Bike lanes going down on Mother Gaston Blvd
Bike lanes going down on Mother Gaston Blvd
Photo credit: www.madeinbrownsville.org
Friday May 10th marked the first sign of bike lanes going down in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The Department of Transportation team was out early on Mother Gaston Blvd from East New York to Livonia Avenue spray painting the guide lines for the new lanes and parking lines that will be painted starting Monday. The Community Board 16 approved project was pushed back a few weeks due to weather but the lanes are highly anticipated as a compliment to the newly installed bike racks that the DOT recently installed a few months back all around the Brownsville/East New York area. Residents I’ve spoken to like NYCHA Citywide Tenant Association President, Reginald Bowman, applauded the changes and look forward to seeing more activity from city agencies saying, “They’re doing good work…” speaking of the Brownsville Partnership and the efforts of the DOT who worked in collaboration with the Community Board in convening public meetings to get the ball rolling on the bike lane discussions in Brownsville.
The Rockwell Group offered a pro-bono plan for a Brownsville Imagination Playground as a renovation to the existing Betsy Head Playground on Dumont and Thomas S. Boyland St. At a price tag of $3.92 million, the park is the second worldwide Imagination Playground and the first for Brooklyn.
Inspired by tree houses, the park will include a multi-level space with water, sand, and loose part play areas surrounded by a long, curving play ramp that weaves through the trees and is bridged by permanent play equipment; renovated basketball and handball courts; and an exercise area for adults.
A trained staff of Play Associates will be onsite to maintain and manage the loose parts during the summer.
MKW + Associates, LLC is the landscape architect for the project.
The $3.92 million playground will be funded with $3.1 million capital funds from Councilwoman Darlene Mealy (D-Brooklyn), $750,000 from Borough President Marty Markowitz, and $70,000 from Mayor Bloomberg.
“The Imagination Playground concept allows children to exercise their minds, as well as their bodies,” said City Parks Commissioner Veronica White. “David Rockwell’s innovative design at the Burling Slip site of the South Street Seaport has proved a tremendous success and we are thrilled that he is working with us to introduce a vibrant new permanent play space for children here in Brownsville’s Betsy Head Park. Special thanks to Council Member Mealy and Borough President Markowitz for allocating the capital funds for this imaginative oasis of play.”
The playground uses large blue re-configurable blocks for “unlocking children’s creative spirit” says Matt Goldman, Co-founder of the Blue School. The Rockwell Group has donated a preliminary set of play blocks to the Brownsville Recreation Center to test.
This comes as great news as the Brownsville Partnership and the Municipal Art Society have recently been holding Hope In: Parks and Open Space sessions as a break out from their successful Hope Summit community planning event earlier this year. Conducting park audits to assess and rank the needs of the community, the organizations are looking to their partnership with Community Board 16 to produce actionable steps toward engaging city resources to do the work that needs to be done in Brownsville—a predominately black area that has seen considerable disinvestment in recent decades in physical environment and educational creative outlets for the youth. This could be a grand opportunity to affect am entire generation of young black and brown children and cultivate their minds to think creatively not only about their play but the physical world around them.
Who knows. I might not be the last black Architect out of Brownsville after all thanks to this.
After one of the most extensive community planning processes in New York City history, including nearly 400 community meetings and a website that received over 10,000 suggestions, bike share stations finally started hitting the streets this weekend. As more stations are going in, anxious commuters and recreational cyclists are wondering when the stations will be up and running. Well, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan told reporters yesterday that May will be the big unveiling.
The long awaited Citibike program, which faced setbacks first from computer glitches and then Hurricane Sandy, will be rolled out at 330 stations in May, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan told a group of reporters in DUMBO this morning. “When in May?” you, and everyone else asked inquired, persistently. “In May,” she said firmly.
All around Downtown Brooklyn, Clinton Hill/Fort Greene area in high profiled spots like outside Atlantic Terminal Mall and outside of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), the stations have landed themselves much to the revel of passersby. Revelers will be happy to know that they can start signing up now for membership.
The first set of 330 stations have been positioned in Manhattan South of 60th St and Brooklyn West of Nostrand Ave and North of Altantic Ave (With the exception of one outlier on Dean Street and 5th Ave).
Looks like Brownsville will have to wait. We’ll keep you posted.
Theoretical good news from the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The public housing agency has pledged to eliminate the backlog of repairs currently on its plate.
NYCHA maintains its status as the largest operational Housing Authority in the nation–employing over 12,000 (roughly 9,000 on front-line operations and 3,000 in administration)–and New York City’s biggest landlord with over 400,000 residents, Totaling over 420,000 backlogged repairs (that’s approximately 1.05 complaints per resident), the daunting task for the action plan comes seven months after the pricey Boston Consulting Group’s (previous employers of both NYCHA Chairman, John Rhea, and Mitt Romney who had just completed B-School) key findings and recommendations report . The $10,000,000 BCG invoice that came with the report is suppose to save NYCHA $100,000,000 by 2016 with $36,000,000 annually and $27,000,000 of that being reallocated to bring in more front-line staff, says a NY Daily News report.
NYCHA will see reinvestment of $40 million into repair efforts picked up from savings in administrative costs, and $10 million from the City Council. NYCHA says it has hired more than 500 additional workers over the past year for maintenance and skilled trades.
Courtesy of NYCHA Journal
John Rhea and the city couldn’t have chosen a better time to optimize efficiency in the books considering the great amount of resources consumed in the response for Hurricane Sandy. Couple this with extreme cut backs in federal funding over the better part of a half century, and the ingredients are ripe for devastating long-lasting instability for thousands of families. As New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, put it:
No one has felt the impact of federal underfunding more than NYCHA residents, who have had to face long waits for repairs to apartments and public spaces,… Despite these severe funding challenges, we refuse to turn our backs on public housing — something we have seen other cities throughout the country do.
~Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Not for nothing, Mr. Mayor, and with all due respect but according to your record on homelessness over your 11 year reign, you really couldn’t afford to turn your back on public housing. It would be a publicity nightmare if you had.
Courtesy of Coalition for the Homeless
An elephant of homelessness lurks in the corner of City Hall. With a record number of households in shelters and a divestiture of federal aid programs like Section 8 and other housing vouchers and subsidies, Bloomberg’s necessity to keep public housing viable is warranted especially if he is ever to run for higher office. Not to mention that whoever the next Mayor is, she’ll have to face “a historic homelessness crisis” says the Coalition for the Homeless in their annual report.
Let’s hope that NYCHA can stretch resources and make good on their commitment. We can only hope for the best because hope and shelter are, sometimes, the last things that low-income public housing residents can rely on.
Read the full NYCHA Journal article here. [Source NYCHA Journal Vol. 43, No. 2 - March 2013]
Former Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, Tito Mboweni, will be the keynote speaker at this years Harvard Africa Conference
It’s coming. The 3rd Annual Harvard African Development Conference, the only Africa-related conference that is organized by all the schools of Harvard University. This year’s theme is Rethinking Development in Africa: From Strategy to Implementation. The conference will feature the latest information on an emerging continent. The keynote speaker this year is Tito Mboweni, former Governor of the South African Reserve Bank. Find out more and register here.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a group of Africans somewhere in Africa speculating the future of the United States. “1st Annual Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology United States Technological Development Conference.” Just putting it out there.
Bike lanes going down on Mother Gaston Blvd
Bike lanes going down on Mother Gaston Blvd
