March 15–21, 2019 Brooklyn Paper • www.BrooklynPaper.com • (718) 260-2500 AWP 3
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G
oing down
MTA MTA
reopens stairways at Metropolitan
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
Call them steps in the right
direction!
G-train straphangers now
have even more options to
walk in and out of Williamsburg’s
Metropolitan Avenue
station, after state transit officials
wrapped a job to reopen
a long-shuttered mezzanine
near the Union Avenue
end of the hub, and install a
new staircase leading from
the Kensington-bound platform
to the station’s second
mezzanine that connects to
the L line.
Officials with the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority
on Feb. 28 reopened
the mezzanine near Union
Avenue, giving straphangers
access to two street-tomezzanine
stairways on the
avenue at Hope Street and
Powers Street.
In addition, reopening that
mezzanine now allows straphangers
to access six staircases
leading from it to the
Kensington- and Queens–
bound platforms below, which
transit leaders closed back in
the ’90s.
And workers installed a
seventh new staircase lead-
Transit officials reopened two of Metropolitan Avenue
Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit
station’s street entrances on Union Avenue,
as well as several mezzanine-to-platform staircases
previously off limits for years.
ing from the Kensingtonbound
platform to the hub’s
other mezzanine near Metropolitan
Avenue, from which
straphangers can connect to
the beleaguered L train.
The fixes will help pedestrian
traffic better flow
through the station, where authority
bigwigs expect a surge
of commuters once they begin
their looming repairs to
the L line next month , according
to the leader of the state
agency’s local arm.
“This major station-capacity
improvement project
gives customers more space
and more ways to get to the
trains quickly and safely,” said
Andy Byford, the president
of the New York City Transit
Authority.
The roughly six-month
job also brought new turnstiles,
emergency gates,
digital signs, and Metro-
Card vending machines to
station entrances near the
newly reopened Union Avenue
street-to-mezzanine
stairways at Hope and Powers
streets. But none of the
upgrades made the station,
which lacks elevators and escalators,
accessible to persons
with disabilities.
Transit officials shuttered
many of the station’s recently
reopened stairways decades
ago, when they closed stairways
at hubs across the city
due to a combination of decreasing
ridership and increasing
crime, according
to an authority spokesman,
who said the multiple sets
of stairs at certain hubs offered
baddies too many escape
routes from cops.
And Metropolitan Avenue
isn’t the only station where
officials are giving new life
to long-shuttered steps. Authority
workers recently reopened
out-of-use stairways
at the Flushing Avenue and
Hewes Street stations on the
J line, according to spokeswoman
Amanda Kwan, who
said the agency also plans to
widen stairs at Marcy Avenue
station to accommodate the
expected influx of passengers
to the J, M and Z lines once
L-train repairs begin.
But other stops along the
elevated J, M, and Z lines in
Williamsburg and Bushwick
still feature out-of-use staircases,
which create dangerous
human traffic jams during
rush hour that will likely only
worsen with increasing ridership
during the L fix, according
to AM New York.
ON THE RADIO
Please, think of the children
By Moses Jefferson
Brooklyn Paper
We did it for the kids!
Indeed, local youngsters
were the through line in
this week’s all-new episode
of Brooklyn Paper Radio,
on which co-hosts Anthony
Rotunno and Johnny Kunen
took a deeper dive into stories
unfolding across the borough
that put children front
and center.
Our co-hosts first welcomed
reporter Kevin Duggan,
who zipped to the studio
straight from an event hosted
by District Attorney Eric Gonzalez,
where he laid out his
so-called Justice 2020 initiative
that aims to eliminate the
trend of incarceration-as-firstresort
in Kings County .
The scheme in part calls
for a reduction in prosecution
of so-called school-based offenses
in order to divert young
people from the criminal-justice
system — which Gonzalez
said for too long encouraged
the jailing of individuals
who could be appropriately
punished without spending
time behind bars, according
to Duggan.
Reporter Colin Mixon then
joined the hosts to remind listeners
of officials’ call to vaccinate
their children, after 21
new victims contracted the
measles virus when leaders
of a Williamsburg yeshiva allowed
a sick , pre-symptomatic
kid to attend class.
Later, Mixon pivoted to
another developing saga on
his beat — residents’ growing
chorus of calls for a dominatrix
to flee the sexual-education
space she operates inside
a Bedford-Stuyvesant
residential unit , one neighbor
of which claimed draws
“creepy” clientele who could
simply snatch a hapless child
from the street one day.
Reporter Julianne Mc-
Shane closed the broadcast’s
hard-news segment by joining
the hosts to discuss a
new bill up in Albany that
would bring 750 school-zone
speed cameras to city streets
if passed .
Brooklyn Paper Radio is
recorded at our studio in
America’s Downtown, debuts
new episodes every
Tuesday, and can be found,
as always, on BrooklynPaper.
com, on iTunes , and of course,
on Stitcher .
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