Brooklyn 11211

Your fare hike at work:

A new B2 bus route connecting Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Long Island City, Queens, to midtown Manhattan.

Nice piece in today’s Times about the working artists at 475 Kent and the community they created.

“Ah, irony,” Scott Bullock, a senior attorney with the group that fought eminent domain in the [Kelo] case.

The linked article is a little disingenuous, in that Pfizer was not a party to the Kelo (the Supreme Court case that gave birth to the phrase “Eminent Domain Abuse”). But it was Pfizer’s relocation to New London, Conn. that was the direct impetus for the City’s acquisition of property in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood that resulted in Kelo. So without Pfizer, there would be no Kelo.

Pfizer has announced that it is closing up shop in Williamsburg (where the company was founded, in 1849), putting over 1,000 people out of work. Assemblyman Vito Lopez is looking to having Pfizer’s extensive holdings on either side of Flushing Avenue acquired by eminent domain, in order to create affordable housing and job incubators. Pfizer, of course, would like to sell their property on the open market. As the first step in that process, the company has supposedly issued an RFP to solicit bids. Pfizer says that affordable housing is a “key priority” in its RFP.

We’ll have more on the merits of Lopez’s bid at a later date, but for now, we’ll enjoy the irony.

I have heard that the water taxi dock at Shaefer Landing was removed over the weekend. Apparently, a new and smaller permanent dock will be installed in “a couple of months”. I suppose that quashes any hope of taxi service resuming any sooner than “a couple of months” from now.

Time Out NY has an excellent piece titled It Happened Here, an informative romp through NYC history & geography. Greenpoint’s contribution includes this entry:

The ironclad Union warship the USS Monitor, which battled the Confederacy’s Merrimac to a draw in Chesapeake Bay, was built at the Continental Iron Works shipyard in Greenpoint and launched on January 30, 1862. The shipyard was located on Newtown Creek at Cayler and West Sts, Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

But it didn’t happen there (or rather there is no there there) – Continental was located on Bushwick Creek, not Newtown Creek.

Not a good review for Peters Since 1969.

Rudy, speaking of his support for John McCain, says that he is

fully aboard 100 per cent. I don’t do things half way, and when I believe in a man like I do John McCain, this will become to me as important as my own election campaign.

Well, there was that half way run for the Senate. Not to mention the half way “campaign” for the Republican nomination.

McCain must be comforted to know that Rudy has his back.

At a rally pushing for the downzoning of Carroll Gardens yesterday, blogger and City Council candidate Gary Reilly said that he was fighting to keep Carroll Gardens from “becoming the next Williamsburg”. Today, on his blog, Reilly had this to say about his comment:

A quick note on the Williamsburg comment, before it’s taken out of context – I’ve got nothing against Williamsburg. What I’m opposed to is what crap developers and their architects like “Hot Karl” Fischer have done there . . . and for the record, Hot Karl is currently straddling Carroll Gardens and making his first deposit at 100 Luquer Street. We can’t have more of that.

We won’t take it out of context at all – and won’t even take offense. The fact is, 90% (or more) of the buildings going up in Williamsburg and Greenpoint are crap. Some, like the crap on Karl Fischer Row, went up before contextual zoning took effect. Others, like the proposed Karl Fischer crap on Grand and Driggs is trying beat out a pending contextual zoning. Still others, like the Karl Fischer crap on Humboldt, is going up precisely where our community is working to implement more contextual zoning.

A word of warning to our friends in Carroll Gardens: a lot of the crap that is going up in Greenpoint & Williamsburg is consistent with the contextual zoning that was implemented in 2005 (R6A and R6B, predominantly). Its shorter crap, but its still crap. And other than landmarking, there’s not a lot you can do about that.

As expected, Rudy was trounced in Florida yesterday, and is expected to drop out of the race today (endorsing John McCain in the process).

On the plus side, Rudy finally managed to outpoll “fringe” candidate Ron Paul. On the minus side, the putative front-runner for most of 2007 has only two convention delegates to Paul’s six.

Apparently DoE has backed off and decided not to put a second school in PS 84. According to a flier posted at the school, DoE has determined that “the community clearly doesn’t support the plan”.

Hopefully the principal and PTA at 84 can bring the same passion and vigor to improving their school (which DoE says is on the verge of failing) as they have brought to keeping this school out (and as they brought to fighting a change to a “progressive” (whatever that means) curriculum last year). At this point, 84 is not only failing, it is undersubscribed. Parents who have the means (and I’m not talking financial) are sending their kids out of zone – to PS 132, the East Village, open enrollment public schools, or private and parochial schools. Parents dedicated enough to schlepp their kids across the East River every day are exactly the type of parents that PS 84 needs.

True, a Discovery School in PS 84 would not have done anything to improve the existing school – they would have been two separate programs (with the Discovery School open to citywide enrollment). But fighting against a Discovery School also does nothing to improve PS 84.