My Life In Brooklyn

Late this afternoon a chatty and enthusiastic man rang my doorbell with a petition and pen in hand.

“This is for the basketball stadium,” he told me.  “We all know its going to be built.  This is to ensure local residents will get the construction jobs.”

I read it over.  Not a word on it about construction jobs, however it was collecting signatures in support of Atlantic Yards development.

When I began to talk to the signature collector, noting there was nothing on the petition about jobs and asking who he represented, the man backed off and was on to the next house before I could say another word.

As usual, read before you sign.

This construction site has been ongoing for a couple of months now also.  I haven’t managed to grab many pics that decently display the site itself and frankly I more or less forgot to mention it before.  It is boarded up very efficiently to prevent viewing.

The site is located on the south side of Crooke Avenue between St. Paul Place and Parade Place.   This is another large site, and also another site that is in process due to a teardown.  If you look at a map, this site is slightly west of the Caton Ave site on the very next block.

While I was at the site, attempting to grab some images, one of the plywood “doors” to the site opened and I had a chat with a low-level manager, who allowed me to take a couple pics (though he didn’t want the boss to see me).  He told me this would be another six story building, condos, and they are moving along quickly now.  I’ll check on the progress of this one over time.

I haven’t published pics of this construction site before, though I have a few images archived during earlier stages of this build.

It is located on Caton Ave, almost directly facing the intersection of East 18th St.   I am guessing this will turn out to be condos, though with all the press lately about condos becoming rentals (or in some cases hotels or discarded plans) one cannot predict.  Sadly, at this point the slots for the requisite air conditioners are evident, looks like there will be balconies, and I can only guess the roof level will be some sort of penthouse offering.

Now, while this is indeed Caton Ave, there are some elements of this neighborhood I like quite a bit.  It is a short walk to the Parade Ground, Prospect Park, and Q train.  It is just on the outer edge of Victorian Flatbush.  There are some really nice larger buildings in the area as well as limestones, though ultimately I am not able to say what the place is like at night, for example.  But I can’t imagine it to be very bad.  On the down side, on Woodruff, which isn’t too far away there are three buildings I suspect to be SROs: broken windows and shades, graffiti and generally poor shape.

Again I have to remind people to have a look at various online mapping resources, you will note there was a teardown in order for this structure to be built.  I am not saying all teardowns are unjustified, but I plan to continually remind everyone that they are consistently happening.  My own personal opinion is teardowns balance out to be more on the unjustified side in terms of how it ultimately will modify the nature of a neighborhood, but that is how I feel.  It isn’t just the teardowns that are worrisome, but moreso the poorly designed buildings that replace them.  The city needs to establish some serious guidelines.  The following image shows what was torn down for this building (the red “pushpin” is pointing to the intersection of E. 18th and Caton Ave):

Image from Microsoft, Local Live

It couldn’t have been a more perfect day to be outside for a lengthy walk.  Seems like I have been away forever, in blog time at least.  However, Thanksgiving is over, the houseguests have returned to their respective cities and hopefully I will be able to catch up here with comments and a couple of entries.

To begin, today I grabbed another shot in the progress of the commercial building on the northeast corner of Church Avenue and Ocean Ave.  As you can see from the image, new sidewalks have been created, lots of retail space is evident, some with windows and security gates installed, others still boarded up.  It will be interesting to see what stores finally open their doors — and also interesting will be a visual on the completed structure.

The four retail windows on the left in the image appear to be one large space with a partially finished interior.  A number of months ago the New York Times published an article on retail rentals in this area, describing it as nearly 100% and of interest to larger chain stores.  So, we shall soon see what happens here.