Last month Greenpoint and Williamsburg neighbors broke out of North Brooklyn and headed down to City Hall to fight for Bushwick Inlet Park. We joined hands, sang songs, screamed our heads off and showed Mayor DeBlasio we have serious balls to bang on the table. In fact, there were so many of us at City Hall, 300+ people by most accounts, we were spilling out into the streets because there wasn’t enough room to for us all.
Our rabble-rousing Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park are at it again and need our help. They are passing around a petition which lays it out to the Mayor in clear-cut terms: We want our park, you know the one promised to us YEARS ago, and we won’t back down until we get one!
Don’t think this issue effects you? Think again.
Yes, we have McCarren and McGlorick parks, but these green swatches are not enough. Did you know Greenpoint has the LOWEST park to person ratio in the entire city?! Wait until those Ferragamo heels start filling up the soon-to-be-built towers, literally doubling our population. In the near future we will be suffocating under the weight of so many people. Hit up Transmitter Park on a weekend to feel our current claustrophobia. If you think it’s bad now having to play foostie with your hang-nailed, toocloseforcomfort fellow park-goer, just wait until those towers come! Talk about an invasion of space.
Enough of get rich quick schemes and band-aid fixes
The last thing our waterfront needs is another money hungry developer sticking in one more ugly ass, over-priced tower, to pay for a park that should be there already! Unfortunately, this maybe a real reality. I don’t know about you Greenpoint, but I’m sick of developers coming into the hood dangling “affordable housing” carrots in exchange for a host of tax giveaways, expanded air rights, and one blade of astroturf. What we are holding in our hands right now is a hot smelly turd of unfulfilled city promises and Mayor DeBlasio hasn’t said diddlysquat about it.
So what to do with all this bullshit besides flinging it on the steps of City Hall where it belongs? Signing the petition is a start. Getting mad and speaking your mind on May 16th is the next best shot.
Clouds are looming over CitiStorage if we don’t step up
Norman Brodsky, the owner of CitiStorage recently told Crains he believes his property “could fetch $500 million dollars on the open market if it were already zoned for residential”. Mr. Brodsky also hopes a deal can be struck to allow his land to be spilt between the park and residential development.
Well… I hate to break it him, but that ain’t going to happen–at least not over our tax-paying bodies! For starters, CitiStorage is zoned for manufacturing. Once that land is no longer used for manufacturing it reverts to parkland for that “green string of pearls lining the waterfront,” as State Assemblywoman Joan Millman so lovely described Bloomberg’s grand vision for a 28 acre waterfront park at the City Hall rally.
A promise is a promise
If our neighborhood was to get these monstorous Bloomberg-backed towers littering our waterfront, the very the least the city could do was roll out a big green lawn for us to puke on. This was the raw deal Greenpoint and Williamsburg had to swallow in the 2005 rezoning. Ten years later and we’re still gagging, only now on a bunch of soulless Miami-inspired designs, cracking infrastructure, serious displacement, and nary a green leaf in sight.
Something is rotting in North Brooklyn, and no, the stench is not coming from our blue digester eggs.
So here’s the deal Greenpointers–Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park is gearing up for their next May 16th rally on N12th and Kent St, and they need extra helping hands to get the message out. This Monday night, April 20th, between 7:30-9pm, they will be meeting at Dirck the Norseman to talk turkey.
Hope to see you all there and don’t forget to sign this petition!
This is some bullshit!