[CPEO-BIF] "Grand Plan for a [Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, New York] Is Scorned and Celebrated"

[Lenny Siegel <lennysiegel@gmail.com>]

Grand Plan for a Toxic Site Is Scorned and Celebrated

By JOSEPH BERGER
New York Times
October 8, 2012

Look upon them as among the first palazzos on a not-so-grand canal,  
two proposed buildings that rival the scale of almost any residence  
in Venice and harbor a total of 700 rental apartments. They represent  
an emphatic confirmation of what local artists and other urban  
pioneers have increasingly feared - that real estate operators would  
officially anoint the once-scorned Gowanus Canal and its gritty  
jigsaw patch of Brooklyn as "up and coming."

But the plan to erect the buildings by the Lightstone Group, one of  
the nation's largest real estate firms, has divided the neighborhood,  
which now proudly calls itself Gowanus.

Some residents are trying to block or reduce the scale of the  
proposed buildings, arguing that the new tenants would overwhelm  
schools and subways, and that the buildings themselves - 12 stories  
in spots - would perniciously transform the low-rise mingling of  
factories and row houses they have come to love. Others, however,  
argue that the Lightstone development would create a constituency to  
lobby for continuing the cleanup of the sometimes inky, sometimes  
lizard-green waters of the 1.8-mile polluted and pathogenic canal,  
which was declared a Superfund site in 2010.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/nyregion/development-plan-near- 
gowanus-superfund-site-is-scorned-and-celebrated.html

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope Street, Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650-961-8918 or 650-969-1545
Fax: 650-961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org



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