Rally against demolition for parking lot!

rogersma

Please come out for this rally tomorrow, Sunday at 2 PM, now at the Lafayette Presbyterian Church on South Oxford Street at Lafayette in Fort Greene. The time of the rally remains 2pm on Sunday April 15. A good cause and lots of music!

Even if you're in favor of the arena (or you think that it won't affect Park Slope) building a parking lot that will attract 1600 extra cars to the neighborhood over 200 nights a year doesn't seem like a quality-of-life enhancer. The plan to one-way Park Slope streets make it clear just whose neighborhood the City expects to route those cars through.

Details below:

Planned "Temporary" Parking Lots
Twice The Size Of Union Square Park

This Sunday, Assemblyman Hakeem Jefferies, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, Council Member Letitia James and Council Member David Yassky will address the Rally Against Demolition for Parking organized by the sponsors of the BrooklynSpeaks.net campaign.

The Rally is being held to call on the State and the City to rethink their plan to permit Forest City Ratner to demolish two entire city blocks, including the historic Ward Bakery, to create "temporary" parking lots for over 1600 cars. The surface parking lots will occupy approximately 7 acres of the Atlantic Yards site ­ an area one and a half times the size of the equivalent of two Union Square Parks. The developer calls the lots "temporary" because they plan to build the second phase of the project on top of them. But members of Forest City Ratner's own team, including landscape architect Laurie Olin, believe that the second phase might not be built for 15 or 20 years, if it is built at all.

"Once you demolish buildings, you can't go back. We risk having surface parking and empty lots for decades, just as we had around Atlantic Terminal in the 1980's." said Deb Howard, Executive Director of the Pratt Area Council.

"Many of the benefits of this project are turning out to be illusory. The promised 7 acres of open space will in fact be 7 acres of parking lots. And instead of a transit oriented development, we're getting a traffic-oriented development." said Gib Veconi, member of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council.

Joining the elected officials to perform will be the Lafayette Inspirational Gospel Choir, Singer Dave Hall and musicians Masauko Chipembere and Ned Rotherberg.