The city promised to build three parks — 28-acre Bushwick Inlet Park, Barge Park, and a park on Commercial St. in Greenpoint — as part of a 2005 waterfront rezoning to allow housing towers. Only a 7-acre chunk of Bushwick Inlet Park with a soccer field has opened.
The City Council’s Parks and Waterfront committees will be holding a hearing on the 2005 rezoning and its unkept promises.
Scattered showers didn’t stop backyard grilling connoisseurs from feasting at the first annual Grand Slam BBQ Battle Music and Food Festival [last Sunday]. More than just bands, beer and beef, the event also marked the neighborhood’s formal introduction to the Grand Street Alliance (GSA), an organization dedicated to developing and supporting small businesses in Williamsburg.
GSA did an amazing job with this event. The food was fantastic, the whole thing was really well run, and by the next morning, the street was nearly spotless. Good start for this organization.
Newsday (via Second Avenue Sagas):
The MTA will add nearly 100 trains each week along the L line starting Sunday… 16 additional round trips will run each weekday, 11 more will go on Saturdays and another seven on Sundays, an MTA spokesman said.
The increased service is the result of the automation upgrades that have been going in on the line for what seems like years now. As a result, the MTA is able to reduce headway and squeeze more trains onto the single-track line.
State Senator Dan Squadron – who pushed hard for these service increases – is a happy man: “Anyone tired of the crushing crowds and overflowing trains will now have an L train trip less likely to feel like hell.”
Just around the corner – and this year it is expanded to three Saturdays.
Brownstoner has published the full text of the press release for the Landmarks Warehouse RFP. This is the site at 337 Berry between South 4th and South 5th Streets that was promised as affordable housing in the 2005 rezoning. CB1 pushed hard to get the City to agree to some additional community benefits, most notably a local presence on the development team. And lo, HPD delivered:
As part of the RFP’s threshold criteria, at least one Principal of the development team must also be a locally-based development company
That probably does not mean that a local partner is required, but it comes darn close. Los Sures should have the inside track here, assuming that they can put together a viable proposal and convince the city that they can pull the project off.
Two of Brownstoner’s five biggest sales last week were at the Finger Albero 144 North 8th Street. Penthouse #2 tops the list at over $2.5 million, while Penthouse #1A is #5 on the list at $1.8 million (must be a real dump).
Food vendors are a sore subject in southern Brooklyn:
[Community Board 10] voted to request that a city-imposed ban on sidewalk vendors within the Bay Ridge 86th Street Business Improvement District be amended to include food carts.
Two thoughts:
1) the city can ban sidewalk vendors in general? I shudder to think what this would do the melted record industry if applied on Bedford Avenue.
2) Maybe we need to acknowledge a borough-wide “war on food”, and declare food trucks the southern flank and brunch the northern flank.
You might have missed it, but last week was the 7th anniversary of the City’s 2005 rezoning:
In 2005, the mayor pushed through a rezoning of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, allowing for significantly higher development along the waterfront, and promising a series of parks and open spaces strung like beads along two miles of the neighborhoods’ shorefront…
Certainly, much has changed for the better in Williamsburg, from a waterfront access standpoint. The esplanade in front of the Edge and Northside Piers is well-trafficked and much-loved. Transmitter Park at the end of Kent Avenue, though not yet finished, is in use by Greenpoint residents.
Unfortunately, progress on the development of the waterfront access and open space is not very promising – in fact, recent developments at 65 Commercial Street are a huge step backwards.
The best the City can do at this point is to point to the huge sums of money they have spent to date (“the largest in any Community Board district”) as justification for not actually building much in the way of parks. The problem is, most of the money has been spent acquiring industrial property at residential valuations (that would be the “drastic miscalculation”), leaving very little left over for remediation, let alone construction of actual parks.
Much has changed for the better – McCarren pool is opening soon, as is the waterfront portion of the Bushwick Inlet soccer field site and Transmitter Park (the latter, a promise from the Giuliani era, finally fulfilled by this administration). But despite this progress, we are years away from realizing three-quarters of the promised incremental open space.
Animal New York smells the new Yankee fragrance line so you don’t have to.
A club owner whose Lower East Side hotspot features an ice cage for chugging vodka and promises of free shots if you get naked is trying to bring the party to Williamsburg – but neighbors are battling his plans… Neighbors say they’re used to bars in the neighborhood, but are spooked because of how over the top his other joint is.
Over the top doesn’t begin to describe Mehanata. And from what I hear, SLA agrees – sources there say that the Lower East Side venue has multiple liquor license violations against it.
The plan for Williamsburg Manor is for a restaurant and “radio studios”, and the owner promises that his Brooklyn outpost will be much classier than his Manhattan shit show (but fret not Williamsburg, the plans presented to CB1 included an “Ice Cage”). Not surprisingly, he made very similar promises to the community board in Manhattan:
According to a letter from Community Board 3 in Manhattan, [the owner] originally claimed Mehanata would be a restaurant with daytime workshops and studio space, but hasn’t served food since 2007.
Too bad – the food looks so appetizing.
