Friends of East River State Park is looking for volunteers to join them Saturday morning to weed the park (sorry, there will be no actual weed).
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Monthly Office Suites at 33 Nassau
Also from the Real Deal, 33 Nassau Avenue (you probably know it as the Spritzenhaus Building) is leasing monthly office space on its second floor.
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175 Kent Fully Leased
The Real Deal reports that 175 Kent Avenue – a 112-unit building at the corner of North 3rd Street – is now full leased.
What really caught my eye, though, was some of the broker babble:
The 112-unit rental conversion at 175 Kent Avenue…
Conversion from what? This is a new building. Never lived in. Doesn’t a building have to have some sort of prior use to be a conversion?
…the Williamsburg waterfront property…
The waterfront is a block away. Now either side of Kent Avenue is “waterfront”.
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Don Draper Was NOT in Williamsburg
The heat must be getting to the Brooklyn Paper:
Yep, that was Don Draper taking in the summer breeze from one of the best places around — a Williamsburg stoop.
Technically, it was Jon Hamm, who was not filming for Mad Men. And the stoop was at 365 Grand Avenue (at Gates), which most Brooklynites know is not in Williamsburg (that would be Grand Street).
Don Draper, being a Manhattanite, probably wouldn’t know the difference. But you’d think the Brooklyn Paper would.
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Lentol on Bushwick Inlet Park
PIX interviews Assemblyman Joe Lentol on Bushwick Inlet Park, and the City’s decision to walk away from its commitments in the 2005 zoning.
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City Too Poor to Build Promised Bushwick Inlet Park
Aaron Short covers the City’s abandonment of Bushwick Inlet Park.
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State Won’t Fund Kayak Center on Newtown Creek
The Newtown Creek Boathouse proposal, which was the top-ranked project for funding under the State-administered fund established to mitigate the City’s ongoing pollution of the creek during the construction of the Newtown Creek Waste Management plant may run aground because of the Federal designation of the creek as a Superfund site.
Got that?
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Reversal on Plans for Williamsburg Park
The Daily News reports today that the City is reneging on one of the key components of the 2005 Greenpoint/Williamsburg rezoning – the 28-acre Bushwick Inlet Park. The park – which would straddle Greenpoint and Williamsburg – was the centerpiece of the City’s open space plan under the rezoning.
In the six years since the rezoning, the City has acquired less than a third of the property that was to make up the park. In a letter to one of the property owners on the site, the Parks Department is now saying that it has “no schedule for the acquisition of the site” (a position which was apparently reiterated by other City officials in a meeting with the Community Advisory Board last week).
In the 2005 rezoning, the City promised that it would add roughly 38 acres to North Brooklyn. Six years – and thousands of new housing units – later, less than 3 acres of that is actual, usable open space. The rest is 35 acres of broken promises and, ultimately, a ruined rezoning.
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A Phantom Ride on the Evergreen Branch
Paul Cox takes a ride on the old Manhattan Beach Rail Road’s Evergreen branch.
Great piece – I love finding these geographic relics.
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Who’s Behind the Blight?
Turns out that a lot of the stalled construction sites in Williamsburg (corner of South 4th and Bedford, 212-218 North 9th, 237-243 North 9th, 261-263 North 9th) are owned by the same pair of developers. Who also own the converted loft building at 100 South 4th Street and the vacated loft building at 239 Banker Street.