Giuliani Can Come Home Again - to Hawthorne

As it becomes increasingly clear that the President of 9/11 Rudy Giuliani won't be the President of the United States, it is probably rubbing salt on the wound of the discovery that they don't like him in Florida, to add that he wouldn't even win an election in his childhood home at 419 Hawthorne Street (near New York Ave).

The NY Times City Room blog has a post about his childhood neighborhood. Though the current resident of his old homestead thinks Ruby "was a good mayor," she prefers Hillary for President.

(Thanks, Daniel McDermon!)

Whatever happened to PLUS?

After trying for months now to work with Prospect-Lefferts United for Services (PLUS), to no avail, I've got to wonder aloud what's going on with the group. Both founding members Mark Dicus and Jeff Welch are no longer currently active. (According to Dicus, the PLUS board declined to fund a salary for him and he's not sure what his role is going to be.)

I'd been talking to PLUS about a few things. One: distributing the pamphlets that PLUS designed to encourage independent businesses to open in PLG. The pamphlets were printed almost a year ago and are probably sitting in boxes somewhere. Charles and I are PLUS members but as far as we can tell no one from PLUS has made any effort to distribute them or to even let members know how to help. (The PLUS email list has been quiet on this count.)

The other matters were things I discussed with Dicus in September: putting in tree pit guards on Lincoln and working with businesses on Parkside to put in street trees and spruce up the area. The specific ideas don't really matter; what does matter is that PLUS doesn't have any sort of process in place to discuss member ideas or to carry them out. When I raised these issues to Dicus, he said PLUS received a substantial amount of grant money, and that they needed projects like this to spend it on. He asked me to "look into it." There was no communication with the PLUS board or its members, no "lets discuss this at the next meeting"—in fact, as far as I can tell, there are no scheduled meetings!

I've been involved with many nonprofit and activist groups (indeed, I run my own small nonprofit), all of them with their share of dysfunction. But the lack of communication and transparency with PLUS is, in my experience, unparalleled. What is happening with the grant money? What is the group working on? When does it plan to let members know?

I sincerely hope that the PLUS board can get its act together and takes this as a wake-up call because PLG sorely needs a group like PLUS.

Coming to Flatbush Avenue: A Store

On the corner of Winthrop and Flatbush, in the space formerly occupied by Caribbean buffet Nile Exquisite, comes a store that will sell ... something.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that "supply" is a Caribbean colloquialism but right now that sign might as well read "Store: A Place for Things."

From the blog-o-sphere

Brooklyn Based has an interview with a Prospect Lefferts couple about the hood. Check it out.

In praise of gentrification

In light of last week's New York Observer article about gentrification in Prospect Lefferts, I thought I'd post this 1978 essay by James Greene. This piece appeared in THE (original) BROWNSTONER, a newsletter published beginning in the late 1960s by the Brownstone Revival Committee.

While the Observer article was sloppy and narrowly drawn, comments by its critics (PLGers and non) tended to be just as shallow. Perhaps some day a local journalist will write something intelligent about gentrification. In the mean time, here's Greene, writing at at a time when the very word "gentrification" was relatively new. The article isn't perfect; it doesn't deal with race at all (an important oversight). But it points the way to showing that—then as now—attacks on gentrification are ridiculously simplistic.

- - - - - -

Attack from a New Quarter: Urban Gentrification
by James Greene, 1978
(Reprinted in THE BROWNSTONER, April 1985)

Individually or in groups, the people attempting to revitalize our cities' declining neighborhoods have long faced several natural enemies: negligent city agencies, indifferent or conflict-ridden legislators, and extreme political groups who see the brightest change for revolution in promoting decay and poverty. We can deal with these.

But now comes opposition from a new quarter. The sociologists, whose past recommendations to politicians helped lay waste our urban landscapes, have invented a new field of study which permits them to question this madness of community improvement. It is termed gentrification--movement of the "gentry" into lower-class neighborhoods, disturbing cohesiveness and generally such devotion to keeping the covenant intact resulted in raising hell with the social "balance" of the slums. The concern with gentrification began in Britain, where sturdy brick houses occupied for generations by the "working classes" are being bought and refurbished by the upper-middle class.

Now, "gentrification" studies are being launched in the United States. Ironically, it is not the improvement of neighborhoods that is studied, but the assumed deleterious impact of improvement--displacement of the poor, reduction in the number of housing units, creation of new "social pathologies." Consequently, neighborhood revitalization programs are being asked to defend themselves.

PLG traffic calming meeting Thursday 1/31

ATTENTION LOCALS. The Lefferts Manor Association is holding a forum on bringing traffic calming measures to Prospect Lefferts Gardens.

Thursday, January 31
6:30–8:00 pm
Church of the Evangel
(1950 Bedford Ave., bet. Hawthorne & Winthrop)

Representatives from the 71st Pct., Fire Dept., Dept. of Transportation, and Transportation Alternatives will be there. I highly recommend that anyone concerned about having cars and trucks speeding through PLG come out to this meeting. The traffic is only going to get worse, and only a neighborhood-wide effort can effectively combat the problem.

Traffic calming without speed bumps

Following up on our previous discussion of traffic calming methods, here's a new one that I'd love to see in these parts: the chicane. In addition to slowing down speeding cars, these spaces would add space for plantings, providing a host of environmental benefits.

Of course, car owners who don't pay for parking will be upset about losing a few free parking spaces but, hey, you can't please all the people all the time.

This reminds me: a month or two ago, there was talk of the Lefferts Manor Organization organizing a neighborhood discussion of traffic calming methods. I posted a query about it on the PLG yahoo group and will let you all know if it actually happens...

(Via Streetsblog)

Blatant self-promotion

UPDATE: SEE THE FEATURE IN THIS WEEK'S TIME OUT NY (P. 10) ABOUT "ADULT EDUCATION"

While this has nothing to do with PLG other than the fact that we live in it, Charles and I have a couple of Brooklyn shows coming up that may be worth your while.

The first is PANT-HOOT, a comedy show that Charles hosts at Magnetic Field, Tuesday night (Jan. 15) at 8 pm. The lineup includes Moody McCarthy, DJ Hazard, Gilad Foss, Rachael Parenta and probably one or two others. Par usual, I'll be giving a brief talk on behalf of Monkeywire during intermission. (Tonight's topic: WN Kellogg's classic experiment raising a young chimp as a human.)

The following Tuesday (Jan. 22) marks the debut of ADULT EDUCATION, which my group Stay Free! is organizing at Union Hall (gmap) in Park Slope.

Adult Education is a monthly lecture series devoted to making useless knowledge somewhat less useless. Each show is devoted to a given theme, and 4 or 5 speakers present mini-lectures on some aspect of that theme using some sort of visual aid. The first show, "Microgenre," will include the following talks:

Liz Clayton: The Architecture of Converted Fast-Food Restaurants
Paul Lukas: On Elevator World, American Jails, and other obscure trade magazines
Heidi Cody: First National Icons: Native Americans in Grocery Brands
Jim Hanas: On meta-tourism: photos of tourists taking photos
Russell Scholl: TV Commercials for Personal Hygiene Products

... and, to keep everything in the family, Charles will host.

For more info, see the Facebook and MySpace pages.

The Wire's Flatbush Connections

Today's New York Times City Room blog had a neat little post about the New York natives on HBO's awesome show The Wire. It turns out that two of them are more local than that: Michael K. Williams (Omar Little) is from East Flatbush and Jamie Hector (Marlo Stanfield) and grew up in Flatbush and Crown Heights.

Chad L. Coleman (Dennis "Cutty" Wise) is living in Flatbush now — and he's member of the Park Slope Food Coop. Celebrities: they're just like us!

Free subway and bus with congestion pricing?

Now here's a transit reform I could get behind: free subway and bus rides in conjunction with charging cars to drive in Manhattan's Central Business District. Gothamist has an interview with Ted Kheel describing his new study, one of many suggested alternatives to Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan. (See also Kheel's Daily News op-ed.)

The premise of our study is that there is an interrelation between automobile travel and mass transit travel, so that it is critical to look at both together to achieve a proper balance. This is what our city should be doing, but instead, we did it.

Indeed, the City has done such a lousy job of connecting the dots between mass transit and car travel that we're actually headed toward MTA fare hikes!

The possibility of Kheel's plan actually passing is quite remote—the City is more likely to go toward a variant on the proposals to toll the east river bridges—but it's nice to see a counter-plan that increases sustainability for a change.