From the inbox:
Please join the Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee & DEP for the Digester Egg lighting ceremony.
Tonight. June 3, 2008, 8 p.m.
Newtown Creek Wastewater Pollution Control Plant Nature Walk
(entrance gate located at Provost St & Paidge Ave. )
Greenpoint, Brooklyn 11222
Which gives me a good excuse to post this picture again:
Photo: Fred Conrad (via NYT)
It seems those grand plans for new parkland in Greenpoint and Williamsburg are a little bit behind schedule. Not surprising, really. Much of Bushwick Inlet is contingent upon acquisition (in a rising real estate market) or eminent domain. The MTA lot on Commercial (which is part of a land swap for both open space and affordable housing) is contingent upon locating comparable space elsewhere for the MTA (when all of the city-owned land in North Brooklyn has already been promised to others). The sludge tank site at Barge Park is contingent upon the relocation of the sludge tank (which is on hold until the city can get new barges to ply Newtown Creek).
Seems like the only thing that is not contingent based is the construction of luxury towers in Williamsburg (which will mean the completion of an esplanade sooner rather than later).
By winning the Giro d’Italia yesterday, Alberto Contador became the first rider to win the Tour de France and the Giro back to back since his fellow Spaniard Miguel Indurain did it 1993 (Indurain did it in the same year; Contador across years).
But the best Grand Tour rider won’t be defending his Tour de France title this year. In whst dhould go down as one of the more boneheaded responses to its ongoing doping scandal, the organizers of the Tour – have dropped Contador’s (new) team from this year’s invitation list.
Big Brown’s owner runs a trucking company in Greenpoint.
Greenpoint condo prices are up 40% over last year? Sounds like not enough data points (7 sales last April vs. 25 this April). The data are even sillier for South Park Slope (3 sales vs. 21 sales).
A former bar colleague makes it big (really, he’s been making it big for years).
Everyone’s favorite Brownstoner commenter gets his day. (And, of course, you can read all the comments here.)
Once Haberman gets over making fun of the train that Manhattanites have never heard of, he has a decent summary of last week’s G train rally. (And its not just Haberman – even David Yassky gets in on the schtick: “You can’t spell ‘neglected’ without G, you can’t spell ‘ignored’ without G”.
(Slightly dated.)
Between September, 2007 and January, 2008, the Department of Buildings audited 662 self-certified plans and found zoning-related objections to 556 of those plans. During the same period, another division of DOB that targets repeat offenders found a similar rate of objections: 171 of 207 plans filed, or 83%. With almost half of all plans that are filed being self-certified, that means that as many as 27,000 of the 61,000 plans filed so far this year could be flawed.
Given the convoluted nature of the City’s zoning and building laws, and the fact that so much of zoning can be open to interpretation and reconsideration, it probably should not come as a surprise that the “experts” get it wrong so often. In all likelihood, the vast majority of the errors are probably not of the nefarious variety, though a good many of them probably do result from an aggressive interpretation of the codes.
Still, the rate of “failure” has always been high under the self-certification program, and is only going up, not down: in a 2001 audit, 59% of the plans reviewed had objections.
Walkscore is a pretty nifty website that calculates how “walkable” your neighborhood is. On a scale of 0 to 100, I come out as an 88 – not really a surprise, given that we are in the middle of New York City (my office gets a 100, but most of the places I could walk to from there aren’t worth the trip). The 88 means that just about everything I need is within 7/10 of a mile of my house. Six or seven years ago, this would not have been the case – there was not a restaurant next door, a bar two blocks away, a bookstore within four blocks or a pharmacy within 10 blocks. It was still a walkable neighborhood, you just had to be a little more ambitious.
There are a few idiosyncrasies about the site (which is intended as a real estate marketing tool). For instance, the nearest movie theater to my house is the Riverside Dance Festival in East River Park, Manhattan. In fact, all of the “nearby” theaters are in Manhattan. Fair enough, but the site lists the walking distance for Riverside as 6/10 of a mile, which I’m pretty sure would require walking on water to be true. I took the bridge, it would be easily twice that distance. Also, some of the locations are just plain wrong – the site tells me that the nearest pharmacy is a Rite Aid on Metropolitan and Kent. (Its really referring to a Rite Aid on Metropolitan in Ridgewood, but for some reason.)
Strangest of all, though, is that the “walkability” score takes no account of public transportation. There are two bus lines within three blocks of me, and two subway lines within about 10 blocks, giving me walking access to all of New York City. Yet nowhere is public transit mentioned.
