Oil-field-to-luxury-condo plan stalled

From the Brooklyn Paper:

The Great Recession really stinks — and for one Park Slope family, it’s literal.

Steve Shepard, who lives next to a troubled construction site on Fourth Avenue between Fifth and Sixth streets, says that a fetid stench from gasoline and oil overwhelms his co-op apartment and can be smelled from as much as a block away.
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“It smells like a refinery! It gives my wife headaches and a sore throat,” said Shepard.

The torrential downpours of last week only made matters worse. Shepard now worries that hot weather will create a Biblical plague of putrid odors.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Environmental Conservation said that the odors were tied to “small amounts of petroleum floating in some standing water.”

The spokeswoman, Lori Severino, also noted that the site has been on the city’s radar since 1989 as being possibly contaminated. Clean-up proposals were first made by BP in 2007.

A year later, developer Isaac Katan proposed a 12-story, 107-unit building that would have remedied the contamination while building the stylish structure right next door to another luxurious condo building on Fourth Avenue, the Novo.

Some excavation took place, but the recession put the full plan on hold. But the smell continued.

Isaac Katan, incidentally, was one of Melinda Katz' biggest campaign contributors. Maybe that's why he no longer has money to finish this project.