Above is a section of the MTA’s new-and-improved subway map, due to be released into the wild next month. Of particular note to residents of North Brooklyn is the orange line that now runs alongside the familiar brown of the J/M/Z line. That’s for the newly revamped M train, which is now part of the 6th Avenue IND system – running from Bushwick and points east through the Lower East Side, and then directly north to the 6th Avenue line and on into Queens. That turn to the north that the M train now makes just west of Essex Street station is known as the Christie Cut – it has been unused since the late 1960s, but has been put back into service to give Williamsburg and Bushwick a direct connection to Midtown Manhattan.

Levine Developers and the City held a ribbon cutting for the affordable housing component at the Edge – the new waterfront condo development on Kent Avenue between North 5th and North 7th Streets. The Edge is the largest inclusionary housing development constructed to date in the City, and it represents a significant step forward on some of the City’s promises from the 2005 zoning.

Amanda Burden, the Chair of the City Planning Commission, had this to say about the project:

This important development epitomizes many of the goals of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg rezoning plan: a significant number of badly needed permanently affordable housing units, magnificent new public waterfront access and outstanding architecture.

I don’t know if the public waterfront access is actually open yet, but assuming it is, Burden is right on two out of three. But unless you really (really) like blue-glass balconies and a never-ending materials palette (seriously, did they reject any material sample?), “outstanding architecture” is a serious stretch. I’m sticking with my earlier assessment that the Edge is Goofus to Northside Piers’ Gallant.

The Daily News reports that Luis Zaruma of Williamsburg fell to his death at a Clinton Hill construction site. The accident happened yesterday afternoon at a construction site “on Bedford Avenue in Clinton Hill” (I’m pretty sure the site is 892 Bedford Avenue, just south of Myrtle). According to a DOB spokesman quoted in the News article, Zaruma was not wearing a safety harness at the time of the accident.

According to this report in the Times, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is now the nation’s largest:

If the team’s estimates are accurate, this spill would be far bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 and the worst in United States history.

But as we all know, the Exxon Valdez pales in comparison to Greenpoint’s own stealth oil spill – the one that the state and the oil companies have taken decades to acknowledge, let alone clean up.

Brooklyn may yet retain its title. The estimates for the Greenpoint oil spill are 17 to 30 million barrel; the latest estimates for Deepwater Horizon (after 35 days) are 17.6 to 28 million.