The Forgotten Tunnel Under Atlantic Avenue

The Gowanus Canal

Although this odd signage has been up on the Ninth Street bridge over the toxic Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, the multi-colored waterway was only made a Superfund site this month. It actually doesn't smell as bad as it looks.But the most exciting part about the canal is this, as summarized in a 2009 article in New York Magazine:

"Cholera, typhoid, typhus, gonorrhea: They’ve all been found in the water. A team of biology professors at New York City College of Technology have also studied a curious white goo oozing along the bottom, which turned out to be a mix of bacteria, protozoans, and various contaminants. The microbes appear to have evolved resistance to the filth, and the scientists have been trying to figure out whether their disease-fighting mechanisms could be adapted for medical use."

The canal was dug in the 1860s, and the pollution came from the oil refineries, tanneries, and other chemical plants that used it and its shores. The Superfund clean-up should take between 10 and 12 years and cost as much as $500 million. The Bloomberg administration opposed the Super Fund designation; it has an alternative plan that it said was faster (but not by much) and cheaper -- and all to attract developers who are eager for clean (or at least saleable) waterfront property.

Who Would Dare Ban Babies From Brooklyn Bars?

Babies in bars? This could only be an issue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. And it doesn't stop with small children scrambling around shrieking in drinking establishments; there are stroller traffic jams and mothers who want to breast feed here, too. Union Hall, a large Park Slope bar with indoor bocce lanes and a basement music venue once had a "no strollers" policy, one that may have been put in place after some rumored Fire Department tickets for strollers blocking exits. That policy is no longer in place.

How did this battle start? Young parents began bringing kids to bars more often when New York banned smoking indoors. My generation, the one for which 30 is the new 20, finds itself listening to the same music as its children, and wearing the same skinny jeans. It doesn't know it's grown up. Or rather, it refuses to grow up.

[UPDATE 3/4/10: When I wrote this yesterday, I couldn't recall actually seeing babies in Park Slope bars. Sure, I get run off sidewalks by giant strollers being pushed three abreast by mommies of means. But I hadn't had the bar experience. Until I stopped for a drink on Seventh Avenue after work last night. Damn it if there wasn't a young hipster couple with an infant, coming in for some booze.]

Here are some quotes about kids in bars, mostly via Gothamist, by locals:

• "I will get up on the subway for kids. I will be tolerant of them kicking the back of my seat while seeing a G-rated movie. But let me have my bars."
  
  --Julieanne Smolinski, 26-year-old Brooklyn resident (CNN.com, Mar. 2, 2010)



• "We're a neighborhood gathering place, not a hard-drinking bar, and we're not jerks about it. But the overwhelming clientele that spends quite a lot of money here can't deal with babies."
  
  --Greg Curley, co-owner of the Park Slope bar Double Windsor, which recently made a 'no-kids-after-5 p.m. rule.' (CNN.com, Mar. 2, 2010)



• "I'm not going to keep her out past 7 p.m. When the bar starts filling up, that's when we head home. It's responsible parenting and responsible adult behavior. I'm not knocking back double vodkas while my daughter is stumbling around."
  
  --Matt Gross, freelance writer and Park Slope resident (CNN.com, Mar. 2, 2010)



• "My stance hasn't changed since I had my daughter. We've taken her to a bar or two, and she's proving herself to be a very pleasant diner, too—but we take her at times where it's totally square and appropriate. I've never eaten dinner at 5:30 before, but now I do if I REALLY want to go and we don't have a plan. I know a ton of other bar and restaurant owners and I can see them cringe when people bring their kids in at inappropriate times. It ruins the vibe they've worked very hard to create. Bars aren't Romper Rooms, they are dangerous places with pottymouth drunks. Some seem more friendly than others, but they aren't. You can tell if a place is friendly to kids or not and you shouldn't take it personally if they are not. Just go somewhere else."
  
  --Jack "Skippy" McFadden, owner of the Gowanus, Brooklyn bar The Bell House (Gothamist, Feb. 17, 2010)



• "No matter what breeders might think, bars are not family-friendly. If I am out drinking and sobbing about a bad breakup, I don’t want my cries to compete with those of an infant sitting next to me. If I go to the bathroom to correct my wayward mascara at the end of a long weekend night, I don’t want to watch a baby being wiped down on the soggy sink counter.
  
  "Nor do I want to be scolded by parents like the ones at the Gate, a favorite bar, where friends have witnessed a few mothers with toddlers actually wagging their fingers when young people cursed too loudly or got a little sloppy, while conveniently overlooking the fact that alcohol, blaring punk rock and drunken partiers are not pediatrician-approved."
  
  --Risa Chubinsky, Park Slope resident (New York Times City Room Blog, Jan. 15, 2010)



• "God, they're like ants on Fire Island! Even the wait staff and manager at the restaurant were chagrinned this past weekend when the needy, greedy narcissists arrived back from their summering to ruin what was evolving into a peaceful haven for grown-ups who have enough of a life to leave their kids at home when they want a dinner at what is clearly an adults-only kind of place.
  
  "Provini deliberately doesn't have high chairs, I was secretly told by a waitress, and there certainly isn't any room for strollers, but the exquisite wine list alone should keep kids out, don't you think? Not in Park Slope, where pathetic parents don't want to live with the choices they've made, so they crash everyone else's party. CRASH?! Yep. Everyone turned around to see the glass breaking on the floor at the table with the toddlers."
  
  --Peter Loffredo, psycholigist, blogger, Park Slope resident (Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn, Sept. 15, 2009)



• "It was strictly liability. A lot of parents are great and mindful. But some are not that attentive to their kids when they’re in here. This is a bar with an open stairwell and a bocce court. This is a business and we don’t have the staff to police it."
  
  --Jim Carden, owner of Union Hall (Gothamist, Feb. 1, 2008)



• "Psychologically, you feel like, 'Oh, my life hasn’t changed that much,' although of course it completely has."
  
  --Christen Clifford, a writer/actress who, according to the New York Times "proudly recalled breast-feeding her son, Felix, at the bar before ordering a martini." (New York Times, Feb. 10, 2008)

It's Giant Menorah Season

Yes, it's Giant Menorah Season again in Brooklyn. This year, the Caton Avenue overpass on Ocean Parkway featured a new, more modern menorah. In previous years, as longtime readers will recall, the Caton Avenue menorah was lit by Colemen propane lanterns. No more: the menorah has gone electric. Now there's an extension cord running from the menorah, along the chain link fence on the overpass, over the frontage road and into a nearby apartment building's basement window.

And the roofrack menorah below was spotted on Brooklyn's Prospect Park West.

More on the Bedford Bike Lane

"There are people who are trying to play that the nudity is the issue, but it's not," South Williamsburg resident Leo Moskowitz told the Gothamist blog today. "The main concern is the safety of our kids. There are lot of institutions and families on that Bedford Avenue stretch, and we are always really concerned about the kids being picked up and dropped off. There are sometimes small accidents where the cyclists are violating the law because they don't stop for flashing school buses."

And those small accidents are much less desirable than cyclist deaths like this one. And this one, this one, and this one.

Gothamist also reported that 50 nude and scantily clad bicyclists will ride through the 14 blocks of Bedford Avenue that no longer has a bike lane in protest of its removal.

The Williamsburg Bike Lane Debate

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, generally a friend to bicyclists, has helped get new bike lanes added to busy streets all over the City. These narrow lanes are little more than visual buffer zones for bikers, and they may not protect them from getting doored by parked cars, but some statistics say biker injuries and deaths drop significantly when such lanes are painted in.

Bloomberg ordered a lane removed on a section of Bedford Avenue in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn recently. Why? The story goes that the Hasidic community through which the bike lane flowed was offended by the scantily clad hipster women who rode by. Can that possibly be true? It seems too moronic to be real that even very conservative religious people would think that a bike lane would have any real affect on what some young women wear passing through. It's even more unbelievable that a mayor would listen.

But that's how almost all media reports have it. Here's a synopsis from the New York Post in September 2008:

Leaders of South Williamsburg's Hasidic community said yesterday that bike lanes that bring scantily clad cyclists - especially sexy women - peddling through their neighborhood are definitely not kosher.

The red-faced religious sect is calling on city officials to eliminate the car-free lanes on Wythe and Bedford avenues, and to delay construction of a new one planned for Kent Avenue.

"I have to admit, it's a major issue, women passing through here in that dress code," Simon Weisser, a member of Community Board 1 in Williamsburg-Greenpoint, told The Post.

In the beginning of the month, the City announced that 14 blocks of the Bedford lane would be removed, with bikers re-directed to the Kent Avenue lane. About a week ago, bike riders calling themselves "self-hating Jewish hipsters" videotaped themselves re-painting the lane (see video below). They were arrested, charged, and the lane was removed again.



One bike activist (and notice here that all parties are Jewish, both pro-bike lane and anti-bike lane; only in New York), Baruch Herzfeld, who Gothamist describes as "an Orthodox Jew who runs a South Williamsburg bike clubhouse," had this brilliant rant upon Mayor Bloomberg's trip to Denmark for the climate change conference:

"How can Mayor Bloomberg go to Copenhagen and pose as a green mayor after this? He's a hypocrite, and I believe his office directed the DOT to remove this bike lane as a political favor for the rabbis, who want to keep South Williamsburg a ghetto enclave. There was no discussion with the community, like with the Kent Ave bike lane. And this bike lane was just a visual reminder for drivers to keep their eyes open for cyclists. But the rabbis don't want a visual reminder that there are other people in the neighborhood besides the Hasidim.

"One woman asked me if she should go topless [during an upcoming protest] and I told her no, because we're not trying to create more confrontation with the Hasids, who actually hate the rabbis much, much, much more than I do. The Hasids in the community are not the problem; they give me the thumbs up when I bike by, and even Hasidic women have told me they really approve what I'm doing. They hate the rabbis for trying to control their lives, intimidate them and scare them."

An article in the Jewish Daily Forward from August -- the single-best article about this bike lane mess -- explains that part of the problem is that the Satmar sect of Hasidic Jews who live in this part of Williamsburg are not only averse to men and women wearing shorts. They think that bikes are for children. Adults ought not to ride them.

Herzfeld, who was the subject of the Forward story, has little patience for such restrictions: “For the love of God — I’m Jewish, you’re Jewish, borrow a bicycle. Who are we hurting?” His bike club has hundreds of bikes for local residents to borrow.

But the issue for the Satmar Hasidim is really about isolationism. They resent the gentrification by young hipsters, and the fight against the bike lane is one way they've found to resist change.

Big Brooklyn

I just happened upon a story from January on the National Public Radio site about the perfume company Bond No. 9's fragrance, Brooklyn:

"Now you can get a whiff of Brooklyn — and we're not talking the smell of stale subway. A new perfume bears the name of New York City's second-largest borough. The fragrance, from a company called Bond No. 9, sells for $220 a bottle. The creators have blended the scents of grapefruit, cardamom, cypress, cedar and leather."

What's wrong with that story? Bond names most of their scents after parts of New York, so that's nothing special. The problem is that Brooklyn isn't "New York City's second-largest borough." It's the largest.

According to 2007 census data, Brooklyn is home to 2,539,206 of New York City's 8,272,607 people. Queens is the second largest borough, with 2,240,174. Manhattan is the third largest borough with 1,625,251 people. (and the Bronx has about 300,000 fewer then Manhattan, and Staten Island is about the size of Albuquerque.)

To put Brooklyn populations into perspective, the Canarsie (last stop on the L train) and Flatlands neighborhoods of Brooklyn, bordering Jamaica Bay, have a population larger than Salt Lake City's 180,651.

So why would NPR get it so wrong? No one outside of Brooklyn and Queens realizes how huge and dense these boroughs actually are. As I like to point out, Brooklyn is bigger than Houston and closer in size to Chicago. And if you took Brooklyn out of New York, the City would still be the largest in the country:

1. New York City: 5,733,401
2. Los Angeles: 3,834,340
3. Chicago: 2,836,658
4. Brooklyn: 2,539,206
5. Houston: 2,208,180

Interestingly, Brooklyn was bigger in 1950 than it is today. Back then it had 2,738,175 people. The shift from 1950 to today was even more dramatic in Minneapolis, from around 500,000 then to 377,392 now. Chicago, too: in 1950 it had 3,620,962 people. Why? The suburbs.

Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street...Barclays Center?

I was stunned to learn that Brooklyn’s Atlantic-Pacific subway station, a giant underground maze that connects 10 different lines and the Long Island Railroad, is not even among the top ten busiest stations in the City (it ranks 29th in all of NYC with 9,643,487 riders in 2007). In fact, it’s not even the busiest in Brooklyn—that’s Court Street/Borough Hall, which connects only six lines.

No, the busiest stations in New York City are all in Manhattan, and “busy” is measured simply by how many riders pass through the turnstiles. Times Square is the busiest station, with 58,506,230 riders in 2007 on its 12 lines.

Measured by how many lines run through a single station however, Atlantic-Pacific is number two in size. This is what gave me the impression that it was so busy, and of course transfers from line to line -- certainly a logical measurement of busy-ness -- aren't accounted for in the turnstile figures.

All of these thoughts ran through my head as I learned yesterday that Barclays, a London bank that I know nothing about, bought the rights to name the Atlantic-Pacific station from the MTA. Barclays bought Lehman Brothers last year, so their U.S. holdings are growing, but the bank does not have a Brooklyn office. The MTA, which has apparently trying to sell off the names of its stations for years, convinced the bank to buy the station name because it had already bought the rights to name the proposed New Jersey Nets basketball arena near the stop in Brooklyn.

But as the architecture blog BLDG BLOG points out, the $4 million, $200,000/year for 20 years price tag is awfully low. As a measure of how many eyes will see the name, associate it with the bank, and see it as a sign of financial strength and legitimacy, the price seems modest. It seems like the MTA (which is dying for money and will be raising fares from $2 a ride to $2.25 as of June 28) could have asked for more. It is, after all, selling the name of a piece of public property to a private (and foreign) entity.

Blogger Jason Kottke points out that many stations already have brand names, some of them quite old:

Rockefeller Center
Columbia University
JFK Airport
Museum of Natural History
Lincoln Center
Hunter College
Yankee Stadium
Aqueduct Racetrack
Times Square
Herald Square
NY Aquarium
World Trade Center
Brooklyn Museum
Mets

It’s interesting to note though that when the New York Mets opened their new stadium, Citi Field (for which they will pay $400 million over 20 years), they passed on buying the nearby subway stop (which is currently called Mets/Willets Point).

Were it not for the difficulty the MTA has had in selling off station names (the Times says the MTA has been trying for five years), one would be concerned for all stations.

No one is saying yet what exactly the station will be called—maybe it’ll just be named after the basketball arena. Some have been speculating that the Barclays name will just be tacked onto the existing name, making it longer and more awkward.

I think what offends New Yorkers about the whole thing the most is the fleeting nature of stadium names and endorsement deals these days. To all Americans, it seems as capricious as new celebrity products (for example, rapper 50 Cent is coming out with his own cologne. The late Ed McMahon had a vodka.).

I remember when the Utah Jazz basketball arena was called the Delta Center, after the airline. As of late 2006, it’s called the EnergySolutions Arena. It changed when Delta decided to cancel their 15 years contract. EnergySolutions, which describes itself as “a world leader in the safe recycling, processing and disposal of nuclear material,” stepped in and apparently paid at least as much as the reported $1.3 million a year as Delta was shelling out. At the time, The New York Times reported that fans were already making fun of the new sponsors, coming up with nicknames for the arena like: The Glow Bowl, the Isotope, the Dump, ChernoBowl, JazzMat (“short for Jazzardous Materials”), the Big Bang, the Tox Box, the Fallout Shelter, and the Melta Center.

When these things are bought and sold like this, it lends an air of impermanence to what should be stable landmarks. But then, they don’t build arenas and stadiums like they used to.

These woven webs are on a section of chainlink under a bridge in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

The Dodger Dome

Walter O'Malley, the reviled Dodgers owner who moved the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, had proposed to build a new stadium in Brooklyn before he made his drastic move.


In 1955, the year the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Yankees in the World Series (or 1956; accounts vary), O'Malley asked the architect Buckminster Fuller--a visionary famous for his geodesic dome designs--to design a domed stadium for a site in Brooklyn.

According to "The Dodgers" by Glenn Stout, Richard A. Johnson, and Dick Johnson, the project Fuller and his Princeton graduate students came up with was a spherical geodesic dome that would have been 750 feet in diameter and 30 stories tall. O'Malley visited one of Fuller's existing domes, and found its plastic construction sturdy enough that he couldn't throw a rock through it.

But the project was rejected by the infamous/legendary urban planner Robert Moses and other key people. The Brooklyn site, down Flatbush Avenue from the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, wasn't viable, and the dome design didn't help O'Malley's case.

"Instead of making O'Malley look like a man ahead of his time," write Stout, Johnson, and Johnson in "The Dodgers,"

"he came off as a man out of his mind. In 1955 the notion of a domed stadium was an untested pipe dream, and Fuller, while a darling of academic architecture and a true visionary, was far, far too 'far out' to be taken seriously by the powers-that-be. Neither Robert Moses nor anyone else in authority would ever be willing to back O'Malley now."

According to the Walter O'Malley website (run by his family), the dome would have been retractable.

Should we be lamenting the lost future, a future in which the Dodgers not only stayed in Brooklyn, but played under the world's first dome designed by a star architect? "Even the most dedicated old Dodgers fan should shudder at the thought that such a facility might have ever been built," write the authors of "The Dodgers."

The Houston Astrodome, the first domed stadium opened a decade later in 1965. Astroturf, the first artificial grass for playing fields, was developed for the Houston stadium. It didn't get enough natural light for grass to grow. While it was the home to many firsts, it wasn't the best field for playing.

The Fuller stadium would have been built at Flatbush and Atlantic, but the powerful urban planner Robert Moses said the stadium would make a "China wall of traffic." Moses suggested Queens.

Not everyone mourns the move and the failure of the stadium. "So we lost the Dodgers, but we gained some great neighborhoods," writes the blogger at Brooklyn Views. "Instead of second guessing the loss of the Dodgers, things could be worse; we could be asking ourselves: 'Who lost Brooklyn?'"

A remarkably similar same debate (though on a much larger scale) is playing itself out with developer Bruce Ratner in a O'Malley role and Frank Gehry in the Fuller role.

[photos from walteromalley.com]

Brooklyn and its Lost Dodgers

When I was searching for apartments in Brooklyn three years ago, I looked at a nice one in Crown Heights, a neighborhood that I knew of only as the site of three days of rioting between blacks and Jews in 1991. As I was walking around the neighborhood, I stumbled upon a plaque in front of a set of highrise housing projects. This was where Ebbets Field once stood.


The photo illustration above (by Christopher Nesbet) from a 2007 article in New York Magazine shows the rough size and shape of Ebbets Field, the stadium the Brooklyn Dodgers played in until their move to Los Angeles in 1958.

Why do people still talk about the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn fifty years ago as if it were recent? Why does it gall Brooklynites who weren't even alive when it happened?

Brooklyn, as I proudly tell anyone who will listen, is the largest of New York's five boroughs. Like Queens, it was once its own city—it merged with New York in 1898. Its 2.5 million people (about a million more than live in Manhattan) would make up the fourth largest city in the country, just behind Chicago (and New York, even without Brooklyn, would still be the biggest).

Since the Dodgers left, Brooklyn doesn't have a professional sports team. The Knicks and the Rangers play in Manhattan, the Yankees play in the Bronx, and the Mets play in Queens. (Both the New York Giants and the New York Jets play in in Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.)

"The tragedy of the Dodgers," wrote Sam Anderson in the New York Magazine article that the above photo went with, "was only incidentally about baseball. This was not just the death of a team, or the extinction of a fan base, or the sudden bankruptcy of Crown Heights hot-dog vendors—but the death of mythic Old Brooklyn itself. The team’s departure corresponded with a massive social shift that totally remade the borough."

Most people blame Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, for the tragedy. There's a story about how two New York reporters, Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield (both from Brooklyn) sat at a bar one day in 1983, making lists of the greatest villains of the 20th century. They both had the same three people at the top of the list, the story goes: Hitler, Stalin and Walter O'Malley. Continuing on the theme, there's apparently an old joke that says "if you were to find yourself in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and O’Malley, armed with only two bullets, you’d have to shoot O’Malley twice."


In the 50s, Ebbets Field held 33,000 fans, considerably less than Yankee Stadium's 75,000 or the New York Giants' (baseball) Polo Grounds' 56,000 seats. Even so, the Dodgers attracted a million fans a year—second best attendance in the league during most of the 50s. O'Malley wanted a bigger stadium.

In 1956 there was discussion about building a new 55,000 seat stadium over the Atlantic Yards, a Long Island Rail Road hub near downtown Brooklyn, but legendary urban planner (and villain to many) Robert Moses didn't like the plan.

This is especially interesting because, 50 years later, this same site is where developer Bruce Ratner wants to put a $4 billion project that would include a $950 million basketball stadium. The stadium would be the new home of the New Jersey Nets, making them the first pro sports team to call Brooklyn home since the Dodgers. The Ratner plan, which is delayed because of the economy, has the stadium opening in 2011. It has not been well received by many Brooklynites.

I ask myself why I care about pro sports in Brooklyn. I'm not much of a sports fan and even less of a baseball fan. But baseball is a fitting lens for American 20th century culture. (Jonathan Mahler's book about New York in 1977, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning" uses the Yankees to talk about one of the city's direst years. It's superb.) There's a sense in Brooklyn that the loss of the Dodgers was the loss of the Borough's sense of self. It's a huge, sprawling part of the City, and somehow, without the Dodgers, it wasn't united anymore.

The Dodgers leaving was one of four events from the 50s to the 70s, says Pete Hamill, that devastated Brooklyn—the others being the closing of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1955, the introduction of heroin to the white neighborhoods in the mid-50s, and the closing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1966. Hamill, quoted in an oral history called "In The Country of Brooklyn," explained that the Brooklyn Eagle's function as a borough paper was never taken up by any other. Heroin addicts were more than a nuisance, they were dangerous. And the Navy Yard employed more than 70,000 people at one time.

After all that, Brooklyn wasn't the same. Rabbi Paul Kushner told New York Magazine,

“The Brooklyn that I know and loved isn’t there anymore. Right now, Brooklyn is an aggregation of individuals, an aggregation of racial groups, of ethnic groups. There’s nothing uniting us. There’s no borough. Marty Markowitz is not president of anything. He’s president of garbagemen and sewer cleaners, whatever keeps the infrastructure going. There’s no feeling of cohesion.”

Kushner moved to Long Island more than 20 years ago.

Last December, Walter O'Malley was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. "I told them if they insisted on doing this, it would break the hearts of Brooklynites all over again," Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz told the New York Observer.

Ebbets Field was demolished the year after the Dodgers moved, apparently by a wrecking ball painted to look like a baseball. Pete Hamill noticed something poignant at the housing projects that replaced the stadium:

Years later, I went out there for a look, and there was a sign on the wall beside the front door.

NO BALLPLAYING ALLOWED, it said.

Others have noticed it too.

So what is Brooklyn today? Now every other creative writer seems to be from Brooklyn. The Borough has its own expensive SoHo in the lofts of DUMBO and its own version of Greenwich Village in Williamsburg. It's got musicians. People want to live here now. The white flight of the mid-century started turning around in the late 80s (see Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, 1989: there's a scene with confrontation between a white yuppie and the black residents of Bed-Stuy).

If real estate is the subject of nearly every New York conversation, gentrification is the subtext of most of them that take place in Brooklyn. Who wants to be that yuppie in "Do The Right Thing"? That's why I didn't move into that nice apartment in Crown Heights, near Ebbets Field. It's a touchy subject, wrapped up in race, class, and even popular culture. Are gentrifiers getting great deals and cleaning up neighborhoods, or are they pushing regular people out of the neighborhoods they grew up in?

So many of the people who still mourn the loss of the Dodgers say that it was the thing that everyone could talk about. As Sam Anderson wrote in the New York article, "The only force strong enough to unite all of the fractured cultures was baseball." This, as Anderson acknowledges, is partly mythology. But what could unite Brooklyn now? Certainly not the New Jersey Nets. Brooklyn is still waiting for its savior.