Category: Articles

Domain Name For Sale

06/02/2011 | 1 Comment

In case you haven’t heard, the postal service is splitting off half of the 11211 zip code into a new zip code (11249 – doesn’t exactly roll trippingly off the tongue). This is happening because there are so many new dwelling units west of the BQE that the post office can’t keep to its delivery schedules.

In a sign that the Postal Service is still operating in the (early) 20th century, there isn’t any information about this zip code change on their website – just a letter that appeared in everyone’s mailboxes yesterday. And apparently this doesn’t mean that “West Williamsburg” will get a new post office, just a new zip code. So we can expect the same substandard service with a far less snappy zip code.

So, I guess after 12 years, maybe it’s time to retire brooklyn11211.com (or broker a trade with this guy). No reasonable offer refused.



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Bushwick Inlet Park Update

05/26/2011 | Comment

BIP plan

Bushwick Inlet Park – Someday.


Curbed has a post today headlined “Long-Delayed Bushwick Inlet Park Now Planning for 2012“. What they mean is that the big pile of dirt on Kent Avenue between North 9th and North 10th Streets will become the headquarters for North Brooklyn’s Parks operations will open in “winter 2012”.

Curbed mistakenly says that the “original plan, when the first phase of park construction kicked off back in 2009 after several delays, was for the whole 28-acre project to be done this summer”. Actually, the plan was only to have this little building completed by this summer. But even that is not going to happen.

So this seems like a good time to check in on the status of Bushwick Inlet “Park”. You might remember that it was the major open space concession in the 2005 rezoning of Greenpoint and Williamsburg – a 28-acre waterfront park for two neighborhoods that historically ranked near the bottom in terms of open space. Bushwick Inlet Park represents over three-quarters of the new park space promised under the 2005 rezoning. That rezoning passed six years ago this month. Hundreds of new apartments have been constructed on the waterfront at the Edge and Northside Piers. Thousands of new apartments have been constructed on sites inland from the waterfront.

So how is this jewel of the North Brooklyn waterfront coming along?

We have a soccer field. It’s a very nice soccer field, but it is not a 28-acre soccer field.

There is a big pile of dirt where the Parks headquarters will someday be, and that project is actively under construction. Of course that headquarters was supposed to “be” this summer. Instead, it is now “on schedule” for completion in winter 2012. In other words, it is about a year and a half behind schedule.

Someday, that soccer field will look out on a waterfront esplanade, a restaurant and a pier-like structure. But right now it looks out on a chain link fence, and the esplanade is but a promise.

That’s the parcel between North 9th and North 10th Streets, which accounts for about 15% (4.1 acres) of the promised park.

There is less progress on the other 24 acres. To start with, the City doesn’t own most of that land – all they’ve managed to acquire is the 1.9-acre former Sanitation lot on Kent between North 11th and North 12th. The CitiStorage site (6.8 acres between North 10th and North 12th), the Bayside Fuel Oil site (7.3 acres between North 12th and North 14th) and the Motiva site (2.4 acres along Quay Street) are still privately owned.* Even if they were acquired today, it would take the City many years and many millions of dollars to clean them up and turn them into a park.

Yes, times are tough and the budgets are tight. But the 2005 rezoning did come with an explicit promise – the private sector would build a lot of apartments, and the City would build some parks and open space. The private sector has kept up its end of the bargain – according to the US Census, about 2,200 people were added to the census tracts covered by the rezoning area between 2000 and 2010 (and many more units have come online in the last year). The City has not kept up its end of the bargain – having turned only 3.1 acres of Bushwick Inlet Park into actual, usable parkland.

*If you’re doing the math, all that only adds up to 22.5 acres. There is an additional 5.5 acres or so taken up by the streets between these various lots. Presumably they are City-owned, but they aren’t park either. The East River State Park, between North 7th and North 9th, is another 6 acres or so, but is not included in these numbers.

New East River Ferry Launches June 13

05/26/2011 | Comment

eastriverferrymap.jpg

East River ferry service map


As reported in the Brooklyn Paper this morning (and on Brownstoner), the new East River ferry service is set to begin service in mid June.

I met with the operators of the new service a week or so ago, and am very excited about the new service. As you may have guessed, I have been a pretty frequent rider on the former Water Taxi service. The service that NY Waterway, the new operator of the route, will be implementing in two and half weeks will be a vast improvement over the Water Taxi service (thanks in large measure to city subsidies). Instead of two or three boats in the morning and two or three boats in the afternoon, the Waterway service will run continuously from 7 in the morning to 8 at night. And instead of an hourly schedule at each stop, the new service will have boats departing every 20 minutes during peak commuting hours and every 30 minutes other times.

Add in new ferry stops at North 6th Street and India Street, and all of a sudden ferry service on the East River is a commuter service on the city model, rather than the suburban model. No longer will you have to make the 8:30 boat or risk an hour wait for the next boat (or a long walk back to the J train!). The additional stops on the Northside and in Greenpoint will bring the ferry service closer to a lot more commuters. And for people commuting to midtown, there will be a shuttle bus running in a loop from 34th to 42nd Street, so there is the prospect of a single-fare ride.

Another bonus for residents of Long Island City and north Brooklyn is the weekend service, which will also run on a half-hour schedule and will include one-boat service to Governor’s Island!

Things still won’t be perfect, though. For most commuters, taking the ferry will mean two fares – until the MTA and the City figures out how to do MetroCard transfers from the ferry to the buses and subways, commuting by ferry will only be viable for people who live and work close to the ferry stops (on the other hand, if you live in northern Williamsburg or Greenpoint and work in DUMBO, you now have a pretty direct commute, and if you live in Greenpoint and work in Midtown, you could conceivably kiss the G train goodbye). I’m also concerned that NY Waterway’s bike policy will make it harder for people to commute on two wheels.

And even with city subsidies, the service is not cheap. A discounted fare will run you about $4, which is a bit less than the Water Taxi charged, but still more the twice the cost of a subway fare with a monthly MetroCard. This – and the transfer issue – is something that the city needs to come to grips if it wants intra-city commuter ferry to work.

But all in all, the changes coming with the new NY Waterway service are very good first steps to making that kind of service a reality.

Update: Had an email from the ferry folk saying that service will start “mid June”, not on the 13th. The sooner the better.

Southside Firehouse to Close?

05/18/2011 | Comment

First they came for the teachers, now it’s firefighters (or at least firehouses) that are on the budgetary chopping block.

There are 20 firehouses on the City’s list of potential firehouse closings released today, and 40% of them are in Brooklyn. Three of the eight Brooklyn houses slated for closing are in North Brooklyn:

In addition, Ladder 128 at 33-51 Greenpoint Avenue in Long Island City is a backup unit for many parts of Greenpoint.

So basically, every neighborhood in North Brooklyn is cut. Well, every neighborhood except the Northside – it lost its firehouse in 2003. At least that one didn’t go down without a fight.

Brooklyn FDNY

Brooklyn fire houses
Source: Brooklyn.com

I haven’t delved into the numbers behind all of these closings in our community, but the removal of Ladder 104 from the Southside will leave only three units in Williamsburg west of the BQE (Engine 221, which will remain at South 2nd Street and Engine 229/Ladder 146 on Richardson Street just south of McCarren. This in a neighborhood with a booming population and many tall buildings that can’t be reached by a regular engine company.

The Southside has some of the largest concentration of tenements in the area, and most of these are 5 and 6 stories tall. The area west of the BQE has also seen the largest concentration of new mid- and high-rise apartment buildings in the 2000s housing boom. One would think that would be an area that could use a ladder company.

Meanwhile, the area directly served by Ladder 104 (roughly from Broadway to McCarren Park, west of the BQE) has seen a population increase of 22.5% (over 6,300 people) in the past 10 years. And the area immediately surrounding Ladder 104’s house is among the most densely populated areas in North Brooklyn (over 21,000 people live in Ladder 104’s census tracts or one of the 5 abutting census tracts).

Wood map

Wood frame buildings are prevalent in Bushwick
Map: Bushwick Avenue Studio


Over in Bushwick, the closing of Engine 218 will leave no company in the center of a neighborhood that has a large percentage of wood frame houses (which, as we learned last week, go up quickly). And that wasn’t the first fatal fire in that neighborhood this year.

But I’m sure all of this has been thought through.

2011 Building Brooklyn Awards – North Brooklyn Represents

05/16/2011 | Comment

wyckoff-exchange.jpg

Wyckoff Exchange
22-28 Wyckoff Avenue
Andre Kikoski Architect
Photo: Dezeen


The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce announced its Building Brooklyn awards (Brownstoner has the details; they’re not up on the BB site yet). For a change, North Brooklyn has some really good projects in the mix, including the Newtown Creek sewage plant (Ennead Architects), the Austin Nichols & Company Warehouse (aka 184 Kent Avenue; SLCE Architects with Walter B. Melvin Architects preservation architect), the Mason Fisk Building (72 Berry; Meshberg Group), the Brooklyn Brewery (Fradkin & McAlpin Architects) and the Wyckoff Exchange (Andre Kikoski Architect).

CB1 Supports OSA Concerts

05/10/2011 | Comment

CB1 voted tonight to partially overturn the recommendation of the Parks Committee and not recommend a reduction in the number of OSA concerts or the number of concert attendees.

This came after OSA Secretary Adam Perlmutter made the case for OSA and it’s concert series. Perlmutter pointed out that last year’s promoter was out and that OSA would be running quieter and shorter shows this year. Long before the community spoke out on the issue, OSA had already decided to cut the number of shows from 22 to 15, the number of attendees from 7,500 to 6,500 and the number of bands per show from 5 to 2. And of the 15 shows, two will be children’s concerts, one will be a comedy show and one will be a philharmonic show, so there will be only 11 rock concerts (the Parks Committee recommended 10).

These changes seemed to be acceptable to some of the park’s neighbors, and since they brought the concerts more in line with what the committee had recommended anyhow, it was agreed to drop the numerical requirements and give OSA a chance to run a more neighborhood-friendly concert series.

It Is Still Safe to Drink in Williamsburg

05/06/2011 | Comment

CB1’s Public Safety Committee held a very long meeting tonight, which ended with a discussion of the “moratorium” (apparently it started with that too, but I missed the opening hour). CB1 Chairman Chris Olechowski presented some recommendations from the Board’s Executive Committee that were based on guidelines used by CB3 in Manhattan. They were, for the most part, pretty common sensical – using the 500′ rule more, not approving rear yard uses in residential districts, limiting approvals on residential streets. It’s not clear how those rules would fit into the reality of CB1, but the Committee agreed that they were worth further study.

And so, no moratorium (this month).

Bikers, Drivers Clash Over Bedford Avenue

05/05/2011 | Comment

Drivers in South Williamsburg are apparently harassing and in some cases physically (and vehicularly) assaulting bicyclists. Of course no one could have predicted that when the DOT removed the bike lanes on Bedford Avenue that it would lead to a sense of entitlement to the road on the part of local drivers.

As I said when the bike lanes were originally removed, a lot of the controversy over the lanes was about the very mundane issue of parking. Baruch Herzfeld backs up this notion:

Williamsburg bike maven Baruch Herzfeld, who hosted a debate between bikers and Hasidim last January, says the tension has resulted from the lack of parking spaces in South Williamsburg and not a conflict between Orthodox residents and yuppie cyclists.

“The Hasidim park in the [former] bike lane because there is no other place to park and the city has limited resources to enforce it,” said Herzfeld.

Of course local political leaders have a solution:

Hasidic leaders say that cyclists should find another route.

“You have a densely populated area that hundreds of people cross those streets every single day,” said former Council candidate Isaac Abraham. “You’ve got a ballroom, two schools and five synagogues. Traffic there is tremendous.”

It sounds to me as though these leaders need a refresher course in driver’s ed. It’s pretty simple really – riding a bicycle on a public street is legal, bike lane or not. Double parking is not legal. Kicking bicyclists, running them off the road with your minivan or school bus and otherwise intimidating or harassing fellow citizens is very illegal. Sounds to me as though the NYPD needs redirect some of its efforts to parking and traffic enforcement on Bedford Avenue.

Williamsburg Community Board Approves Parks Concert Series

05/04/2011 | Comment

The waterfront concerts were not the only concert series on the agenda of last nights CB1 Parks Committee meeting. I hear that at the end of the meeting the committee recommended that the full board support the L Magazine’s Northside Festival concerts in McCarren Park (I think on the asphalt baseball fields across from the Turkey’s Nest). The concerts (which will, in part, benefit OSA, and which will have a capacity of 5,000, but I guess the similarities end there) include Beirut on June 17th and the Wavves opening for Guided by Voices on the 18th.

(The rest of the Northside Fesitival lineup feature The Hold Steady, Titus, the Fiery Furnaces and a whole bunch more in a series of venues spread around the neighborhood.