Author: linked

“It’s deadly,” said Jessie Singer of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group that was already studying the fast-moving strip when 28-year-old Web designer Neil Chamberlain was hit last week.

After 3 years, HPD has finally picked a winner for the Greenpoint Hospital affordable housing redevelopment, and it goes to… no one from North Brooklyn. TNS Development – the winning bidder – has done a fair number of projects in NYC, including a 31-unit affordable housing project on Myrtle Avenue in Bed-Stuy and a bunch of other affordable housing projects in Harlem and the Bronx.

(And by “upstate”, the Brooklyn Paper means Westchester County. Mt. Vernon, actually – about as downstate as you can get without being in Yonkers. And their partner construction firm is based out of College Point.)

This one in Harlem – in case there was any doubt that the City is getting serious about illegal and unsafe transient housing.

Neil Chamberlain, 28, was hit by a car crossing McGuinness on Calyer as he was walking in the crosswalk. The driver didn’t stop.

Local activists say that the McGuinness corridor is one of the most dangerous in Brooklyn. “We’ve been close to begging people to do some sort of traffic calming,” said Ryan Kuonen, an organizer with Neighbors Allied for Good Growth, a North Brooklyn community organization. “It’s a racetrack.”

(BTW – NAG has taken matters into its own hands, working with Transportation Alternatives to document traffic conditions on McGuinness.)

Photo: WG News + Arts

I want one.

Brooklyn Ink has a post detailing the travails of one tenant forced out of 112 North 6th Street.

According to the article, the building has no sprinkler system (which I believe is required for a transient hotel use) and, with the exception of the ZIP112 hostel space, no second means of egress. But even with their second means of egress, ZIP112 is probably not legal:

“The building is commercially zoned,” [DOB spokesperson] Fitzgibbons said in a recent phone interview. “If the hostel is still in operation, then it’s illegal.”

OK, maybe not probably.

The redecorating of Domino continues.

But the vote could come tomorrow.

As of last week’s Council hearing, the owner was offering 28% affordable housing (up from the 20% originally proposed and 25% proposed in his first counteroffer). I hear that the number has now gone up further.

Via Brooklyn Public’s Brooklynology blog, the story of Grandma Logan, who moved to Greenpoint in 1859 at age 21. She died in Greenpoint in 1936, 100 years old, and in all her time in the neighborhood, she left the Garden Spot only three times.

In 1927, she recollected:

We had to go to India St. for a pail of water…there was a beautiful orchard between Norman and Nassau Sts. on Newell St., and many beautiful gardens.

Waiting for Godot at Greenpoint Hospital. It’s been three years since the RFP was issued, and – good news! – HPD is “still on pace to choose a developer for the site in the near future”. That’s reassuring.