[All photos for GL courtesy of Brenda From Flatbush]

Last Friday, we posted a big gallery of photos of the now completely vacant blocks of Willoughby and Bridge Streets where Avalon Bay West may (or may not) build a gi-normous commercial and residential tower. If they don’t they will leave behind abandonment, blight and danger where mom & pop ethnically-owned businesses once existed. The same kind of mass demolition is going on on Duffield Street (though not yet at the site of the infamous Underground Railroad houses). What it amounts to is a leveling of a huge part of old Downtown Brooklyn. To some it is progress. To some, it could amount to the ethnic cleansing and de-racification of a thriving, if not exactly, neat and quiet neighborhoood. (It most reminds us of downtown Newark.) In any case, Brenda From Flatbush, the creator of A Year in the Park, one of Brookyn’s most creative blogs and a devoted GL reader sent us these pictures of the ongoing demoliition work on Duffield Street which (assuming the plan doesn’t hit a fiscal iceburg and sink) will create a park. (Should it go Titanic, half of downtown will look like downtown Stuttgart after the allied bombing raids and the rubble was cleared.) But we’re sure the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership will provide a very nice park for all those tourists that will be flocking to those hotels (after the recession-depression ends) and the people living in the luxe condos, nonos and rentals. (We can’t speak to any abandominiums that might become part of our Dead Pool and Blight Me series down the road.) Brenda wrote:

On our way to church downtown, I took these shots of 237 Duffield, whose plywood is festooned with a demolition permit, a stop-work order for unsafe conditions, and an okay-to-proceed-now statement. The houses to the left of the immediately adjacaent house are the disputed “abolitionist” sites. Love that lone office chair.

Yeah, we do too.

Of this, Brenda writes: “I’m not so sure about the poor neighbor with the white cornice, which is currently home to ‘Perfect Crystal Nail’ and ‘Best Total Food.'”