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Since 1978 • (718) 260–2500 • Brooklyn, NY • ©2019 16 pages • Vol.Serving Brownstone Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Williamsburg & Greenpoint 42, No. 10 • March 8–14, 2019
Firefighters rushed to put out the blaze that consumed the bakery-supply truck after its
driver pulled the vehicle over on the expressway near Adams Street.
Photo by Kevin Duggan
BQE CONFIDENTIAL
City sets private meeting with civic gurus to discuss plan
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
Department of Transportation
officials will meet with leaders of
local community boards behind
closed doors on March 11, to get
the civic gurus’
input on
the proposals
to repair the
Brookly n–
Queens Expressway’s
crumbling triple
cantilever,
according to
an agency spokeswoman.
“The meeting will consist of
a briefing on the BQE project,
and serve as an opportunity to
hear feedback from the community
boards, and will not include
new information,” said Alana
Morales.
The rep did not say which boards
will send members to the meeting.
But the top staffer of Community
Board 2, whose district includes
the Brooklyn Heights Promenade
— which one proposal suggests
converting into a six-lane highway
for expressway traffic in order to
repair the three-tiered highway beneath
FRESHLY BAKED! Department of Transportation leaders invited local civic gurus
it — said that he and other
leaders of that panel received an
invitation.
“DOT invited us to an invitation
only scheduled briefing on
the BQE,” said CB2 District Manager
Robert Perris.
Perris, who said the invitation
came with no further details
on what the meeting would
cover, will attend the meeting
with CB2’s newly elected chairman,
Lenny Singletary, and heads
of the panels’s Transportation and
Public Safety, Parks, and Land Use
committees.
It will be the first time in five
months that agency leaders discuss
the looming fix with the civic
gurus, according to the district
manager. And he suspects officials
waited that long so that tempers
could cool following the overwhelming
backlash they received
to their two proposed repair plans
at a September town hall — retaliation
that Perris believes led transit
chiefs to reconsider their so-called
innovative option to turn the Promenade
into a speedway in order to
fix the triple cantilever.
“They have not talked to CB2
since the September town hall,
when they had their tails handed
to them,” he said. “They’re not
talking to anybody because they’re
reconsidering their plan.”
Since the heated town hall,
Transportation Department officials
only attended one CB2 meeting
in January, where they presented
a project on Nassau Street
pedestrian improvements to the
panel’s Transportation and Public
Safety Committee.
But over the past five months,
agency leaders continued to meet
with Brooklyn Heights residents,
business owners, and other groups
with a vested interest in the fate of
the beloved Promenade, according
to Morales. And those conversations
suggest another townhall
style gathering may follow
the upcoming private meeting,
Perris said.
“They’ve been meeting with
property owners in the neighborhood
and politicians. All of that
is an indication that they are on
the verge of having another town
hall meeting,” he said.
In addition to the innovative
option — which would turn the
Promenade into a speedway for
no less than six years so workers
can shore up the 1.5-mile stretch
of expressway between Atlantic
Avenue and Sands Street by 2026,
the year experts worry the triple
cantilever may collapse beneath the
weight of the thousands of trucks
that travel it daily — transit officials
are now weighing two other
repair plans.
One, the city’s so-called traditional
option, proposes repairing
the triple cantilever lane-by-lane, a
FIXING
the BQE
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
Firefighters rushed to put out
a blaze on the Brookyln–Queens
Expressway on Monday, after a
truck burst into flames on the
highway near the Columbia Street
Waterfront District.
Dozens of New York’s Bravest
at 11:13 am descended on the
Queens-bound side of the expressway,
where the vehicle
belonging to a bakery-supply
company caught fire between
Rapelye Street and Atlantic Avenue,
according to a Fire Department
spokesman.
The responders battled the
wheeled inferno after the truck’s
driver pulled the smoldering vehicle
onto the side of the highway
near Adams Street, where
black smoke billowed from the
wreckage, and the stench of burnt
gasoline filled the air.
The trucker managed to pull
the vehicle over and escape it with
his passenger before the flames
injured either of them, according
to another employee at Queensbased
Sparta Bakery Supplies.
The Fire Department spokesman
confirmed the blaze injured
no one, including the driver and
passenger.
to a private March 11 meeting to update them about
the agency’s plans for repairing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
File photo by Evan Gardner
See BQE on page 4
AND THE SUBWAY
IS ON FIRE TOO
SEE PAGE 5
St. Pat’s march turns corner
Brooklyn’s parade formally welcomes LGBTQ participants
By Colin Mixson
Brooklyn Paper
Organizers of the borough’s
eponymous St. Patrick’s Day parade
this year will formally welcome
local LGBTQ marchers for
the first time in the procession’s 44-
year history — a historic change
for the event that excluded those
communities for too long, according
to a longtime Irish-American
LGBTQ advocate.
“It is ground breaking, it is historic,
it is a huge moment,” said
Brendan Fay, the founder of advocacy
group the Lavender and
Green Alliance, whom police previously
arrested for protesting the
local march, and who for decades
has advocated for more inclusive
St. Patrick’s Day parades across
the five boroughs.
Leaders of the Brooklyn Irish
LGBTQ Organization announced
on Feb. 26 that parade organizers
accepted their group as one of dozens
of entities that will march in
the March 17 procession through
Brendan Fay
FLASHBACK: Irish LGBTQ activist Brendan Fay, second
from left, and members of his alliance at the 1999 march,
where cops cuffed them for parading without a permit.
Brooklyn Irish LGBTQ organization members joined Park Slope Assemblyman Robert Carroll,
third from right, to show off their Irish and rainbow flags ahead of this year’s parade.
Brooklyn Irish LGBTQ Organization
Park Slope , encouraging supportive
locals of all genders and sexual
orientations to walk beside them
as they take to the streets without
fear of arrest.
“For many years, people within
the LGBTQ community had to
separate from their identities to
march in the parade,” said Lisa
Fane, a co-founder of the local
Irish LGBTQ organization. “We’re
proud of our LGBTQ history and
we feel this has been missing in
the parade.”
Brooklyn St. Patrick’s Day
Parade organizers’ decision to
welcome more diverse participants
comes years after leaders
of the city’s St. Paddy’s Day
march through Manhattan invited
Fay’s alliance to join that
procession in 2015 , but as stagers
of other borough-based processions,
including the March 3
Staten Island St. Patrick’s Day parade
, continue to formally exclude
LGBTQ marchers.
And the opportunity for LGBTQ
Brooklynites to openly celebrate
their Irish heritage, and their
sexual and gender identities, is
a huge victory for advocates —
especially Fay, who said he was
heartbroken when cops cuffed
him along with seven others for
“parading without a permit” after
they slipped into the ranks of
the 1999 Brooklyn St. Patrick’s
Day Parade.
“To be Irish and arrested for
simply seeking to celebrate Irish
heritage and culture with your
community was devastating,”
he said.
The local Irish LGBTQ group
formed by Fane and Matthew Mc-
Morrow, both of whom live in Park
Slope, filed its application to appear
in this year’s parade — which
will step off 20 years after the
march where police arrested Fay —
after spending two years building
a coalition of supporters, including
local Assemblyman Robert Carroll
(D–Park Slope), whose grandfather
John Carroll co-founded the
annual Kings County Celtic procession
back in 1975.
And organizers of the event
— who met with Carroll and the
Brooklyn Irish LGBTQ Organization’s
leaders several times
last month, after receiving the
formal application in January
— ultimately approved, according
to Fane, who said getting them
to agree to diversify the parade
didn’t require too much persuasion
after recent changes to other
marches.
“It wasn’t that hard of a sell,”
she said.
Weekend with Bernie
Sanders returns to Brooklyn to rally for 2020
By Colin Mixson
Brooklyn Paper
Brooklyn’s feeling the Bern
— again!
Thousands of left-leaning locals
packed Brooklyn College’s East
Quad on March 2 to watch borough
son, Independent Vermont
Sen. Bernie Sanders, deliver the
first rally of his recently announced
2020 presidential campaign, where
he credited his self-described democratic
socialist values to his humble
Kings County roots.
“I was born a few miles away
from here on E. 26th Street and
Kings Highway, and my family
and I lived in a three-and-a-halfroom,
rent-controlled apartment,”
Sanders told the crowd. “My experience
as a child, living in a family
that struggled economically,
from the audience.
And throughout his speech,
Sanders took every opportunity
to distinguish his and his campaign’s
values from those of the
country’s sitting commander-inchief,
whom he derided as a racist,
sexist, homophobe, and called
“the most dangerous president in
modern American history.”
“I want to welcome you to a
campaign which says loudly and
clearly that the underlying principals
of our government will not be
greed, hatred, and lies; it will not
be racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia,
and religious bigotry; it
will not be tax breaks for billionaires,
and efforts to throw millions
off of the health care that they currently
have,” Sanders said.
Campaign staffers estimated the
rally drew some 13,000 Berners,
and attendees waited for hours in
lines that stretched down Bedford
Avenue for a chance to hear the
two-time presidential hopeful
speak , according to one BrookBernie
Sanders hosted the first rally of his 2020 presidential lyn College student.
campaign at Brooklyn College on March 2.
Photos by Caroline Ourso
(Above) Daniela Umana
came out to support Sanders.
(Left) From left, Megan
Devir, Eliza, Gus and Columbia
McCaleb cheered the
pol on.
powerfully influenced my life and
my values.”
The pol, who attended Brooklyn
College for a year in 1959 after
graduating from James Madison
High School, made a laundry
list of progressive promises — including
Medicare for all, a national
$15 minimum wage, free enrollment
at public colleges, outlawing
for-profit prisons, and ending
the so-called War on Drugs
— to his adoring supporters, occasionally
pausing as chants of
“Bernie, Bernie, Bernie” erupted See BERNIE on page 2
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