April 10th, 2007 · Comments Off on Making Gowanus Green: Learn How Tonight
The final session of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy‘s series on improving water quality in the Gowanus and making the community a greener place concludes tonight with a session on “Green Gowanus.” Speakers will be presenting their experiences of developing and implementing green projects in Brooklyn. There will also be a round table discussion on specific strategies, projects and programs. Speakers include Susan Boyle of Big Sue LLC, Atom Cianfarani of Habana Outpost, Ian Marvey of Added Value and Robin Simmen of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The session runs from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Polytechnic University in the Dibner Library, Room LC 400. It’s located at 333 Jay Street in Brooklyn. Call (718) 858-0557 for more info.
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April 10th, 2007 · Comments Off on Greenpoint Getting Banged: The Video
If you wonder why people living near development sites go slowly insane and some become obsessed with the project next door or across the street or down the block, look no further than this video. It was posted by the creator of the blog One Sweet World, which is not dedicated to real estate and development. We found it because the creator of this wonderful and eclectic blog left a comment on one of our posts about the Magic Johnson project at 110 Green Street. Check out her blog, read the post (which went up a couple of weeks ago but that we hadn’t seen) and most definitely click on the embed below. If you’re musically inclined, lay some guitar or keyboard tracks over the rhythm section.
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April 9th, 2007 · Comments Off on Slime Smackdown: Roebling Oil Field vs. Gowanus Canal
Not to overkill the Roebling Oil Field today, but if the average picture is worth a thousand words, this one is worth at least several hundred, give or take. The top picture is the sheen on pooled water at the west end of the development site at N. 11th and Roebling in Williamsburg that we call the Roebling Oil Field. It was taken yesterday. (We don’t know where it’s coming from–it could be leakage from construction equipment or it could be coming from the ground, but there’s quite a bit of it and you can still smell oil on that part of the site.) The bottom photo is the sheen on the Gowanus Canal. It was taken on Saturday. Gross.
Just to provide context for the photo, here’s a broader view of the west side of the McCarren Park Mews condo site, right below. What you are seeing is like a bottle of spring water compared to what the east end of the site looked like in the fall.
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April 9th, 2007 · Comments Off on Roebling Street Now Has Oil Wells
Six months after oil started oozing into the construction site at N. 11th and Roebling Street in Williamsburg–and years after it was discovered on a site across the street–the Department of Environmental Conservation is trying to figure out from where the Williamsburg Black Gold is coming. There are now two “test wells,” one on the west side of Roebling in the sidewalk next to the Roebling Oil Field (pictured above) and the other across the street, in the sidewalk next to the notoriously stinky cabbage plant (which city inspectors once mistook for the source of the oil smells neighbors were calling in about). So, while it’s interesting that officialdom is trying to discover the source of the oil, and we suppose that better late than never is always a good adage, here’s our question: Why wasn’t it a pressing concern last fall when pools of oil were collecting atop the mud at N. 11th and Roebling?
One of our kind readers sent us the photo above of trolley tracks on Union Street just east of Smith Street that have been unearthed during construction. So, we passed by yesterday (we owe our reader, because we wandered past this scene on Saturday on the other side of the street and didn’t even notice the tracks sitting there. Duh.) and found the unearthed rails sitting by the curb and snapped a few more daytime shots. The Union Street line was apparently discontinued in 1945 and we don’t know when the tracks were paved over. There’s something absolutely fascinating about them being dug up after all this time, though.
April 9th, 2007 · Comments Off on GL Construction Site Du Jour: Northside Piers
We found the Toll Brothers having a different kind of open house at Northside Piers on Kent Avenue yesterday. The sales office was closed for the holiday, but the construction site was wide open and security was nowhere to be seen. For the sheer scope of the potential danger to the public we found, Northside Piers is now a top contender for Construction Site of the Year honors. At least, no cranes have collapsed in Williamsburg.
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April 9th, 2007 · Comments Off on Take a Walk and Listen to "What Happened to Smith?"
Something tells us that songs lamenting the gentrification and development of Brooklyn could become a genre in coming years. Call it gentrirock or developunk. Last year, Radio 4 touched on the topic last year and, now, local indie rockers Life in a Blender are dipping into the well. (Actually, the song was written in 2001, but it’s on the band’s new CD, The Heart is a Small Balloon.) After Ariella Cohen wrote a great piece about What Happened to Smith?, we emailed the band for the MP3 and the full lyrics. Our favorite lines are the last, which say, “I’ll wait it out by the Gowanus. I’ll wait for the scene to shift/I’ll take the stench of the canal/Over what happened to Smith.” The song, of course, is about Smith Street, which is now in the second wave of the gentrification that dates to the end of the 1990s and its rebirth as Brooklyn’s “Restaurant Row.”
Frankly, we’re as glad to find Life in a Blender as we are to listen to What Happened to Smith?, which is great music and touches a Brooklyn theme that is near to many hearts. You can get the song (and sample it) online here and check out their website here and their My Space page here. Their CD is available at Music Matters on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, and the band tell us they’re playing Barbes in Park Slope on May 25 and will do a date at the Old Stone House in J.J. Byrne Park in July.
Meantime, here’s a sampling of the lyrics:
Sale on the dairy in the circular by my feet If I keep my eyes downward, it’s the same old street Then there’s the unlettered awning and the one blue light And the trance like music and the crowd’s all white There’s a clap of goatees Someone’s smoking a spliff It’s 90 percent Manhattan Man what Happened to Smith? What Happened to Smith? (x4) All the social clubs are pulling down their shades The old gang on Sackett’s closing up their blades Where’s the five dollar hero? It’s just $20 and tip. You might as well starve tonight Oh man, what happened to Smith? Forget about rent, don’t’ think about rent, it’s already spent Just try to pull through, pass the well-to-do Dressed down in their thrift clothes Still you’ll see the clues all the girls balanced in their Manolo Blahnik shoes Yellow tinted glasses exposed mid drift Oh man What Happened to Smith? Some TV cop show producer wants me to move my automobile Well up your ass I think my cellular phone you should conceal I’ll wait it out by the Gowanus. I’ll wait for the scene to shift I’ll take the stench of the canal Over what happened to Smith
What Happened to Smith, by the way, was written years before the coming of the Starbucks and American Apparel and other chains.
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April 9th, 2007 · Comments Off on Brooklyn Matters, So Here Are Some Screening Dates
There are more screenings of the documentary Brooklyn Matters–which takes a look at the Atlantic Yards development–coming up. So, we thought we’d list them for anyone interested. As always, complete information about the film is available at the Brooklyn Matters website.
April 9 7:00 pm – First Presbyterian Church 124 Henry Street, Bklyn
April 12 7:30 pm – Brooklyn Free School, First Free Methodist Church, 120 16th Street, Bklyn. RSVP: contact@brooklynfreeschool.org
April 14 4:00 pm – Freddy’s Bar and Backroom, 485 Dean Street, Bklyn. (Freddy’s is the only location on the list that would be doomed if Atlantic Yards goes forward. It is part of the eminent domain lawsuit filed against the plan.)
April 18 7:30 pm – Old First Church, 126 7th Avenue at Carroll Street, Bklyn, Panel Discussion (sponsored by Old First Reformed Church Fourth Mission Committee and Park Slope Neighbors)
April 27 6:30 pm – The Judson Hall Memorial Church 55 Washington Square South (Thompson St entrance downstairs) NYC (sponsored by the NYC Sierra Club)
April 30 7:00 pm – Hunter College Thomas Hunter Building-105 Lexington Ave bet 68th and 69th streets, NYC (Sponsored by the Hunter College Social Action Club)
May 12 7:30 pm – Park Slope Food Coop, 782 Union Street, Bklyn
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April 9th, 2007 · Comments Off on Controversial Fifth Ave. Building Gets Another Hearing This Week
That supportive housing development at 575 Fifth Avenue in the South Slope that the Fifth Avenue Committee wants to develop gets its next hearing this week. This time, it goes in front of the City Planning Commission on Wednesday, April 11 at 10AM. The project got a thumbs up from Community Board 7, but was turned down by the Borough President, who actually wants an eight-story building on the site so that more senior citizens and families can be accommodated. (The Fifth Avenue Committee’s proposal is for a five-story building.) The City Council will actually have the final vote on the project. There is both support and strong opposition in the community to the development.
Another Sunday, another Craigslist Brooklyn missed connection. So many choices this week, but we settled on this one, mostly because it has a certain something to it, especially if you read it with an Eastern European accent. IE, “You were with a black suite and also black pants with white lanes.” Here’s Borat: WE WERE IN ‘Q’ TRAIN AND I HESITATED TO START TALKING TO YOU-M4W, 23
WE WERE IN ‘Q’ TRAIN AND I HESITATED TO START TALKING TO YOU, EVEN THOUGH I FOLLOWED YOU UNTIL YOU TOOK A SEAT IN TRAIN AND I TOOK A SEAT NEAR TO YOU, YOU WERE WITH A BLACK SUITE AND ALSO BLACK PANTS WITH WHITE LANES AND U WERE TRYING TO READ SOMETHING IN NOTEBOOK FIRST, THEN IN NOVEL,THEN YOU LEFT IN 7 th AVENUE BROOKLYN. I WAS IN LIGHT COLOURED JACKET AND BROWN PANTS SO IF U READ THIS PLEASE E MAIL ME AS SOON AS IT’S POSSIBLE,BESIDES I’M NEW HERE, I’M FROM SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE AND I DON’T SPEAK WELL ENGLISH BUT I DESPERATLEY WANT TO HAVE YOUR E MAIL ADDRESS AND PROBABLY MORE…,I ALMOST FORGOT THE MAIN THING: YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL.
Sorry about all the caps, but Borat prefers to scream.
April 8th, 2007 · Comments Off on Gowanus and Sewage, Perfect Together
There are few neighborhoods in New York City, or Brooklyn, where conversations about development and the future immediately turn to sewage. (Although, there are some where the talk can turn to toxins.) In this, Gowanus is unique. Case in point: the article about Gowanus by Jake Mooney in today’s New York Times. The piece deals with the coming neighborhood rezoning and with developments that the Toll Brothers and Shaya Boymelgreen would like to build in the neighborhood. Most of the story, however, treats the subject of sewage in Gowanus, including the geysers of sewage that erupt in the neighborhood during really bad rainstorms and the flushing tunnel that turned the Gowanus from a stagnant, fetid cesspool to the less offensive body of water that it is today. The bad news: Ye Olde Flushing Tunnel is going down for repairs that will take a year-and-a-half. Given our sense that Gowanus water quality has had some pretty bad patches in the last year so, we think it’s going to be a very, very, very long 18 months.
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April 7th, 2007 · Comments Off on Spring is Springing in Brooklyn, Honest
Truth be told, we were freezing yesterday as we shot these photos around Grand Army Plaza and Prospect Heights. They’re hopeful pictures, though, in that they show that in no time, Brooklyn will be full of color and greenery. (And people sneezing, but that’s another story.) On a day like yesterday, when it was way colder than we would have preferred, the flowers give us hope.
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There will be a rally next Sunday, April 15, at 2PM to protest planned demolitions of two blocks of buildings in Prospect Heights that will be used as parking lots. The rally is sponsored by Brooklyn Speaks and will take place on Pacific Street between Carlton and Vanderbilt Avenues — the location of one of the proposed parking lots. The rally will ask the state to stop the demolition of the two blocks in Prospect Heights–including the historic Ward Bakery–to create three enormous parking lots for 1,400 cars.
A member of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council says the lots “will blight Brooklyn for decades.” The develope calls the parking lots “temporary” because they plan to construct the second phase of the project on them. Recently, however, project landscape architect speculated that Phase Two won’t be done for 20 years or longer. Hence, two blocks of Prospect Heights will be vast empty spaces most of the time, except for game days, when they will be seas of cars.
Brooklyn Speaks quotes Andy Wiley-Schwarz, vice president of Project for Public Spaces, as saying, “No other large-scale project in the city has required the demolition of two city blocks for parking. This is 1950s-era Detroit-style urban planning.”
[Photo courtesy of Miss Heather]
We expect to get nasty emails about our problematic construction site feature, but not a thank you note. That, however, is exactly what we got from an artist named RENE iATABA, and in a very sincere way. Turns out the creator of the fence pictured here at 128 Dupont Street, which we posted about a couple of weeks ago, has put a lot of effort into the fence. She writes:
I want to thank you for placing my fence in your blog. I paid a lot of money to have a good fence because I had the intention of painting a mural on it. Unfortunately during the excavation of the foundation the trucks and excavators kept on ruining it.Now that we are on the next step of the construction you will see what I had in mind to do at the beginning. There will be a bridge that have to be built over head with lights underneath, this will give me the opportunity to work until late in the evening. I am building an art gallery/art school for the kids on the block. I hope to have a block party every year and sell the art that the kids in the block produce. Hopefully many more art galleries will follow suit. By the way the panels of the fence will be used as lining for the basement of the building. I used to have a gallery in SoHo and kept 7 murals at street level from 1977 until 1999. You can visit my web-site at– www.reneiamthebestartist.com.
Excellent!
(After we posted this, Miss Heather sent us the photo below. It turns out that 128 Dupont not only has one of the most solid and nicely decorated fences in North Brooklyn, it also has friendly and courteous construction workers!)
Anyone naive enough to think that bike lanes would be embraced in Park Slope–home of a food coop where green is an ideology, not a color–would have been quickly disabused of the notion within moments of walking into the room at Methodist Hospital on Seventh Avenue where the Park Slope Civic Council was holding its monthly meeting last night.
“There is no way in hell there is going to be a bike lane on Ninth Street,” one resident exclaimed before the meeting even started.
A group of Ninth Street residents turned out in force to strongly oppose a Department of Transportation proposal that would add turning lanes and bike lanes to Ninth Street, and in the end the PSCC voted 14-3, with one abstention, to object to the plan.
The primary objections voiced by residents were that a bike lane would interfere with double parking and the ability to pick up and drop off children, for instance. There were also concerns that narrowing the street from two lanes to one lane would cause traffic congestion and that bicyclists would be deposited at the Ninth Street entrance to Prospect Park, which is for pedestrians. There were also a number of complaints that the city’s Department of Transportation had not involved residents in preparing its plan.
“It’s not a plan that was done looking at community needs,” said PSCC Trustee and Ninth Street resident Bob Levine, who led the charge against the bike lane proposal. “Yes, we need bike lanes, but DOT didn’t talk to the neighborhood.” Mr. Levine suggested placing new bike lanes on 15th Street, which he argued is more amenable.
The bike lane and traffic calming plan had its origins in community protests after numerous accidents, including a car that crashed into Dizzy’s, a popular neighborhood eatery at Ninth Street and Eighth Avenue. “We’ve been asking for traffic calming for ten years,” one resident said. “DOT is now saying we have a solution for you: It’s bike lanes. We really feel like we’ve been shafted.”
Community Board 6 District Manager Craig Hammerman, who is also a PSCC Trustee, said that he supported bike lanes on Ninth Street, but not the version proposed by DOT. He said the agency “failed to engage the community.” Mr. Hammerman said he supports “Class Three” Bike Lanes, which are arrows painted on the street, rather than “Class Two” Bike Lanes, which offer a painted corridor for bicyclists. (Class One bike lanes are physically separated from the flow of traffic and were offered by PSCC Trustee Aaron Naparstek of Streets Blog as an ideal solution for Ninth Street. Such lanes would be between the sidewalk and parked cars and offer a landscaped buffer.)
Another resident who said that she is bicyclist said that “we’ve survived without a bike lane” and attacked “people who have a sense of arrogance [that] can come into our community and dictate.”
Mr. Naparstek said that there are “a lot of people who would like to see this plan go forward” and noted that large numbers had turned out in support at an earlier hearing. He noted, however, that it was “unacceptable that community stakeholders were not involved in the planning process.” (You can find Streets Blog items on the 9th Street plan here and here.)
Eric McClure, a founder of Park Slope Neighbors and a PSCC Trustee also spoke in favor of the bike lanes and traffic calming measures. “One of the best traffic calming measures is a single lane of traffic,” he said. “As a cyclist, I’d much rather travel on a road that has a cycling lane.”
The PSCC wields some influence with local officials when it supports or opposes a plan. The Department of Transportation, meanwhile, intends to go ahead with the plan, but there will likely be intense back channel lobbying to try to block it. It is unclear whether other measures to make Ninth Street safer would be pursued without the bike lanes or whether DOT is interested in creating bike lanes on alternate streets, and how residents of those streets would feel about the idea.
