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Maria Torres recalled the day 10 years ago, when she and a few others she called “on-water thrill-seekers” paddled in kayaks from Hunts Point to a little, tree-filled island in the East River.
Then Torres, the president of The Point Community Development Corporation, dipped a quill pen in ink and added her signature to a document that made the island she rediscovered that day a city park.
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The battle to redevelop Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal has been going on since the 1960’s. By then, the canal, once one of the state’s busiest waterways, had fallen largely into disuse. Many of the warehouses, factories and other industrial sites that lined the canal’s shores were abandoned.
Now, with residential real estate booming and the city’s population expanding, the area is on the verge of a new era of residential development. But as development plans go forward, every step requires a delicate balance of the city’s enormous need for housing, the environmental cleanup required on a century-old industrial waterway, and the ongoing needs of the businesses that remain in the area.
Click here for Matthew Sollars’ multi-media report.
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Efforts to turn the embattled Brigham Street lot in Sheepshead Bay into a green space began to bear fruit as the district’s first community-born park project got a crucial boost.
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Long-time allies in the effort to clean up pollution in Hunts Point have fallen out over the fate of the 28-acre corner of the Oak Point rail yard where the city wants to build a jail.
Congressman Jose Serrano has denounced Sustainable South Bronx’s longstanding plan to create an industrial park devoted to remanufacturing discarded construction material there.
In an open letter to the Hunts Point community, Serrano contends the proposal would merely add another dumping ground to a neighborhood already overburdened with waste.
“We’ve had enough,” said the Democrat, who represents New York’s 16th Congressional District in the South Bronx. “I can’t support the idea we’ll be putting a lot of fanfare behind a project where some people will be sorting other people’s garbage.”
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Joseph Wroblowski was thrilled when T-Mobile offered to pay him more than $1,000 a month in exchange for putting a 27-foot cell phone antenna - disguised as a flagpole - on the roof of his Maspeth home.
After being criticized by his neighbors and learning more details about the project, Wroblowski decided the star-spangled headache is not worth the money. However, T-Mobile is not going to let him off the hook.
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For a map of cell phone towers in New York City, click here.
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Hunts Point Riverside Park is a pristine patch of green surrounded by rusting metal: train tracks line one side of the park, and mountains of scrap metal another. But the salvage yard where the Sims Metal recycling company collects discarded metal will soon include its own patch of green: a wall covered in moss and ferns, and a wet meadow with native plants.
The plants are part of a $2-3 million water treatment system aimed at keeping pollutants out of the Bronx River by imitating natural wetlands.
