Month: February 2008

Way back when (i.e., the late 90s), that’s what real estate people were calling Bedford Avenue. It was a rather annoying contrivance by people who didn’t know anything about Williamsburg or how to “sell” it. Which is to say its been almost a decade since I’ve heard a Williamsburg-is-the-new-East-Village remark like this.

NYT profile of Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Julius Spiegel:

“I think I’m about to crack Robert Moses’ longevity record of 26 years and 100-something days with the department,” he says. So he is much relieved that the bane of his tenure, the decrepit pool at McCarren Park, the grandest of the city’s necklace of pools, created by Mr. Moses in 1936 but shut down since 1983, will finally undergo a $50 million renovation and reopen to the public in 2011… “Giddy is how I feel about this pool being brought back to life,”

The water taxi also has routes connecting lower Manhattan to Williamsburg and DUMBO in Brooklyn.

Yes, too bad they don’t have any boats connecting lower Manhattan to Williamsburg and DUMBO.

One of the great changes to occur over the past few years is the reopening of many long-shuttered storefronts. The changes on Franklin Street have been particularly dramatic (likewise Grand Street). Jane Jacobs would be proud.

In case you’re wondering how all those buildings manage to get approved by DOB.

As usual, reactive, not proactive.

Hard to believe that it was 22 years ago.

As of 8:00 am, WNYC is reporting that FDNY has just gotten a fire under control at a matzo factory on the Brooklyn waterfront. According to the brief report, the fire broke out this morning at a matzo factory next to 475 Kent Avenue (there’s another factory next to the building?). We’ve seen no other reports online, but will post updates as we see them.

More info:

WNYC Latest News (click the “Latest Newscast link – right now its the second story)

UPDATE: According to 1010 WINS, the fire is at 799 Kent, between Park and Flushing, “not far from a building that was evacuated a few weeks ago because officials had discovered a matzo bakery in its basement. Officials had determined that grain silos were a danger and could ignite.” WINS also says that “the building” was illegally converted to apartments, but due to ambiguous editing, its not clear if they are talking about 799 or 475 Kent Kent in that reference.

PM UPDATE: Late reports are saying that the fire destroyed a matzoh factory in the basement of 799 Kent, and that the resulting smoke damage has forced the Krula Cheder yeshiva to decamp for other quarters. No word on when the yeshiva will be able to return, and still no word on the cause of the fire itself.

I haven’t run across the Mayor’s Citywide Performance Reporting system before. Its a neat idea – the system monitors the performance of City government overall and agency by agency (and given the Mayor’s wonkery and geek background, I’m sure this a exercise near and dear to his heart).

Overall, we’re doing pretty well. Citywide, 53% of the performance indicators are improving or stable, while just under 26% are declining[1]. As you’ll see in the screen cap above[2], one of the agencies dragging down the curve is DOB. Granted, DOB has a 50.0% improving/stable rate. But it also has 50.1% (must be rounding error) of its performance indicators on the decline.

The breakdown of the performance numbers is not flattering, either. In the fiscal year to date, the number of construction-related injuries is up over 21%. Fatalities, happily, are down to 9 from 12 (though its not clear if this data predates recent fatalities). Another area where the agency shows “improvement” is in the issuance of violations for after hours work. For the current fiscal year, the agency is issuing violations in 6% of inspections, up from only 1% last year[3]. Tellingly, the report does not indicate the number of complaints for after hours work (a number is included for most other complaint categories). Nor does it list a percentage of complaints inspected on the same day the complaint was made (which is the real problem – its hard to issue a violation for Sunday work when you inspect the complaint on a Monday).

On the heels of yesterday’s announcement that DOB will be bringing added scrutiny to self-certified applications, the CPR report indicates that the percentage of agency audits of self-certified apps is actually down, albeit very slightly. On the plus side, the percentage of audits that have resulted in revocation notices is up fairly substantially.

[1] Its not clear that “improving” is necessarily a good thing. If I earned a D last year and a C this year, that is an improvement. But it is still a pretty poor grade. Likewise, a drop from an A+ to an A is not necessarily a sign of failure.↩

[2] Direct links are not working, so you’ll have to go to the site and navigate to the data yourself (just click on the start using CPR link).↩

[3] See note 1. This is not an improvement, its just slightly less pathetic.↩

The Women’s Club of New York held a panel discussion on the state of the Mayor’s New Housing Marketplace plan to construct or preserve 165,000 units of affordable housing. The panel discussion follows up on a recent study by the City’s Independent Budget Office, which found that the City was largely on target in meeting its goals for preserving housing, but not on creating it.

This matches what we have seen here in North Brooklyn: a lot of preservation of existing affordable housing stock (a good thing, certainly), but not so much in the way of new housing. This is particularly disappointing here, because the inclusionary housing program was supposed to generate new housing – and its not (at least not at the pace that was expected).