Category: Noted

City Reneges on Promised Brooklyn Waterfront Parks

06/19/2012 | Comment

Wsj map

Source: Wall Street Journal

I’d been meaning to write a wrap-up post on last week’s City Council hearing on the status of the 2005 rezoning of the Williamsburg & Greenpoint waterfront, including the many articles that led up to the hearing. Happily, the Working Harbor Committee has done that for me – written a concise, informed wrap-up of the many articles already written. So I’ll just link to that, put up this very excellent graphic prepared by the Wall Street Journal and pull a particularly good quote from Council Member Steve Levin:

This is about credibility, doing what you say you’re going to do,” said Levin. “You have no concrete plan. When you want to do something, you have a plan.

OK – and I’ll add this: since the 2005 rezoning was based on environmental assessments that assumed that the city would build parkland, at what point does the city’s failure to build that parkland (or even make good faith progress toward doing so) make the EIS a faulty instrument?

City Won’t Promise to Finish Two Long-Stalled North Brooklyn Parks

06/19/2012 | Comment

As the Brooklyn Paper reports, the Bloomberg administration has refused to commit to any goals or deliverables on the acquisition or construction of Bushwick Inlet Park or 65 Commercial Street. (I guess everyone has given up on the expansion of Barge Park?)

Financial mismanagement and planning gaffes have also stood in the way of both planned open spaces.

Bloomberg officials originally valued [the soccer field block] on the southern edge of the 28-acre Bushwick Inlet Park at about $12 million, but a judge ruled that the area’s residential rezoning meant its value was almost eight times higher.

The city eventually settled with the property owner and bought the parcel for about $93 million, according to court papers and Council testimony…

Money to build a park at Commercial Street dried up too.

In 2007, city budget hawks removed $13 million of the $14 million allocated to the park’s development and spent it on other projects.

Contrary to the headline, I don’t think anyone expects that this administration will finish either of these parks before January, 2014. But the administration can ensure that the parks will be built someday by negotiating contracts to buy all of the Bushwick Inlet properties and by moving the MTA off the Commercial Street lot once and for all.

Neither of those actions will ensure that the parks are completed anytime soon (as I said elsewhere, we are looking at decades), but they will ensure that North Brooklyn has a clear path to getting the parks we were promised seven years ago.

Brooklyn Waits on Promise of a Park

06/14/2012 | Comment

Wsj map

Stuck in Park
Source: WSJ

The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy article (and excellent graphic) on the fight to get the Bloomberg administration to follow through on the parks and affordable housing it promised Williamsburg and Greenpoint in the 2005 rezoning.

Often there are community benefit components that make rezonings more acceptable than they otherwise would be,” said state Sen. Daniel Squadron, whose district includes the Williamsburg waterfront. “If those promises don’t mean anything, it’s going to be a lot harder to move forward with similar community-remaking projects


Williamsburg Charter High Gets a Reprieve; Cheating at PS 31?

05/23/2012 | Comment

The saga of Williamsburg Charter High School’s closing continues. Yesterday, a judge refused the city’s request to move forward with a lottery to relocate the current students at the school. Unfortunately, this decision doesn’t necessarily help the students at WCH, as they may still need to scramble to find a new school between now and September. From the looks of it, neither the city nor the leadership of the school (which is fighting to stay open) have done right by the students in this process.

Elsewhere in the Eastern District, two highly-ranked elementary schools are being investigated for cheating on standardized tests. P.S. 31 in Greenpoint and East Williamsburg’s P.S. 257 – the two top-ranked elementary schools in the entire city based on the Department of Education’s report card system – are under investigation for helping their students excel on the standardized tests that make up a big part of the report card ranking.

The cheating was suspected after many of the students from the two schools performed worse than expected on subsequent testing at I.S. 318. The gaming of the testing system also reveals a particularly nasty side effect for the teachers at the middle school:

At I.S. 318, nearly 60 percent of teachers were rated below average or low [on DOE’s new teacher report cards]. The Daily News singled out the school for its poor performance, and many news media outlets, including The New York Times, published teachers’ ratings online. The sixth-grade teachers’ scores, which depended on the progress students made from fifth to sixth grade, were particularly poor.

Wythe Hotel

05/22/2012 | Comment

englehardt_hotel.JPG

80 Wythe
Theobald Englehardt (1900)
Morris Adjmi Architects (2012)
Photo: brooklyn11211


Matt Chaban in the Observer:

This was, is and will be the greatest thing Williamsburg has ever seen. It is the pinnacle, the acme, the end. The story of gentrification, at least in this oft-buzzed about corner of Brooklyn, is over — checked at the curved-glass-and-carefully-rusted-steel door outside the Wythe. If Francis Fukuyama needed a hotel room in Brooklyn, this would be it. Thank you, and good night.

Matt & I disagree somewhat here. Not on the fact that the Wythe Hotel is great – it is. And not on the fact that the building itself “is the nicest thing ever built in Williamsburg” – if it isn’t that, it’s damn close. Morris Adjmi’s design of the new, the old and the integration of the two is almost perfect (Theobald would have been proud).

But the pinnacle? The acme? The end? Let’s hope not – we need more nice things like this.

Katan Loses Domino Suit

05/04/2012 | Comment

The Observer reports that Isaac Katan failed to secure an injunction against his partner in the $1.5 billion Domino development from selling a majority stake in the project.

The decision appeared to clear the way for the Community Preservation Corporation, a joint owner of the site, to proceed with a deal to hand the majority stake to the project’s senior lender, Pacific Coast Capital Partners, LLC… Mr. Katan secured the Domino Sugar Factory in 2006 in a whirlwind deal largely negotiated over a single weekend to buy the site with CPC for about $50 million from the sugar company, which decades ago [actually, less than a decade ago] used the factory as one of its largest sugar refineries in the world.

Which means that Katan’s (and CPCR’s) stake in the project drops from 50% to 8%. The difference between 50% of $1.5 billion and 8% of $1.5 billion explains why Katan, through his attorney, is promising to continue his legal fight.

[again, via Brownstoner]

Ferry Operator Wants to Accept Metrocards

04/27/2012 | 1 Comment

The East River Ferry wants to accept Metrocards. Other non-MTA services already accept Metrocards, so the idea is not that far fetched. But the real innovation would be for the ferry to accept Metrocard transfers – i.e., eliminating the two-fare structure that most commuters using the ferry face (by the way, it’s nice to see Second Avenue Sagas having a change of heart about the ferry). As it stands now, if you want to go from the ferry to an MTA bus or subway, a one-way trip will cost you as much as $6.50. Institute free Metrocard transfers, and the price drops to $4 (the cost of the ferry ride).

But MTA chief Joe Lhota says that’s not going to happen.