Celebrating Community
The sun was out, but the slanted light of fall did little to warm the small crowd gathered at the Carroll Street Bridge in Gowanus the morning of Nov. 16. But despite winds that whipped bare hands and quickly chilled the hot cider they held in paper cups, members of Gowanus Dredgers, an organization that promotes waterfront stewardship at its […]
I’m happy to be able to start off this column by cheering some neighborhood heroes on a hard-fought victory. Last year I wrote about the plans of an investor to build a huge apartment building over where the Chase Bank is on Hamilton Avenue. I called it a ridiculous idea, based upon their presentation at the community board. In addition […]
Last Thursday I sat through almost three hours of a city process that will force permanent, sudden transformation on a neighborhood that has undergone only incremental change since the Dutch first showed up in Brooklyn. The very next night I sat through two hours of something quite similar, albeit on a smaller scale. The one constant in both cases was […]
I’ve always thought of the subway as something of an equal-opportunity headache. This past week, the MTA made it a migraine when it released a plan for express F train service. The line that runs from the southernmost point of Brooklyn (Coney Island) through Manhattan and into Queens has been divided between some marginal winners and some big losers. This […]
In what must be called a surprising development, City Councilman Brad Lander announced his opposition to the plan by real estate developer Fortis to rezone Cobble Hill, which would have enabled it to build an extra 400,000 square feet of housing on what was once the Long Island College Hospital. The announcement was made at the annual meeting of the […]
Last night I attended what was billed as the first in a series of “Public Planning Meetings for the Long Island College Hospital Site (LICH).” The meeting was a co-production of the Cobble Hill Association (CHA) , local elected officials, and FORTIS, the real estate development company chosen by NY State to redevelop the former LICH properties. The meeting was held […]
This past week afforded me a rare opportunity to see the corporate mind in action. I was invited to take part in a weeklong public relations event held by the world’s biggest chemical company on the occasion of their 150th anniversary. As a representative of the media, I actually got to ask the actual CEO of their North American operations, which […]
On Wednesday evening, July 9, Gowanus business owners and local residents arrived mere steps from the pollution-ridden Canal to attend “Take Back Gowanus.” The meeting was called in reaction to City Council Member Brad Lander’s “Bridging Gowanus” series. Though he claimed that his goal was to find a “shared vision” for the future of the industrial neighborhood, Lander’s community meetings […]
Brad Lander’s Bridging Gowanus series of meetings has spurred some local Gowanus activists to hold their own meetings. “Take Back Gowanus” will be held Wednesday evening at 7 pm at the Green Building, normally home for weddings and other celebrations. It is at the corner of Bond and Union Streets. The Green Building is itself a symbol of the change in […]
The Gowanus Community Advisory Group (CAG) meets monthly to discuss issues pertaining to the Canal Superfund cleanup. At its February 25 meeting, local councilmen Steve Levin and Brad Lander appeared by invitation. The CAG consists of sixty members, many of them representing local groups, such as the Red Hook East and West Tenants, the Red Hook Civic Association, the Cobble […]