Thursday, May 31, 2007

Destroying old nabes to build new ones

The Department of City Planning's webpage on the downtown Brooklyn redevelopment plan declares that its goal is to "serve the residents, businesses, academic institutions, and cultural institutions of Downtown Brooklyn and its surrounding communities." The city's actual environmental-impact statement for the rezoning plan, though, was more blunt, saying that while current businesses would be displaced, they would not be "significant" losses because "they do not have substantial economic value to the City, they do not define neighborhood character, nor do they belong to a special category of business that is protected by special regulations or publicly adopted plans."

On the Outs in Brooklyn

[Store owner Jeff Gargiulo] recalls the mayor's recent statement on the proposed redevelopment of Willets Point in Queens: "There will always be one person who objects to everything, but I don't think anybody suggests that this society should stay back in the Stone Age and never move ahead."

"I got a thousand signatures in three days," says Gargiulo. "It's not just one person that wants to stop this. It's thousands."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A quick scoping of this drawing makes me think of the older Park Ave. view of Manhattan.

This is clearly a plan to "upgrade" and EXCLUDE not include any of the neighborhoods wants and needs!

Urban renewal and "people of color" removal...."re-bopped" (replayed) once again in that all too familiar musical key of "F" (for f--k)!

NYC is rapidly running out of prime downtown quality real estate to develop (over develop) so Dan Doctoroff & Co. have decided that this land is too good for the quality of the residents that currently live there.....so he wants them moved out and replaced with higher socioeconomic level hipster/yuppies!

Anonymous said...

The only way for you to stop this is to unite these targeted neighborhoods around the city.

Don't wait for the 'official' preservation movement to do this. The first generation of fighters has all just about died off, and this current generation is looking to hold on to what they have and be, well, collaborators.

Needless to say, with that agenda, they are losing the fight.

We need a spontaneous coming together of new faces.