Month: February 2008

This sounds like a very good idea – not only would it provide greenways and protected bicycle lanes, it would help slow down traffic on the Kent Avenue freeway.

I’m sure the parking freepers will object, but this is something CB1 should support.

John McCain almost lost three primaries on Saturday. Luckily for him, the Republican brass in Washington state decided that it wasn’t necessary to count all of the votes.

A year later, life is still tenuous for the proprietors at Moore Street.

Your fare hike at work:

A new B2 bus route connecting Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Long Island City, Queens, to midtown Manhattan.

Nice piece in today’s Times about the working artists at 475 Kent and the community they created.

“Ah, irony,” Scott Bullock, a senior attorney with the group that fought eminent domain in the [Kelo] case.

The linked article is a little disingenuous, in that Pfizer was not a party to the Kelo (the Supreme Court case that gave birth to the phrase “Eminent Domain Abuse”). But it was Pfizer’s relocation to New London, Conn. that was the direct impetus for the City’s acquisition of property in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood that resulted in Kelo. So without Pfizer, there would be no Kelo.

Pfizer has announced that it is closing up shop in Williamsburg (where the company was founded, in 1849), putting over 1,000 people out of work. Assemblyman Vito Lopez is looking to having Pfizer’s extensive holdings on either side of Flushing Avenue acquired by eminent domain, in order to create affordable housing and job incubators. Pfizer, of course, would like to sell their property on the open market. As the first step in that process, the company has supposedly issued an RFP to solicit bids. Pfizer says that affordable housing is a “key priority” in its RFP.

We’ll have more on the merits of Lopez’s bid at a later date, but for now, we’ll enjoy the irony.

I have heard that the water taxi dock at Shaefer Landing was removed over the weekend. Apparently, a new and smaller permanent dock will be installed in “a couple of months”. I suppose that quashes any hope of taxi service resuming any sooner than “a couple of months” from now.

Time Out NY has an excellent piece titled It Happened Here, an informative romp through NYC history & geography. Greenpoint’s contribution includes this entry:

The ironclad Union warship the USS Monitor, which battled the Confederacy’s Merrimac to a draw in Chesapeake Bay, was built at the Continental Iron Works shipyard in Greenpoint and launched on January 30, 1862. The shipyard was located on Newtown Creek at Cayler and West Sts, Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

But it didn’t happen there (or rather there is no there there) – Continental was located on Bushwick Creek, not Newtown Creek.