Juliet Linderman has the latest on the Broadway Triangle – which is that it is still stuck in Council subcommittees. This is datelined yesterday, so it is possible that there was a vote today (Thursday). If so, I haven’t seen anything yet.

Basically, the Council is still negotiating with itself, choosing sides over the issue. Diana Reyna continues to push her colleagues to deny the project outright, while other council members seem to be trying to find modifications that will make the project better (here’s a hint – the Community Board had a number of good modifications that would make the rezoning a lot better).

Reyna seems to be letting her passion for the issue overtake the facts. In the article, Reyna is quoted as saying “This plan isn’t about planning for a community, it’s about pushing through a political deal… It hasn’t taken into account an overcrowded elementary school…or corporations like Pfizer that promise jobs”. Unfortunately, if Pfizer is promising jobs, they aren’t in Brooklyn – the company has closed up shop here after 150 years, and is taking 1,200 jobs out of the community. (I don’t think the numbers support her statement on schools either, but I’m not so well-versed in that area.) The other night, Reyna told CB1 that the Broadway Triangle rezoning would result in “only 150” units of affordable housing. The actual number – affordable units to be developed on city-owned sites – is at least 488 and may be as high as 650.

Reyna is right to criticize the process. The sole-sourcing of city-owned sites to UJO and RBSCC is wrong, and it should have been an open process1. And those are issues that Council could take up. But on the other stuff, she should get her facts in order.

1.Not that HPD’s open processes work to the community’s advantage. HPD has a host of RFPs still unawarded, including Greenpoint Hospital (the RFP for which was issued almost three years ago). And the RFPs that have been awarded recently have all gone to private developers from outside the neighborhood – not local non-profit developers. The latest are the four small sites that were awarded to Yuco Development – one at Bedford and South 4th, the other three in the Maujer/Ten Eyck area. A number of local non-profits were vying to develop those sites. So sole-sourcing might suck, but an open RFP process doesn’t always help local developers or non-profits.↩

Hyde & Co. Insurance Map of Brooklyn, 1898
Plate 34
Source: NYPL

The Times profiles life in New York City’s wood-frame houses – a building type that definitely has its charms and pitfalls (I live in a 175-year-old wood house, so I know both). But while they are rare in Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, north Brooklyn – Greenpoint in particular – is positively overrun with wood-frame houses. The map above shows the north section of Greenpoint (north of Greenpoint Avenue) in 1898 – the yellow represents wood-frame buildings and the red masonry. Other sections of Greenpoint have similar ratios of yellow to red among the rowhouses. Northside Williamsburg and East Williamsburg also have a high percentage of wood houses. The Southside has a much higher percentage of red (brick) buildings, and South Williamsburg would actually show a lot of brown (for brownstone) and very little yellow.

Most – though by no means all1 – of the artificially sided houses in Greenpoint and Williamsburg are either all wood or wood sides and rear with brick fronts. (And most of those are worse for the artificial siding, which traps water and hides water damage, but that’s another story.)

The wood houses of Greenpoint and Williamsburg are generally not as nice as the Civil War-era wood houses of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, although there some very nice examples in the Greenpoint Historic District. Most of the wood houses in Greenpoint (particularly east of McGuinness) are late-19th century tenements, not traditional row houses.

1. With the advent of EIFS (stucco over styrofoam), there is an unfortunate trend of covering over historic masonry facades. The results are usually awful, and the benefits to the building are much less than a decent pointing job would have been.↩

Hevemeyer Street, November 14

Tourist Season

Saturday may have been a dreary day, but it was a perfect day for shopping on Bedford Avenue. This group came all the way from Canada by motor coach to shop in our little hipster paradise. The grown ups were in the vintage shop across the street.

via ThinkProgress

A week or two Governor Paterson seemed to imply that State budget cuts would halt the Kosciuszko Bridge project before it even got started (um, aren’t we supposed to be spending stimulus money on infrastructure projects?). Now, the Daily News and Brooklyn Paper are reporting that the $1 billion replacement bridge is going forward. Here are two of the designs that are supposedly on the table (the cable-stayed design is apparently the favorite, though I’m not sure I like the bow-legged towers). Thoughts?

Photo: NYS DOT via Brooklyn Paper

Photo: NYS DOT via Daily News