Chuck Otey's Bay Ridge

Where’s Bay Ridge?

Wikipedia Got It Wrong!

FOR some time now people new to this part of Brooklyn and those living in places like Dumbo have been telling this writer that “Bay Ridge” ends where I. 278 begins!   East of this notorious expressway, they say, is where Bay Ridge ends and Dyker Heights begins.  Dyker Heights, these newbies exclaim, is not in Bay Ridge!

NOT SO! I’ve been telling them. . . Dyker Heights may be distinct as a sub-neighborhood of Bay Ridge, but it is part of Bay Ridge!

WHERE are they coming up with this changing of boundaries?  That endless fount of misinformation–WIKIPEDIA!!!

WIKIPEDIA is the only “source” of information in recent times which relies on what its unqualified contributors deem to be reality!

FOR the record: the boundaries of the NYPD”S 68^th Pct., the Bay Ridge Community Council and Community Board Ten configure a Bay Ridge which starts at about 65^th St., includes all of Dyker Heights and runs south, including the Fort Hamilton Army Base.

 LOCAL NEWSPAPER editors, who know what interests their readers, use the same boundaries–all the way out to 14^th Avenue. And the Dyker Heights Civic Association, the oldest civic organization of its kind in Brooklyn, is a proud, constituent member of the Bay Ridge Community Council!

PEOPLE who don’t know any better forget–or perhaps never knew-that I-278, built to accommodate approaches to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, slashed through residential Bay Ridge, taking out 2,000 homes and almost 10,000 residents!

LISTEN UP Wikipedia adherents:  Monster Builder Robert Moses may have eviscerated Bay Ridge, but he didn’t destroy it!

The westbound lanes of the Gowanus Expressway viaduct soar high above the city streets of Brooklyn below. *

THE OTHER day–at the Brooklyn Bar Association Dinner actually–we ran into a long standing fellow community organizer, the legendary Buddy Scotto.

BUDDY, a main force in cleansing the infamous Gowanus Canal, was there to help honor a civic colleague and friend, Joe Bruno, a former Kings Supreme Court Justice who now heads the City’s Office of Emergency Management.

BUT the first topic for both of us–not to the surprise of his talented lawyer daughter Debra seated with him–was the deteriorating condition of, “the rotting, disgusting, dangerous dilapidated” Gowanus Expressway, which we worked for years to have completely torn down and  replaced with a tunnel!

I’M almost quoting him word for word because that was our mantra throughout most of the nineties, when we were part of a noisy and intense group known then as the Gowanus Expressway Coalition.

SINCE then the Coalition has remained in a quasi-dormant state basically due to a lack of funding. But, with President-elect Barack Obama planning to spend billions on an infrastructure rebuilding program, Buddy, myself, and others, such as Joanne Simon, who was in charge when I left to pursue other civic interests, are beginning to wonder aloud whether the long-delayed Gowanus Tunnel might be going back to the drawing boards!

THE STATE Department of Transportation has been dragging its feet the last several years stalling the tunnel plan with a laborious environmental impact study, or EIS.

WITH the Gowanus Tunnel initiative stymied for the time being, much of the responsibility now rests with Transportation Alternatives, a well-funded civic group which has been focusing on bicycles lanes of late.  The TA was an early Coalition member along with other groups such as the Brooklyn Heights Association, the Merchants of Third Ave. and South Park Slope organization headed by attorney Ben Meskin whose “bomb-throwing” reputation helped the organization gain invaluable publicity.

MAYBE it’s time to resurrect the battle to replace the hazardous and slow Gowanus Expressway with a tunnel which would provide the area with thousands of jobs and hundreds of new acres of productive commercial and residential space!

WE COULD call it the Eileen Dugan–Barack Obama Tunnel in honor of the wonderful late assemblywoman who did so much to battle the forces of inertia and lethargia at the State DOT! 

* Photo and photo text courtesy of northeastroads.com

The Green Church As It Was

 

 

 

THE “GREEN CHURCH” is truly no more.

IT’S an historic tragedy that the beautiful, 109-year-old Bay Ridge United Methodist Church has been destroyed and the corner of Ovington and Fourth Avenues looks eerily like an abandoned lot.

NOW, IN a true sign of the times, there’s now a huge red, white and blue billboard painted message there announcing it is For Sale or Lease.

THIS IS not good news.  It just underscores the sad fact that developer Abe Betesh, who signed a contract to purchase the prime piece of real estate for $9.75 million last year, has been unable to assemble the money needed to build middle and upper income cooperative apartments there.

WITH THE real estate market on shaky ground now, there’s a good chance that the vacant lot might remain so for some time.  Let’s hope not.  Those of us who live nearby and walk along Fourth and Ovington every day hardly need such a negative reminder.

MEANTIME, however, now that the serpentine-stone church has crumbled, it is important to the community-at-large that certain  people stop pointing fingers at the pastor, the congregation or anyone else who didn’t agree with them on how the key corner property should be used.

ASKING a small body of older-aged congregants to devote their lives and their funds to maintain a church as a shrine to days gone by was asking far too much.

PERHAPS church leaders could have listened better to those screaming for preservation.  Perhaps those seeking to preserve the structure could have been less shrill, perhaps less political.

ABE BETESH probably thought he was getting a great bargain when he signed the contract to buy the property last summer. The developer is probably not a popular person locally but there are many rooting for him to come up with the backers and the funds to put in an acceptable structure where the “Green Church” stood for so long.

    PHOTO COURTESY FORGOTTEN NY

KILL THE B37 BUS?  Crazy.  Can the Metropolitan Transit Authority be serious when it suggests that this vital lifeline between the southernmost corner of Bay Ridge and downtown Court Street be eliminated?

LET’S HOPE NOT.  The “Third Avenue Bus”, as it’s known locally, might run irregularly, it may lurch along often at snail-like speed, but there is no way that the MTA should be permitted to shut it down.

HOW will the thousands of current riders–with senior citizens making up the largest group–get around and downtown if the Third Ave. route is discontinued?

STATE SENATOR MARTY GOLDEN cites another complication: “There are 400 businesses on this stretch of the Avenue alone, and thousands of people are employed here.  The impact on them would be tremendous.”

OUTGOING Congressman Vito Fossella expressed his shock that the so-called “Doomsday” MTA budget would end the Third Avenue service.  “The MTA shouldn’t take (any such action)…until they’ve cut every ounce of fat out of their bloated budges,” said Fossella.

CONG.FOSSELLA agreed with Sen. Golden that loss of the Third Avenue route would disproportionately hurt older Bay Ridgeites.  “The elimination of this route would also hit our local seniors especially hard as they would have no other accessible means of public transportation in this part of Bay Ridge” he said.

DEMONSTRATING bi-partisan unity on this critical issue was Dem. Councilman Vinnie Gentile, who said that “Either the MTA is overlooking the needs of seniors and the disabled…or they’re ignoring them.”