Cross Frank Gehry off the list of people born in Brooklyn. Because he was born in Canada. The Atlantic Yards architect’s birthplace has never been a mystery, but according to the Forest City Ratner website for the project, Mr. Gehry had morphed from being a product of Canada to being a Brooklyn native. At least, until this was noticed. The Gehry entry has been entirely denuded of birthplace.–Atlantic Yards Report

The building at 48 Box Street continues to be a miracle of virtually immaculate construction. Having been hit by a series of Stop Work Orders, the building has still gone up rather nicely and might even be called a “masterpiece of illegal construction.” It’s friend at 95 Clay Street, on the other hand, hasn’t even bothered with permits, so there were none to violate.–New York Shitty

Brooklinks is a daily selection of Brooklyn-related information and images:

• Brooklyn Assemblywoman’s Bribery Trial Start [Sun]
• Residential Permit Plan Advances [AYR]
• Brooklyn Boy Accidentally Shot in Head [NYDN]
• New Law Lets Tenants Sue Over Harassment [NYT]
• Former ESDC Chair Charles Gargano Won’t Be Ambassador to Austria [Sun]
• Spring Break Comes Early to Flatbush [DITHOB]
• Feedback Wanted from Flatbush & Midwood Residents [Sustainable Flatbush]
• Imagine Flatbush 2030’s Next Move [Brooklyn Junction]
• Message to a Bike Thief [General Greene]
• Grackles Back in Prospect Park [OTBKB]
• Asphalters [Brooklynometry]
• Hoping for Summer with Trader Joe’s [Lost City]
• Senior Citizen American Idol in Bay Ridge [NYDN]
• Falafel Fusion is Open [Kensington Brooklyn]
• Dogs Unleashed [A Year in the Park]
• A Hole in a Fence Screening [Brooklyn Ramblings]
• Get a Good Deal on the Moonstruck House, Reduced to $3.95 Million [BHB]

Check out the lowdown on Jack, which is an “occasional restaurant” that is open for one seating at 7 pm on Saturday nights, every other week or so. It’s at the Brooklyn Lyceum with a fixed multi-course tasting menu that changes each time. If the photo of the apple in the cardamom wine doesn’t intrigue you, nothing will.–OTBKB

This survey isn’t intended to determine whether people want a 20-story glass tower in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens but what they’d like to see there if it’s built. “The ground floor of the building will most likely be a major retailer or a bank. (This is a premium space that will price out most restaurants and smaller businesses.) The second floor will reportedly be either offices or, possibly, a gym. A gym might also be possible on the ground floor.” The blogger will present the survey results to the developer.–Hawthorne Street

If you’re looking for something to do, we highly recommend this list of suggestions and info about things that are coming up over the next few weeks.–Brooklyn Based

No blue skies or sun at the Brooklyn observatory today. The forecast calls for overcast skies with showers this afternoon and a high of 55. Tonight will be rainy with a low of 42. There is rain in the forecast for parts of both Saturday and Sunday, though nothing like last weekend’s deluge.–Accuweather

What we do know is that the House of Whimsy has logged 35 DOB complaints, most recently in late February. The building has 25 DOB violations dating back to 1990, with the most recent being on Feb 21 for work without a permit. Most of the violations, including the old ones, are still shown as “open.” There are an additional 14 violations from the ECB including the always popular “failure to maintain.”

The building at 497 Third Street, which is next to the Tempo Presto location (where work has been going on but no building permits have been issued in many years) has gotten less press. Records show that it’s owned by Carlos Hernandez and has attracted 27 complaints and gotten 7 DOB violations, including several for being an “unsafe building,” plus 10 ECB violations. The most recent complaint in January was for “VACANT BUILDING NOT BOARDED/ FENCE AROUND BROWNSTONE HOUSE IS FALLING AT ABOVE LOCATION.” Last week, OTBKB noted that a reliable neighborhood source said “something is going on” in the building, yet the building doesn’t show any recent permits either.

I found out that this project was slated to start last summer and finish in spring 2009. There is a well made, yet cryptic, explanation of the project here. Just look under brooklyn, Reconstruction of 5th Avenue from 24 St. to 34 St., Brooklyn — HWK732C. By the way, this is probably a good web site to check before moving into any neighborhood just to make sure they won’t be ripping out the street and sidewalk right outside the window of your new apartment. The best part of the brochure is where it tells people with special needs to contact the project manager immediately– guess if you’re blind or in a wheelchair don’t expect to leave the house until 2009.

Just think, when the entire project is done around 2035, it will be time to start over.

The signs are up. The former Maggie Moo’s space on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope–aka the Storefront of Death–is going to be a “high end” nail salon called Dashing Diva, the nail salon part of the equation having been scooped last week by OTBKB. Will it crash and burn like everything else to move into the space? Will nails end the Curse of Seventh Avenue? Have the ritual sacrifices to rid the place of spirits that doom any business to an 18-month lifespan worked? Stay tuned.

Mayor Bloomberg and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced a Residential Parking Permit proposal yesterday. They held a press conference in Boerum Hill that ended up taking place at the same time as Gov. Spitzer’s resignation speech. They used it to announce a new residential parking permit plan that will be part of congestion pricing legislation. Measures would be introduced in the City Council and State Legislature. The program would be an “opt in,” meaning that neighborhoods and Community Boards can decide to join and set their own regulations and zone boundaries. Streets Blog quotes the DOT Commissioner as saying: “Community Boards will make the determinations and balance the various interests to form the most reasonable plan.”

The city’s press release said that residents would be able to “petition” for parking zones starting this fall. Community Boards would have to vote to approve a zone and it would have to be okayed by a District’s Council Member and the Borough President.

The goal is to prevent some neighborhoods from becoming parking lots for commuters. Neighborhoods could ban non-resident parking during commute times or limit it to 90 minutes during certain periods. There are full details over at Streets Blog.

GL Analysis
Like congestion pricing itself, there is likely to be a range of intense opinions on the change, both for and against. What is odd is that unlike cities that have long had resident parking programs there doesn’t seem to be any citywide, or even boroughwide, uniformity to the possible outcome. What is immediately interesting–and possibly problematic about the proposal–is that it could leave the city with an insane patchwork of parking regulations that makes today’s confusing thicket of signs and parking ticket crapshoots look like the good old days of order and sanity. The approval process itself will lead to intense lobbying and political jockeying to either secure permits for individual neighborhoods or to try to have a move killed. Frankly, we’re not sure that a neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach is sound, although to some extent individual neighborhoods here and there already have their own de facto parking policies. If resident parking permits are to become policy, it would seem that large zones with uniform regulations (as per the Washington, DC model) are in order, rather than, say, a non-resident parking ban on the Southside of Williamsburg from 7AM-9:30AM and a 90-minute non-resident limit in Park Slope from 6AM-6PM.

[Photo courtesy of Streets Blog]

Other Coverage:

• Parking Permit Plan Mulled [Metro]
• Mayor Proposes Permit Plan [Sun]
• Mayor Offers Permit Parking [NYT]

The Clarrett Group got its first Stop Work Order at 340 Court Street on Friday. The development was noted on the Union-Sackett Block Association blog. The blog said, “If you witness work being done on the site before the Stop Work Order is lifted, or that is unrelated to the resolution of the protective netting issue, please call 311 to make a complaint. You may also contact Councilman Bill de Blasio’s office at 718-854-9791.” As of this morning, the Stop Work Order was still in effect. As we have noted, it is going to be a long, long, long 18-24 months on Court Street for everyone involved.

Tomorrow’s testimony is not to speak for or against this proposed development. It is to ask Toll to consider other options and expand the menu of choices for when this project goes thru ULURP. The “no build” option is automatically considered in the environmental review.

People can ask can ask for the project to be reduced to avoid negative impacts. The development is 447 apartments so an easy way to reduce size is scrap the 130 units of affordable housing, which probably doesn’t generate profit for Toll. We can ask for more on-site parking to quell fears of traffic congestion.

The big miss of this project is that Toll raises the development above the flood plain by programming parking at street level, which is a criminal approach to waterfront re-development and I doubt anyone will enjoy living there. Let’s ask for some restaurants, cafes, bars, art galleries, etc.. at street level! Toll can even add a few apartments / floors to pay for it!

Interesting.

“Sunday while I was at the point, the parks department was summonsing some paintballers, and as I was taking pictures of them, this woman who never identified herself (pictured above) said “Excuse me you can’t take pictures of officers doing their jobs“. I responded by saying that Yes I can, that’s your misinformed opinion. Nothing came of it and she continued to do her job as you can see.”–GerritsenBeach.Net

197-a Plans are community-developed, but are routinely ignored because there is no requirement that they be followed. A case in point is the Williamsburg-Greenpoint rezoning that allowed waterfront highrises. Here’s are some excerpts from a long piece written by activist Phil Depaolo who is a veteran of many zoning and development battles in North Brooklyn:

After more than a decade of work, community groups in the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg had reached consensus on plans to revitalize their industrial waterfront. The Greenpoint and Williamsburg 197-a Plan proposed a mix of low to mid rise housing in the neighborhood, so it would be affordable to tenants in this working class neighborhood. The 197-a plans proposed that the mix of industry and housing be brought down to the waterfront, but without the noxious industries like waste transfer stations that have concentrated in the area in recent years. And they wanted public access to the waterfront.

The massive rezoning of Greenpoint and Williamsburg that the City Council approved in May 2005 bears little resemblance to the community plans. Ever since the City Council voted for the Greenpoint and Williamsburg 197-a plans in 2001, they failed to lift a finger to implement them. City agencies went into hiding. There were no budget requests to create public access on the waterfront, no initiatives to preserve industry, and no new housing. Instead, the city turned the other way as developers illegally converted industrial properties to unaffordable lofts, and did little to stop the legal conversions. Then the City Planning Commission and City Council approved a sweeping rezoning of the waterfront that opened the way for 10,000 units of high rise housing, and conversion of industrial properties to residential use. Brooklyn’s Community Board One and the Brooklyn Borough President voted against the rezoning…

The details are complicated, but community planning with teeth would seriously changed the city’s planning and zoning process.

Anyone with a hankering for some Atlantic Yards discussion has another chance tonight. There will be an update on Atlantic Yards tonight (3/13) that is expected to draw some public officials. The session will cover the status of Atlantic Yards litigation as well as the financing issues around the development in a very changed economic environment. As for that, the email says:

Speculation has been increasing recently that Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project could be falling prey to the triple-whammy of a slowing economy, the crisis in sub-prime mortgages and the global credit crunch. Big real estate deals all around the country are being put on hold or are being shelved altogether, and Ratner’s planned City Tech tower project, which would have been Brooklyn’s tallest building, unraveled two weeks ago (CUNY scuttled the deal because Forest City Ratner’s building “would be too expensive, too slow and too controversial”).The Atlantic Yards project is turning into the deal that couldn’t get done.

The future of the affordable housing (on which the development was sold to the public by supporters) will also be discussed. (There is growing sentiment that much of the affordable housing is threatened if a real estate downturn and recession swamp the project.) The UNITY Plan for the Vanderbilt Rail Yards will also be presented again.

The meeting is sponsored by Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, Society for Clinton Hill, Fort Greene Association, Park Slope Neighbors, Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, Bears Community Garden and the South Portland Block Association. The meeting, which starts at 7PM, is at the Hanson Place United Methodist Church at 144 Saint Felix Street in Fort Greene.

Is the Kent Avenue Power Plant near the Brooklyn Navy Yard being prepped for demolition so the site can be developed? Williamsburg blogger INSIJS offered up an excellent piece of reporting that strongly suggests that demolition of the historic building is a distinct possibility. While Con Ed, which owns the property, told INSIJS that it is simply doing “spring cleaning,” other sources said the utility is planning to demolish the building. Con Ed has tried selling the property in the past. Meanwhile, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has rejected examining the landmarking of the building. The plant was a Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) Powerhouse and was built in stages in 1905 and 1936. It supplied power to streetcars and elevated lines. It was sold to Con Ed in 1950 and remained in service through the 1990s. Here’s what INSIJS describes at the site:

We visited the site last week, and sure enough, there’s several new gaping holes in the building’s south wall, and crews appeared to be actively removing asbestos from the north end of the 1936 addition. We identifed ourselves to the security guard as a neighborhood blogger, and asked if Con Ed was demolishing the building. The guard happily answered “yes”, and attempted to summon the contractor’s foreman for a more official comment. The foreman, without leaving his trailer (to be fair, the crew was on their mid-morning coffee break), told her (and she reiterated to us) something to the effect of “That’s not our job. Our job is to bring the place down.”

While a utility officials scoffed a demolition, any hope of moving quietly in the direction would seem to have ended.

• Mayor Offers Permit Parking [NYT]
• Incoming Gov. Paterson Protested Eminent Domain in 2005 [AYR]
• Construction Worker Crushed to Death in East New York [NYDN]
• Construction Worker Killed in Wall Collapse [NYT]
• Urban Green Finally Gets Green Light [Brownstoner]
• An Interview with Coney Island’s Dick Zigun [Kinetic Carnival]
• Wednesday Food & Drink Roundup [Brownstoner]
• Where’s Amy Ruth’s? [Lost City]
• Laughter Draws Violence [General Greene]
• “Not Your Average Ghettomart” [Bed-Stuy Banana]
• Men in Pink with Pigtails [New York Shitty]
• An Old SRO? [Ditmas Park Blog]
• 84th Precinct Council Meeting Coming Up [Dumbo NYC]
• St. Patrick & St. Patrick’s Day [Brooklynometry]