experience.’’ Customers “don’t tell us where they’re going,” Grazi says. “Now we ask.”
5. WINTER HIBERNATION
Winter in New York means a lot less business, Grazi says. The busy season runs from April to November. “When it’s busy, usually toward the end of the week, we have about 30 to 35 different events.” Then it gets quiet. Though rentals drop off dramatically, the company doesn’t lay off its staff. “We have 50 or 60 toilets for construction jobs all season,’’ Grazi says. “But that’s not our main thing. They call us — we don’t go after them.”
