• Further Evidence of the Bushwick Moment: Boats (above)
• Edge Tosses Up a Fence on Kent Ave., Gets Ready to Rock
• Old Williamsburgh Bank Tower to be Uncloaked Soon
• Will New, Improved GAP Help OPP Residents Live Longer?
• ‘Burg Hipsterism Continued: Ikon Fake Celebrities Edition
• Will Greenpoint’s Pencil Be Saved?
• Try Again Dept.: Walentas Pushing New Dumbo Tower?
• Curbed’s Gowanus Whale Watching & Real Estate Guide
• Building Collapse Betting Pool: Slope’s 1504 Eighth Avenue
• Williamsburg’s 184 Kent: Now with Weird Orange Things
• Which Williamsburg Building is Uglier? You Decide
• Toll Brothers Are Down with Williamsburg’s Flavors

They are so cute! I’m totally in love with my little Sludgie character. He’s almost worth all the pain and sickness and surgery I had to go through. He’s almost worth the deadly stinky farts I now suffer from. Yeah, you guys didn’t tell me about that. Who says you don’t need a gallbladder. You do! Gallbladders regulate the smelliness. Oh. My. Goodness. Is there anybody out there who knows what I’m talking about? I practically kill my own self when I fart these days. What is up with that! Ugh.

You can check out the full Sludgie flickr set here. The latest Sludgie blog entry is dated April 18, the day our Sludgie died. C’est triste.

Maybe I just like wayward sea creatures. Maybe I’m partial to the Gowanus Canal. Or maybe I needed something to smile about. But for some reason, the tale of Sludgie the Whale — a minke whale who ended up in Brooklyn — really captured my imagination yesterday.

To be honest, I doubted his existence at first. Surely it’s a large dog, I said to my editor, or maybe a section of sewer pipe. After all, we’re always chasing down tips of adults floating in the East River that end up being pieces of cardboard. My colleague pointed out that it was likely the bloated body of a mobster, a species more frequently spotted in the Gowanus.

But he was a whale, and he was dubbed Sludgie by an editor with fond memories of Fudgie the Whale. (We didn’t have Carvels in Western Pa. when I was growing up, so I’ve never tasted this treat. Sigh.)

So last night, I decided that the world wouldn’t be complete without a crocheted Sludgie. I think the world needs more newsworthy knits! So here he is, complete with removable water spout, if anyone is similarly captivated by him.

A pattern is included, should you be able to and be interested in making your own Sludgie.

SLUDGIE NEWS: Sludgie was a girl. AP reports: “Experts still can’t say why a baby whale died in a Brooklyn waterway this week. But they’ve learned at least one thing about the animal: it was a young female. Researchers examined the whale for seven hours yesterday. They didn’t find any signs of significant trauma. Now they plan to send tissue samples to pathologists for more tests.

It’s Earth Day weekend and there are a few events in and around Park Slope that are of note.

First, there’s the Eco*Fair and Recycle-In at JJ Byrne Park on Fifth Avenue. That takes place from 11AM-4PM and will include Electronics Recycling, Clothing Recycling, Bike Repair, a Recycled Fashion Show, Community Supported Agriculture, a Kids’ Clothing Swap, Solar exhibits, environmental activist group displays, gardens, scavenger hunts and composting. According to organizers nothing is for sale and everything will be free.

The recycling includes computers and electronic devices (no appliances). The Recycle Fashion Show takes place at 1:30PM. The Old Stone House is offering composting and gardening tips from 11AM to 3PM.

The Park Slope Civic Council will be having its Spring Clean Sweep from 10AM-2PM and Park Slope Parents are offering activities for children from 11AM-3PM. The “Kids Clothing Shop is from 10:30AM-1:30PM.

Click over to Recycle This for more info on the whole deal.

Meantime, Prospect Park is offering two days worth of Earth Day activities. Events that run both Saturday and Sunday April 21 – 22 include:

Discover Tour: Nature Revival, 3 p.m. Audubon Naturalists explain what can be done to protect nature in Prospect Park and beyond. Audubon Center. Free.

Earth Day Pledge, 12 – 5 p.m. Learn about what you can do to help the environment by reducing waste, conserving energy, recycling, saving water, and protecting our natural resources. Make an Earth Day pledge that will be posted at the Boathouse. Audubon Center. Free.

Go Green at the Zoo, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. Visit the Zoo’s animal ambassadors – the Hamadryas Baboon family – and find out what WCS is doing to save wild animals all around the globe. Zoo. Free with admission.

Saturday Only event include:

Hands On New York, 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. Meet at Long Meadow & Endale Arch. Enter Park at Flatbush Avenue & Eastern Parkway. Spruce up the trees and paths along the nation’s longest meadow in any urban park with volunteers from the community and New York Cares. Call (718) 965-8960 for details.

Youth Earth Day Fest, 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. Join the Prospect Park Youth Council and discover what individuals can do to prevent global warming. Help with recycling, gardening, composting and painting, and check out great music by Steel Sensation. Bring your old cell phones for recycling. Youth Resource Center, located at Bowling Green at the Parade Ground.

Sunday Only Events Include:

B’EarthDay Bash, 1 – 4 p.m. Celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Prospect Park Audubon Center, as well as the birthdays of John James Audubon and Frederick Law Olmsted. Visitors can count on a fun-filled day of musical performances, arts and crafts, and more. Audubon Center. Free.

Puppet Parade. Everyone is invited to join the parade of wonderful, one of a kind puppets created by the Puppeteers Cooperative. Parade begins and ends at the Boathouse. 1 p.m.

[Photo courtesy of Dalton Rooney/flickr]

Images:

• Fifth Floor Window, Brooklyn College (above) [seriously excited!]
• Development Closing in on Bushwick [Bluejake]
• Blue Sky [elizabeth weinberg/flickr]
• Bay Ridge Avenue Subway Station [Bay Ridge Blog from Ewwwwwwww/flickr]
• Carroll Street Subway [Park Slope Street Photography]
• Obligatory Spring Picture [angela/flickr]
• Slope Blossom [Brit in Brooklyn]
• Bloke in Williamsburg [Bluejake]
• Gowanus Sunset [F Train/flickr]

Words:

• Sludgie Was a Girl Whale [AP/WCBS]
• Ms. Sludgie, Please [NYDN]
• Judge Denies Temporary Restraining Order, Demolitions & Protest Monday [AYR]
• Weekend Subway Clusterf….Service Diversions [Brooklyn Heights Blog]
• In Search of Affordable Housing. How About the Pool? [Bed-Stuy Blog]
• Bklyn Links [110 Livingston]
• Want to Work at Habana Outpost? [Set Speed]
• Best Brooklyn Jazz Spots [1 Stop Over in Brooklyn]
• PS 321’s Walk for Green [OTBKB]
• Brooklynite of the Week: Adam Suerte [Brooklyn Record]

“On the Sofa” is a new, regular feature wherein we highlight some of the more interesting comments–positive, negative or neither–that GL has gotten:

Red Hook “Until Recently Wasn’t a Neighborhood”? Really? “It’s simply missing a comma. Should be: ‘Until recently, Red Hook wasn’t a neighborhood, much less dining, destination.’…’Red Hook wasn’t a neighborhood destination.’ AND ‘Red Hook wasn’t a dining destination.’ Hold off on the over-sensitive rants about gentrification until you use a little common sense. [Anonymous]

Hip Wader Time: Gowanus Floods During Nor’easter “I’ve lived in the area for nearly 50 years…it is NOT as habitable as people want to think. I don’t think it will be…not for a very, very long time. No one is saying ‘Keep Gowanus sleazy so people won’t want to live here!’ but some places unfortunately are just not meant to become the next VENICE CANAL…. [Anonymous]

Watch VBS TV’s “Toxic Brooklyn,” Episode 6. “Although the community is unanimous in its determination to have the spill completely cleaned up and to reclaim the Newtown creek, some question whether the resurfacing of this nearly 30 year old oil spill story is being used to attack the community after it won its rezoning battle against the wishes of Brooklyn based politicians (and divert attention away from cancer cluster issue in Williamsburg). The media reports have not included the fact that: 1) More than half of the 17 million gallon spill has already been cleaned up. 2) The remediation process has been going on, with the blessing of local elected officials, since 1992 and continues. 3) The spill is almost entirely under the remote western industrial section of Greenpoint near the East Williamsburg industrial park. There are a few residential streets near Kingsland Avenue that are above the spill, but the vast majority of residential properties are not involved with the spill…6) Articles keep talking about what the long term health effects of the spill will be, but ignore the fact that the spill had been around for fifty years already and health data shows no abnormal spike in health related issues.” [Anonymous]

Here’s Episode Seven of the superb vbs.tv series Toxic Brooklyn. If you haven’t seen it already, click on the embed. Find all the episodes by clicking over here.

Manhattan State Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden has declined to issue a Temporary Restraining Order to block Forest City Ratner‘s demolition of buildings within the Atlantic Yards footprint. A hearing on the challenge to the state’s environmental review and approval of the project, as well as a motion for a preliminary injunction, will be heard in court on May 3rd. According to Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, “The court expressly stated that in making today’s TRO decision it was not pre-judging the merits of petitioners claims filed on April 5th.” The developer will start working on demolishing nine buildings before the May 3 hearing. “It is deeply troubling that Ratner will move ahead with these mass demolitions” before any litigation is decided, said DDDB spokesman Daniel Goldstein.

Gowanus is “one of the great unique opportunities in the city, but one of the great challenges,” Ms. Burden said. “The Gowanus Canal is like no other place in the city.”

An earlier meeting was held on January 25 to present an analysis of neighborhood land use that might serve as the basis for breaking the neighborhood into different zones or areas. (See the map below. You can find documents from the first presentation on the “Gowanus Canal Corridor Framework” here.) Ms. Burden said the zoning effort is “a tremendous opportunity to open land at the edge of the canal to public access” and to deal with issues of the neighborhood’s scale, creating affordable housing and achieving environmental improvements and cleanups. Large parts of the neighborhood are currently only zoned for manufacturing.

Project Manager Howard Slatkin made a long presentation laying out some of the general goals including public access to the canal, enhancing mixed use development, improving the environment, creating affordable housing and encouraging off-street parking. He said, for instance, that there is a “unique opportunity” to require waterfront access as part of the development process and said current waterfront zoning requirements that require walkways on the water up to 40-feet wide might be extended to Gowanus. Mr. Slatkin also show pictures of how canals are used in such cities as Amsterdam and Richmond, although his first slide, showing Venice, drew laughter. “It’s a different example,” he conceded, also citing examples in Hamburg and Providence as well as the Bronx River.

“Creating new waterfront open space can help create a revitalized canal,” Mr. Slatkin said.

He also noted that the canal is in a valley between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, which are both on hills and that the neighborhood sits within a 100-year flood zone, limiting the kind of underground development (for parking lots, for instance) that can be done. (100-year floods are likely to occur more than once every hundred years if storm intensity and frequency increases as predicted.)

Other general city goals include promoting affordable housing. One controversial option is the use of the heavily contaminated Public Place site for affordable housing. Another is the use of inclusionary zoning, which gives developers density bonuses of up to 33 percent for including affordable units either in a development or nearby.

The meeting broke up into nine discussion groups where resident talked about what they’d like to see come out of the zoning and planning process. In one group that we sat in on, residents discussed creating a continuous park-like esplanade along the canal. One proposed developing cafes and restaurants on the water. Another suggested a small museum dedicated to Gowanus’ industrial past. Another wanted a facility for performance and concerts. One resident asked for more access to the water itself, but a city official said that boating might not be included in the early version of the plan because of pollution issues. Residents in the group we watched also said they wanted to make sure that environmental cleanups are monitored very closely and that new developments be required to include solutions so that they don’t add to the current amount of sewerage and storm runoff that goes into the canal.

Another group we watched that was being run by Ms. Kapur of the Brooklyn planning office was focusing on ways to preserve industry in the neighborhood and balance it with new development and public access. One business owner said, “We need to be where we are.”

When Ms. Burden, who was going from group to group, joined the discussion, Joe Ferrara of Ferrara Brothers Concrete, which occupies a prime lot on the canal that is being eyed for redevelopment as part of Public Place, took her aside. He noted that family bought the land in 1973 so that it could have access to barges and that volume is 245 percent higher this year than last. He listed all the major New York City projects for which Ferrara is supplying concrete, including the massive new water tunnel being built and WTC site redevelopment. “To throw us to the wolves is really not a good idea,” he told Ms. Burden.

All of the discussions we saw were polite and thoughtful, although dozens of people left the meeting when it was clear they wouldn’t be able to make public statements to the entire audience. Generally, residents seemed to want contextual zoning, a clean up of the canal and a way to handle competing uses such as manufacturing and public access to the canal.

Speaking toward the end of the meeting, City Council Member David Yassky cited the controversial Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning as “a good model to look to” for rezoning Gowanus. Mr. Yassky said he was not referring to the height of buildings allowed under the rezoning (up to 40 stories), but to a process that “accommodated all interests.”

Michael Ingui, who is co-chair of the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corp., which produced a Gowanus Comprehensive Plan that was released late last year and has created the Gowanus Canal Conservancy to push for a cleanup, said the meeting “is a great start to the process” and that he was impressed at the range of community interests that had come and that were able to work together.

More meetings with City Planning will follow and there will be a long series of presentations and public hearings before any rezoning is approved. Stay tuned.

Did you think Sludgie, who died in Gowanus Bay on Wednesday evening, was the first Gowanus whale? We did. But we were wrong. A GL reader pointed us to information on the placeinhistory website from the Brooklyn Eagle in June 1952. That article said that a baby whale tried to move into the canal itself on an unidentified date in the 1940s or 1950s and got stuck at the pumping station:

Mike Harrigan, who has spent 29 years on harbor duty with the Police Department, really considers Gowanus a ‘region of the dead,’ like the River Styx of mythology. He should – he has picked up, he recollects, ‘a couple of thousand dead bodies’ while on duty there and on the now filled-in Wallabout Canal. The Canal vet also remembers when a baby whale tried to make the Canal his home and got stuck in the pumping station installed to move the Aroma de Gowanus along. He doesn’t notice the olfactory impact of the Canal – thinks the Canal has cost him his sense of smell. – From the Brooklyn Eagle, June 22, 1952

No word on that whale’s ultimate fate, except that we will note that Gowanus water quality today is like the contents of a bottle of Poland Spring compared to what it was in the 40s and 50s.

Related Posts:
Sludgie, We’re Going to Miss You

Sludgie, the Gowanus whale that delighted us all and broke our hearts with his/her death on Wednesday, was recovered from the waters of Gowanus Bay yesterday. The whale had been tied to a dock overnight, but slipped from a knot on a first attempt to life the body from the water. Divers were called in to recover him/her. Richard Pyle from the Associated Press picks up the narrative:

A day after it died while splashing around in a remote backwater of New York Harbor, the body of a baby whale was retrieved by police divers on Thursday and taken to an Army Corps of Engineers dock in New Jersey for a necropsy to possibly determine what caused its demise.

The 12-foot carcass was lifted by a crane onto the deck of the Hayward, a Corps workboat, after two NYPD Scuba Team divers attached ropes to its tail in Gowanus Bay, in an industrial section of Brooklyn. The dead whale had been tied to a pier at a Hess Oil Co. facility overnight, but slipped its rope on the first attempted lift, prompting the Corps to call in the divers.

“It was a ‘might knot’ _ it might hold and it might not,” said the Hayward’s captain, Brian Aballo.

Detective Sgt. Paul Reynolds, 40, and Detective Mike Cocchi, 39, descended into what they called “zero vis” in the murky outlet from Brooklyn’s notoriously polluted Gowanus canal. Using a “pattern search” method, Reynolds said he “bumped into the whale’s tail on the first pass,” 30 feet down.

“This was my first whale,” said Reynolds, whose job is usually searching for human bodies or other submerged evidence.

Once out of the water, the whale’s belly revealed a number of bloody scratches as if it had scraped itself on the bottom or underwater obstacles.

At the Corps of Engineers Caven Point facility in Jersey City, N.J., the carcass was to be placed on a dock for the necropsy by experts from the Long Island-based Riverhead Foundation for Research and Preservation.

Experts say the whale was about a year old and was probably too young to have survived on its own. If that is the case or if Sludgie was sick, it’s sad, but it’s somehow a little comforting to know that the water coming out of the Gowanus itself didn’t kill him/her. We await news on the cause of Sludgie’s demise.

What you are looking at is the Hotel Le Bleu, as seen yesterday, now revealing itself in all its glory on the Gowanus side of Fourth Avenue. The hotel is slated for a July opening. It’s an eight-story boutique hotel with 48 rooms designed by Andres Escobar. There will be a restaurant, which the Brooklyn Eagle reports will be called “The View” on the eighth floor and, as you can see, there is parking in the canyon-like space out front. There is also apparently going to be a “rooftop lounge,” which should provide superb Gowanus panoramas. Among other things, rooms will have glass-walled showers some of which will allow views of Gowanus and beyond while one is taking a shower.

“I predict it will become one of New York City’s most acclaimed destinations,” Escobar told the Eagle.

Glass walled showers with views of the Gowanus!

Related Post:
Call It Hotel Le Bleu

• David Walentas Stirs Up Trouble [Brooklyn Enthusiast]
• Oder Continues to Shed Valuable Light on Atlantic Yards [No Land Grab]
• Will DOT Come Clean on “De-Mapping” Part of Fifth Avenue? [AYR]
• Ratner Awaits Demolition Ruling [BP]
• DOT Plans for Grand Army Plaza [Streets Blog]
• Ex-Brooklyn Judge Convicted of Taking Bribes [NYP]
• 106 Green Street Redux [newyorkshitty]
• Gowanus Sights [Tugster]
• Bug Love at the Botanic Garden [Brooklyn Record]
• Ocean Architecture [Kensington Brooklyn]
• Why Some Storefronts are Taller Than Others [Myrtle Minutes]
• Tax Man Cometh for Brawta [Eater]
• TONY Names Dumbo’s Rebar as Best New Bar [Dumbo NYC]

Yesterday, the Daily News ran an article about the continuing battle over the future use of two shuttered Brooklyn fire houses, and the fact that some non-profit groups were anxious cut a deal with the city for the properties. Activist Phil DePaolo, who was one of the leaders of the fight to keep Engine 212 in Williamsburg open, has more to say on the subject. In an email, Mr. DePaolo writes:

The saddest part of this whole Firehouse issue is that many Not for Profits who never made any effort to help the communities who were fighting the Engine closings are now climbing over each other to take the houses for their own use. Mayor Bloomberg has made it clear that reopening the Engine companies is not an option and is not to be raised as an issue.

Here in Williamsburg many have justified giving up the fight to restore our Engine by saying that the Engine Company is obsolete and a new firehouse could be built at a later date. Yet they don’t say where this could happen. Land in Northside Williamsburg is going for over a Million dollars for a 20×100 lot today. By 2010 land cost will be much higher and public land will all be absorbed by development. So how would land be acquired for a firehouse? Could some homes that are still remaining in the community be taken by eminent domain for a firehouse in the future? The claim that Engine 212 is obsolete is also debatable…

In Calendar Year 2002 the last full year before Mayor Bloomberg closed six Engine companies the F.D.N.Y averaged 4:13 sec to a Structural fire. They responded to 26,248 Structural Fires in 2002. In just released 2006 Calendar year response numbers the F.D.N.Y averaged 4:29 sec to a Structural Fire. They responded to 27,817 Structural Fires in 2006…

Now all the huge towers that are being built on the former first due are of Engine 212 on the Williamsburg Greenpoint waterfront will require greater response to a fire. A HIGH-RISE MULTIPLE DWELLING FIRE requires a Response of 5 engines, not two. So instead of beefing up resources on the Williamsburg Greenpoint waterfront Mayor Bloomberg closed E212 and also closed E209 in Nearby Bushwick. It is also not lost on the people of Greenpoint and Williamsburg that Mayor Bloomberg changed his mind on closing the engine company nearest his own address…

I remain steadfast in my belief that Engine 212 and Engine 204 should be returned to service returned to the communities as needed Firehouses.

The two Brooklyn fire houses in question are Engine 204’s building on DeGraw Street in Cobble Hill and Engine 212’s quarters on Wythe Ave. in Williamsburg.

Omar Robau, the person behind the always superb Coney blog Kinetic Carnival has outdone himself. Check out his Thorasic Park vid below or click over to his blog item with the vid. It’s excellent. And, while you’re at it, check out his post on Predictions of a Thor-Coney Future. Us, we’re simply excited that the weather this weekend may be Coney-friendly for the first time since the season started in a cold, wet way.

It may seem frivolous to be sad about a whale dying during a week in which 32 people were murdered by a maniac and on a day in which nearly 200 people were killed by car bombs in Baghdad. The whale had gained the nickname Sludgie (originally bestowed by the Daily News because of Fudgie the Whale ice cream cakes) thanks his presence near the Gowanus Canal, and its appearance was one of those things that diverted attention from the awful news swirling around this week. Dare we say that the Gowanus whale put a smile on our faces?

Today’s New York Times said that the whale was “delighting and surprising even the most hardened of Brooklyn residents” and it headlined its story “Frolicking Visitor Delights Hearts, Then Dies.” Newsday noted that the whale had “captured the city’s imagination.” The Daily News said the wayward whale “captivated the city.” Even Mayor Bloomberg had felt compelled to say something about Sludgie, noting that “My thoughts are with the whale.”

Reports about the whale’s death conflicted. Early reports said that it beached itself on a dock, but later reports said it showed signs of distress, then beached itself on some rocks and died. Early stories said ropes were put around it so it could be towed today for a necropsy. Others said it sank and will be found when it floats to the surface.

While we worried about its health, the media attention it garnered was fun to see and the chance that the whale would make it back out to sea or be rescued was enough to counterbalance the concern that it had wandered into water that we knew was especially fouled by this week’s Nor’easter.

So, yes, we were very depressed when we learned of Sludgie’s demise last night, sad that this beautiful creature hadn’t survived and a little selfishly upset that the days of Gowanus whale watching had abruptly come to an end. We love animals and we especially like tales of (non-rodent) urban wildlife, so the whale’s death produced the same empty feeling we had after Hal, the Central Park coyote died and the upset we’ve felt about the poaching of the Brooklyn Parrots. Yes, we understand that we live in a city in which tragedy is all around us every day–look at the number of children that have been hit by cars and killed in recent months or the tragic toll of that awful fire in the Bronx–but a story like that of the Gowanus whale can touch the heart too, albeit in a different way.

We’re sure the marine biologist will figure out why the whale died, and if anyone is still interested it will be reported. They will probably find out the whale was sick and disoriented. We certainly hope it wasn’t the Gowanus that killed him/her. The fact that we still tolerate rivers of sewage flowing right into the Gowanus during rainstorms–and that the pollution goes right into New York Harbor and eventually into the Atlantic–is as astounding as a whale showing up in the Gowanus Bay, but that is a different issue.

For now, though, we simply wish there had been a happy ending to this unexpected whale tale. Thanks for lifting our spirits, Sludgie.

Related Post:
Sad News: Gowanus Whale is Dead

• 317 Stories About the Gowanus Whale [Google News]
• Frolicking Visitor Delights Hearts, Then Dies [NYT]
• Tragedy: Poor Sludgie Succumbs in the Gowanus [NYDN]
• Young Whale Found in New York Harbor Dies [AP/1010Wins]
• Baby Whale Dies in Brooklyn Canal [7online]
• Baby Whale Dies [Newsday]
• Baby Whale Dies After Days in Gowanus Canal [Sun]
• Experts Watch Whale for Second Day [AP/Yahoo]
• Curbed’s Gowanus Whale Watching & Real Estate Guide [Curbed]
• Brooklyn’s Bravest [Z. Madison]

In case anyone wants a refresher about what’s on the site, we were reminded yesterday when someone emailed us a link to a summary of the four big cleanup sites in Gowanus, along with their contents, that have been compiled by someone at Montclair State University in New Jersey working on an industrial archeology project. (Interest in our Gowanus runs far and wide.) The toxic include volatile organic compounds and semi-volatile organic compounds (including napthalene and mixed xylenes), metals, benzene, acenaphthene, phenol and lead. Several of these are in groundwater at concentrations that Whole Foods says are not significant.

Related Posts:
The Ground Beneath Gowanus: Whole Foods Edition
Whole Foods Execs Say Toxics Are Under Control

In 1990, a hearing was held where then City Councilman Age Gerges, Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, and Congressman Steve Solarz all testified against landmarking. The Commission sat on the issue until now. In the interim, the local community board has reaffirmed its stance to demolish the pool and make it 75 percent smaller. The Parks Department is going along with this.

Independent Friends of McCarren Park, Inc., has opposed Community Board 1 on this question consistently over the years. Tax money was spent in April of 2001 on a Vollmer Associates plan that essentially rubber-stamped what the Parks Department wanted.

We believe the acceptance of the Vollmer plan is incompatible with the whole concept of landmarking. It would be the equivalent of landmarking Grand Central Station, and then allowing a condominium to be constructed in the middle of it.

The local community board has tried to bamboozle the community and public officials by stating it is in favor of an Olympic-sized pool, but fails to mention that an Olympic-sized pool is only one-quarter of the size of the current McCarren Pool. We believe that the Vollmer plan means destruction of McCarren Pool, not its restoration…We have always believed that the underlying motivation to reduce the size of the pool has been to discourage the chartered buses coming into Greenpoint from Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The vandalism and petty crime complained about in the last years of McCarren Pool’s operation was tolerated while the population was white, but when it changed to black and the management of the Parks Department became more indifferent, the fate of the poll was endangered.

Always fun when the subject comes to McCarren Pool. Speaking of the Parks Department, it continues to operate out of public view and without public notice about its decisions about programming at the pool. This might not be of interest in many case, but in the case of McCarren Pool, its decisions have sparked a variety of protests in the community. There are groups, for instance, that oppose turning the pool over to promoters such as Live Nation for big ticket concerts and others that oppose big concerts at the pool because of the noise and disruption for neighbors.

Case in point: It appears there will be some big concerts at the pool this summer. The Parks Department hasn’t announced this, but word is slowly leaking out about shows. For instance, Cat Power will play on July 7. A check of the Live Nation website didn’t reveal any shows posted yet, but it continues to list McCarren Pool as a concert venue. It is safe to assume that the Parks Department has once again turned over use of McCarren to a private concert promoter–Live Nation?–for some big summer shows.

• A $5.6 Billion Forest City Ratner Lie? [AYR]
• Call it the Park Slope Triangle [OTBKB]
• Bay Ridge Church Selling Out [Brownstoner]
• Salsa, Baby [Brooklyn Record]
• The Smell of Coney Island [Gothamist]
• Gravity + Construction Work = Building Collapses [IMBY]
• Former Brooklyn Dem. Boss Clarence Norman Free on $160K Bond [Sun]
• 40th Council District Special Election, April 24 [Living in Victorian Flatbush]
• Connecticut Muffin Coming to Cortelyou Road [Kensington Brooklyn]
• Coney Hoopla! [Kinetic Carnival]
• Bushwick HS Students in National Competition [NYDN]
• South of Navy Yard Artists Stroll Coming in May [Bed-Stuy Blog]
• Closed Firehouse Debate Continues, Especially in Williamsburg [NYDN]

[Photo courtesy of bicyclist/flickr]

Some news–mainly of the bad variety–from the Boerum Hill front:

1) Zoila is reported to be closing. The sandwich spot on Hoyt Street is said to be looking for a new space on Atlantic Avenue. Until then, where to go for something on a Ciabatta?

2) Locals continue to mourn the imminent demise of the Brooklyn Inn at Bergen and Hoyt. Its last day is April 30. On May 1, the owners of the building take control of the space. While it’s said the space will turn into some kind of bistro-ish restaurant, and emailer writes, “Get thee quick to the bar for a last pint. Equally let’s hope it stays a nice cozy local bar…just like it is.”

3) Brawta on Atlantic Avenue and Hoyt Street has been seized by the Feds. Uh huh. Our friends at Eater report via the EaterWire that Brawta was seized for failure to pay taxes. We haven’t walked past it, but we can only assume this bodes equally ill for Brawta Outpost in Park Slope.