Saving the Bay

The decaying marsh islands of Jamaica Bay are coming back to life - plant by plant, at significant effort and expense.

Restoration project brings marshlands of Jamaica Bay back from the brink

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently concluded a bold and backbreaking feat of environmental engineering, recreating 38 acres of vanished tidal wetland on Elders East Marsh in the northern portion of Jamaica Bay.

"It's thriving," said Len Houston, chief of the corps' environmental analysis branch in New York. "It's actually doing better than we anticipated."

Before the $13 million project began in spring 2006, small, fragmented pieces were all that remained of the once-vibrant marsh. The area had fallen victim to worsening dieoffs that some scientists predicted could eradicate all of the bay's tidal marshes by 2012.

Park slope

Well la de da, it's another pile of Queens Crap along Calamus Avenue. :::Yawn::: Wait, what's this?
The driveways seem a little too steep.
So steep, in fact, that they needed to install steps next to the parking ramp. Not a blade of grass here, either. Have fun during the next rainstorm.

Bad publicity

"Carroll Gardens is many threads but only one CORD!"

That's the what the latest subway plaza mural reads tonight.... (Carroll Street "F" Station in Carroll Gardens).
It looks like an awful lot of people in Carroll Gardens are trying to "Wake up Bill!!" (DeBlasio) as words to that effect plus his telephone number are painted across the top of the mural. They seem to be saying:

Councilman, the clock is ticking on our beloved neighborhood (as we still know it) and you are STILL ASLEEP at the wheel!! - T.S.

Seems like folks in Brooklyn are not afraid to let their council member know they're not too happy with him because he's shirking his responsibility. In Queens, there is no such similar outcry. Don't want to lose that funding, now. Better to have a few bucks ice cream money and watch the area go down the tubes. There's always Florida...

How to make a neighborhood look crappy

Why would a somewhat respected group like Place in History depict LIC as a pile of demolition debris? Why is this book so popular amongst the area's newcomers?

Dutch surprise

Following a stormy Dutch Kills Civic Association meeting 10 days earlier, the Department of City Planning held an environmental assessment hearing just before Thanksgiving. The meeting, held in the school auditorium of Evangel Church on Crescent Street, was the latest part of the long process toward completing the Dutch Kills rezoning project. It lasted several hours, providing an opportunity for Dutch Kills residents and developers who are currently busy in that neighborhood to address a City Planning panel that was headed by Robert Dobruskin, the department's director of environmental assessment and review.

Dutch Kills Questions Rezoning Plans

Decades of forbearance seemed worthwhile as long as Dutch Kills remained substantially intact, until hotels a dozen stories high and built as-ofright transformed the neighborhood into a highrise area despite the new zoning.

The last speaker was Pastor Robert Johansson of Evangel Church. Johansson has been at Evangel for 20 years and he believed that the rezoning was a plan the neighborhood "could live with". He wondered aloud why a stop-work order was never instituted while the rezoning plan was instituted. "There is something wrong," he said, with a plan that allows 200-foot-high buildings to go up in a neighborhood where, for one thing, nothing nearly that high had ever been built before and where, for another, construction would not be permitted higher than 35 feet once the new zoning is finally in effect. He appealed to the Planning panel before him to institute the new zoning before its requirements have become worthless.

It is not solely up to the Department of City Planning to determine when the new zoning will be effective. The channels that the zoning plan must go through might take it at least another year. It could be an interesting year for Dutch Kills.

Photo from UntitledNameDotCom