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Community Views

Your Forum for Ideas, Comments, Information, and General Gripes.



Prospect Park a successful dog run?!

The very suggestion that Prospect Park's lenient off-leash policy is successful is absurd. Successful for whom? Dog owners have become the only special interest group in Brooklyn who can completely monopolize Prospect Park during prime morning and late afternoon hours. This policy effectively excludes the use of the park by:

- people who are afraid of dogs
- dog owners who do not want their dogs approached by unleashed dogs
- people who want to use the baseball fields on the Long Meadow (yes, unleashed dogs use that as well)
- the elderly, who are at risk of being knocked down
- people who just don't want to be jumped on by a strange dog

It also endangers:

- wildlife
- inline skaters
- cyclists
- runners

In addition, how does one clean-up after their unleashed dog when it is pitch black on the 90 acre Long Meadow and they can't even see their dog?

I've lived in Park Slope for 15 years and have watched the offleash dog numbers go from several dozen to several hundred. I no longer venture into the park during the offleash hours, which, by the way, also includes the Nethermead Meadow beginning at 5pm. There are likely many other Brooklynites who have also been effectively chased from the park by the dogs.

The Prospect Park Alliance needs to undertake a month long park usership survey of people coming and going from the park. Ask the users if they want unleashed dogs running around in unenclosed areas and if the policy has affected their use of the park. Let the millions of other park patrons who use Prospect Park decide the issue, not a group of politicians who likely have never even set foot in the park.

http://brooklynparks.blogspot.com

Posted by: John Lydon



Overdevelopment of East Windsor Terrace

East Windsor Terrace is an endangered neighborhood at
the "tipping point." Either we get a zoning break, which will allow us to preserve our homes and mandate sensible development on a scale with our community, or we’ll cease to exist. In our place will be a traffic island of hastily produced, unregulated, ever-bulkier buildings, squashed up against each other with the grace of subway riders at rush hour, so developers can grasp the last dime from the last inch of land.

I’ve heard Mayor Bloomberg say, in person, "Change is good for a neighborhood, but not change overnight." The latter is exactly what is happening here in East Windsor Terrace. Things are likely to get worse now that quantity of housing has become an election year pissing contest.

Most people think, as I did when we bought a house here in 1989, that the neighborhood is the beginning of Kensington.
Technically, we are seven blocks of Windsor Terrace, severed from Windsor Terrace proper in the 1950s when Robert Moses destroyed scores of neighborhoods to build the Prospect Expressway. He also built entrances to Ocean Parkway and Fort Hamilton Parkway. East Windsor Terrace/Windsor Terrace is bordered by Ocean Parkway, Coney Island Avenue and ends on the northerly side of Caton Ave.

I like to think that, if we could only import some well-connected Wall Street types and their brownstones, prove that Walt Whitman’s "Bles’t Bales of Clovering Hay in East Windsor Terrace" was the authentic, and an inspiration for Olmstead and Vaux to design East Windsor Terrace as an appendage to Prospect Park, we might get some respect. The city would know we existed

The heart of our neighborhood is The Kensington Stables, now the last of the nearly one-hundred and fifty year tradition of recreational horseback riding in Prospect Park. All of our homes are ‘modest’ two or three story affairs, mostly owner occupied. Many homes housed carriage drivers in the early part of the 20th
century and are very nearly one hundred years old.

Like everywhere else in the city, the prices for these ‘modest’ have risen dramatically, but not many people have moved. Every so often shady men stalk us, offering cash for our houses so they can tear them down.

Along Ocean Parkway we are ringed by six story, pre-WWII, Art Deco apartment buidings. There are also two churches. One is a very large Pentecostal Cathedral, which occupies the better part of a block.

It’s equipped with an auditorium that seats over a thousand. The other church is an International Baptist Church with a school, for speaking and deaf children. There’s also a small middle/beginning high school affiliated with Brooklyn College, and a daycare center.

Racially, we’re a mini-United Nations, and we like it that way. Several immigrants are homeowners. One developer volunteered, unasked, that the inhabitants of his building would be 90% white, because, "Who else could afford these prices." At the same time a person from City Planning told me pointedly that, "The immigrants keep coming,[and] they need somewhere to live." Luxury condos?

One would think that, given all I’ve described, there is enough "density" here to satisfy the City Planning in Calcutta, but apparently not.

Before you could say "Board of Standards and Appeals," a 9-story building of fifty-nine luxury units was begun on Coney Island Ave. by a "disgraced" architect/designer/developer who lost his self-certification four years ago when an immigrant
worker was smothered to death by cement. Since then he’s been given cart blanche by the city despite continuing to pull every dirty trick in the book.

We were not notified of the project. City Planning’s position is that it’s at the owner’s discretion to notify anyone, or not. An owner’s privacy is not to be violated. No matter that, as in my backyard, the owner may demolishing another building full of PCBs, asbestos and other contaminants so that he can build on that site without any prior notification. There are many safety regulations to follow, but few inspectors to enforce them. And,
anyway what is a three hundred dollar fine when millions are involved?

Luckily, through the Freedom Of Information Act, the public (if they know it exists) can easily obtain a copy of the developer’s Environmental Assessment Statement from City Planning. However, there’s a thorny layer of rhetoric to cut through. Be prepared to download a glossary of acronyms from the DEP, and the DOB, so you can learn what a ULURP and a CEQR are.

Our whole neighborhood is imperilled due to a fluke of zoning in 1994. We were, unbeknownst to us, arbitrarily and unnecessarily, up-zoned from Residential5 to R6. 5 means that you can’t build above two or three stories; R6, on the other hand allows one to build pretty much as high as City Planning will allow.

This was done, we were told, over a decade later, in order to build a multi-story nursing home on Caton Avenue. (The nursing home was built elsewhere, but we were left ripe for exploitation.) RR7A means one can’t build as high as R6, but one can build mammoth, squat buildings which make more money. All zoning is subject to variance by City Planning.

On one small block, Caton Place, (a narrow 70 ft. street) between Ocean Parkway and E. 8th st, developers want to build enormous buildings of luxury condos and expensive apartments, where one-story industrial buildings stood. They are doing nothing to
upgrade the quality of the infrastructure to match the needs of the hundreds of people who will be counting on a corroded fifty- year-sewer pipe never designed for the waste of over three hundred to four hundred people. Underground parking lots may be a challenge, since the neighborhood is in a flood plane that gets the run-off from Prospect Park lake and is stopped by the BQE. By law, the developers have only to make a parking spaces for a certain percentage of the residents, and the residents must pay a steep fee for a space. Street parking is in short supply as it is.

Horses have the right-of-way, but how do you get that through another irate drivers? The Mayor isn’t scheduling a new subway to abet the F line, or new schools to catch up with the pandemic
overdevelopment decimating Brooklyn.

On 23 Caton Place, [lot 5320 block 24] a developer will be building an 8 story metal and glass building (zoned 7A), with 107 units. Since it was an as-of-right situation, i.e., we had no rights. We were sad to lose the second-to-last stables in the in the neighborhood. The development has a conglomeration of
investors who are ready to flip (re-sell) their units as soon as they hit the market—transience further crumbling the mortar that makes a bunch of bricks neighborhood.

Now, we are presenting our case before the Land Use Committee of Community Board seven. We hope they will support us on the uphill road get a developer to downsize——when he wants to up-size to 7A—— an prospective sixty-eight unit, eight story building with three six-story wings [block 5320,lot 55] at 22
Caton Place, (directly across the street from the 107 unit building).

All we are asking for is sensible development. We’ll
need every voice to be heard.

Posted by: Dave Werner



Sign Park Slope Neighbors' Petition on the Atlantic Railyards

Park Slope Neighbors has launched a petition drive calling for the area's elected officials to take a stand on the proposed Atlantic Yards development project.

Sign the online petition:

http://www.parkslopeneighbors.org/petition.htm

Posted by: Eric McClure














Post Your Views!

Read All Views

Prospect Park a successful dog run?!
(Dec 12, 2006)

Overdevelopment of East Windsor Terrace
(Oct 31, 2005)

Sign Park Slope Neighbors' Petition on the Atlantic Railyards
(Apr 30, 2005)

Stop Airplane Noise Pollution in our Neighborhood!
(Mar 29, 2005)

Host Families Needed for Great AFS Exchange Students!
(Feb 03, 2005)

PARK SLOPE LIBRARY PROVIDES FREE ONLINE HOMEWORK HELP
(Jun 04, 2004)

Police ticket bicyclists rather than drivers
(May 26, 2004)

Bill de Blasio's Name Change
(Apr 21, 2004)

Stop Low Flying Airplane Noise Pollution in Windsor Terrace and Park Slope
(Nov 17, 2003)

Is Bill DiBlasio actually Jake Wilhelm??
(Sep 04, 2003)

Honking Cars at the St. John
(Jun 20, 2003)

UNION Street = major highway
(May 08, 2003)

no good slope dog runs
(May 07, 2003)

Park Slope Dog Run
(May 06, 2003)

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