Category: Linked

Huge Turnout Over New Williamsburg Charter School

I started to write a quick link to this Times SchoolBook article last Friday, but got distracted. Since then, there have been 26 comments posted, almost all of them thoughtful and passionate on the subject of co-locating a Success Charter school at JHS 50 on South 3rd Street. And almost of all of them opposed to the idea. What’s interesting about the comments is that they run about 10 to 1 against the co-location, which, as I started to write on Friday, is about the ratio of locals against and for the co-location at last Thursday’s DOE hearing on the issue.

The problem is, you wouldn’t know that from reading the article – and you particularly wouldn’t know it from looking at the photo accompanying the article, which shows a group of Success supporters bedecked in orange T-shirts. Nowhere does the article mention that most of the supporters were brought in by bus from Harlem and the Upper East Side1. Nowhere does the article mention the ratio of supporters to opposition (3 or 4 to 1; an order of magnitude or two higher if you just count local residents). Nowhere does the article mention that the opposition included many parents from the Northside, Greenpoint and elsewhere in the broader community (who, if they took a bus to get there, paid the MTA for the ride).

As I started to write on Friday – and as the comments to the article since then make abundantly clear – there are good arguments on both sides of this issue. But you wouldn’t know that from reading this article.

1. In the comments, a Times editor says that the paper asked a Success spokesperson about the busing in of supporters – the spokesperson “could not say how many buses Success used”. Sorry, NYT, but that is just lame.↩

Domsey Development Site Up For Auction

Brownstoner reports that the former Domsey parking lot at South 8th and Kent is up for sale at a foreclosure auction. The property was rezoned ages ago, and development at the former used-clothing mecca started in 2008 and then stalled. $30 million, and it’s yours.

Details on North 6th Street Church Purchase, Conversion

Brownstoner has a post about the DOB applications that have been filed for the conversion of St. Vincent de Paul Church on North 6th Street. One application is to convert the rectory into 10 apartments, while the second is to convert the church itself into 33 units (neither application has been approved yet, though the demolition of the church interior is a go). Presumably there are more applications to come, as the church property includes the former school on North 7th Street and the large parking lot to the west of the rectory.

The architect for both jobs is Zambrano Architectural Design, whose local projects include 8 Hope Street. The development company, North Flats LLC, appears to be headed up by Michael Lichtenstein; the same developer who is behind the new Karl Fisher building going up at Grand and Driggs (once upon a time, a mini-tower).

Jardin Going Rental

Jardin (née Urban Green), the development that takes up the middle of the block of North 5th/North 6th and Bedford/Berry is repurposing itself yet again, this time as luxury rentals.

For a development with three very big things in its favor (location, location and location), this project has been particularly star crossed. It went into the ground at least 5 years ago this month, spent at least two years completely stalled, and then was revived as Jardin this past summer.

A Garden is Soon to Grow in Greenpoint

The Java Street Collaborative is planning a community garden on a vacant city-owned property on Java between West and Franklin. The catch is that this is HPD-owned property, which is already planned for a small affordable housing development: “We just want to see what we could do with it until that time,” said Stella Goodall of the Collaborative.

You can read more about the Collaborative here.

The Inferiority Complex of the Williamsburg Bridge

Scientific American, ca. 1903 (by way of Ephemeral New York):

As a matter of fact, the (Williamsburg) Bridge is an engineer’s bridge pure and simple. The eye may range from anchorage to anchorage, and from pier to finial of the tower without finding a single detail that suggests controlling motive, either in its design or fashioning other than bald utility.

Which is what makes it so great.

From Alaska, Great Concern for Central Park

Legislators in Alaska are trying to make a point:

In the interest of preserving an already-compromised sliver of urban wilderness, state legislators are asking the federal government to take over Central Park.

State legislators in Alaska, that is…

It urges the feds to “declare Central Park to be a wilderness area and to prohibit any further improvement or development of Central Park unless authorized by an act of Congress.”

Since most “East Coast elites”, particularly the deep-pocketed ones who live on Central Park, would probably support development restrictions in the park, that point is probably going to be lost on a lot of us.1

1 Wikipedia must have been down that day, but Alaska legislators might be interested to know that Central Park is a completely man-made construct that is already a locally-designated Scenic Landmark, as well as a National Historic Landmark. No, Congress doesn’t control development in Central Park, but the park is unlikely to see any development until well after every drop of oil is sucked out of ANWR.↩

Police Finally Reveal Embarrassing File in Cycling Death

This is so awful (and so pathetic):

Forced by a looming Freedom of Information Law deadline, on Friday the New York Police Department finally told the mother of Mathieu Lefevre what it knows about the cycling death of her son last fall.

The documents released directly contradict the initial version of events put out by police, and suggest an investigation so sloppy that the likelihood of getting justice for Lefevre’s death is scant.

Contrary to initial reports (by the police), the truck that killed Lefevre failed to signal the turn that took the cyclist’s life, and then dragged the bike itself for a couple hundred feet. Shattering the CSI myth, NYPD investigators couldn’t even take photos of the crime scene – they couldn’t get the camera to work. Crime scene evidence, including blood on the bumper of the truck, was lost, pretty much ensuring that the driver can’t be prosecuted (or, for that matter, exonerated). The video that shows all this wasn’t found until two months after the accident, and then only after the family of the victim pressured the police to do a complete investigation.