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Cheap Meat or Luxury Rentals?
The newly reopened Western Beef in Queens. Photo: Peter Castellana, Jr. The crown jewel in the Castellana family real-estate empire is a 20,000-square-foot Queens warehouse wedged between a Home Depot and a row of mom-and-pop appliance stores. For five decades it was a busy grocery store that offered cheap staples as well as specialty ingredients for the neighborhood’s Asian and Latino residents: dumplings, seaweed, chayote. As the flagship store of Western Beef, its once-orange exterior and its grinning mascot, Charlie the cactus, made it one of the most conspicuous businesses on College Point Boulevard. But in August 2018 it abruptly closed. When I visited the building last summer, spray paint…