WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CONGESTION PRICING: PAGE 11
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Since 1978 • (718) 260–2500 • Brooklyn, NY • ©2019 14 pages • Vol. 42, N Serving Brownstone Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Williamsburg & Greenpoint o. 13 • March 29–April 4, 2019
ROOMS WITH A VIEW
BAM to open new gallery, connect three spaces on Fulton Street
Shakeup at BHA
Prominent Brooklyn Heights civic leader resigns
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NewYorkFamily.com/Camps
FACTORY RESET
Clinton Hill civic gurus approve rezoning
manufacturing site for new charter school
Not too baa-d!
Lamb rescued on expressway
fi nds new home at bucolic farm
Come and meet the Camp Directors
Sunday, April 7th, 2019, 12–3pm
FORT GREENE
Bishop Laughlin Memorial High School, 357 Clermont Ave
Scrummy
New York state’s first professional rugby team, Rugby United New
York, kicked off its first full season at its new home — MCU Park in
Coney Island — winning 24–21 on March 15. “We’re really excited
to bring our sport to Brooklyn,” said player Mike Petri.
Keith Killeen
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
They’re going strong!
The Brooklyn Academy of Music will
create a new space dedicated to visual
art this October, alongside its collection
of film and performance venues, the
arts group announced last week. A new
structure on Fulton Street, dubbed BAM
Strong, will house both a ground-floor
gallery and a second-floor sculpture terrace.
The construction is part of a $38
million project that will also renovate
the 115-year-old BAM Harvey Theater
next door to make it more accessible, according
to the Academy’s chief.
“This project provides our campus
with dynamic improvements and additions
while greatly increasing accessibility
for all our visitors,” said BAM
president Katy Clark.
Renovations to the Harvey space include
adding an elevator to its balcony
level, wider stairs, and a larger lobby with
service kiosks instead of a narrow box office
window. The second floor of the theater
will also feature a new patron lounge,
with a floor-to-ceiling semi-circular window
looking over Fulton Street.
The new Rudin Family Gallery, curated
by BAM’s new artistic director David
Binder, will open in time for the organization’s
annual Next Wave Festival
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn Academy of Music announced an expansion of its Fulton Street space, which will open in
October and will include a new visual arts gallery next to the Harvey Theater.
of new art. The terrace atop the new gallery
will host a public art installation,
which will be announced later this year,
according to a press release.
The visual arts space will also connect
the Harvey Theater to the ground floor of
the residential building at the corner of
Fulton Street and Ashland Place, which
the organization bought in 2010. An undulating
lighted canopy will connect the
three spaces along Fulton Street.
The organization’s managers are still
considering what they will do with the
ground floor space at Ashland Place.
“Possible uses and operators of that
property are currently under consideration,”
a press statement read.
The new venture will give the Academy
a chance to try new things, adding
to the neighborhood’s art offerings
and make them more accessible and
affordable, another leader of the arts
institution said.
“We are thrilled that the project will
provide our always adventurous institution
with new opportunities — from visual
art programming, to easier access to
affordable seats, to new spaces for our audiences
to gather,” said BAM board chair
Adam Max. “Having our Fulton Street
spaces united under one canopy also reflects
the evolution of BAM and the growing
Brooklyn cultural district.”
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
Clinton Hill civic gurus overwhelmingly
supported a local charter
school’s plan to erect a new
learning house in a historically industrial
part of the neighborhood,
despite pushback from some locals,
who argued the classrooms
will further reduce the number of
blue-collar jobs in the area, and
expose students to dangers such as
heavy traffic and pollution.
Members of Community Board
2’s Land Use Committee on March
20 cast their purely advisory vote
in favor of rezoning the current
manufacturing site at 30 Clinton
Ave. between the Brooklyn–
Queens Expressway and Flushing
Avenue, so that leaders of Clinton
Hill’s International Charter
School can build a new facility for
its students, who currently learn
at two separate campuses on Willoughby
Street and Hanover Place
in America’s Downtown.
But one local worried that
the board’s blessing will eliminate
manufacturing jobs at the
Brooklyn Navy Yard–adjacent
site — which is currently home
to an ironworks facility, an autorepair
shop, and a food-storage
warehouse — and larger neighborhood,
which she claimed already
lost many similar gigs to redevelopment
over the years.
“Our manufacturing districts
need to be protected,” said Lucy
Koteen. “Because of the rampant
gentrification that’s going on everywhere
throughout the city, and
particularly in Fort Greene, Clinton
Hill, along Flatbush Avenue
and Fulton Street, we need to be
protective of our manufacturing
and industry sections, because
they’re very important for jobs and
for diversity. I think we need to be
really careful to allow too much
development in those areas that’s
contrary to manufacturing and the
The International Charter School of New York has applied
to build its new five-story educational facility on Clinton Avenue
between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the
Flushing Avenue side of the Navy Yard.
Barone Management
industries that we need.”
Another panel member wondered
if students at the charter
school — which opened in 2015,
currently teaches some 355 pupils
in kindergarten through fourth
grade, and could grow to include
fifth-through-eighth-grade classrooms
and serve as many as 727
youngsters if the rezoning is approved
— would be exposed to
air and noise pollution, and dangerous
traffic, if it opens up so
close to the expressway.
“Your location is between the
BQE and the Navy Yard, so you’re
looking at a lot of noise, you’re
looking at a lot of traffic, you’re
also looking at possible air pollution,
how are you handling all
of those three conditions?” asked
Bill Flounoy.
Local parents would have nothing
to worry about, however, according
to an engineer tapped
by the school and its chosen developer
for the project, who said
planners determined that pollution
levels would not harm any
children, after running an emissions
simulator and consulting Department
of Transportation data
to see how many vehicles use the
highway.
“It was determined that the
emissions from the BQE would
not fall above the regulatory standards
of having an impact on students,”
said Equity Environmental
Engineering staffer Amber
Karatlyan.
The engineers also checked
for surrounding industrial polluters
and investigated area crosswalks,
according to Karatlyan,
who claimed her firm went above
and beyond to prove that the school
will not put kids in harm’s way
in order to get the city’s Board
of Standards and Appeals to sign
off on the rezoning.
“I have a 3-year-old, I am a
mother. Any time I’m dealing
with schools in a manufacturing
district, I go above and beyond
State Environmental Quality Review
guidelines,” she said.
International Charter School
leaders must also prove that they
could not find a more suitable site
in the school’s district than the
Clinton Avenue lot, which they
told the panel took them more than
four years to find. And there are
already schools nearby, including
Clinton Avenue’s public Benjamin
Banneker Academy high school
By Colin Mixson
Brooklyn Paper
Call it bleating the odds!
A lost lamb police rescued
from the Gowanus Expressway
this month will live out her days
munching grass and rubbing
hooves at a farm with other fourlegged
escape artists, according to
the kind-hearted benefactor who
took the baby sheep in after her
trot through traffic.
“She’s doing great,” said Mike
Stura, who runs the Skylands Animal
Sanctuary in New Jersey.
Stura, who named the lamb
Palmer after one of his faithful farmhands,
built a reputation as the goto
guy for city Animal Care and
Control officials looking to hand
off wayward critters, after offering
refuge to other beasts pulled from
city streets — including a young bull
that cops corralled at the Prospect
Park Parade Ground in 2017.
Indeed, the rescuer said his farm
was the first place officials from
Animal Control called, after officers
with the Police Department’s
Highway Patrol nabbed the clovenfoot
commuter on March 13, near
the 38th Street exit on the highway’s
Queens-bound side.
Palmer was most likely on the
run from certain death at the hands
of a butcher when motorists spotted
her strolling among passing cars
on the expressway, but — due to
liability and public relations concerns
— her former owners are unlikely
to come forward demand-
Police Officer Dominick Gatto shows off the lamb he rescued
from the Gowanus Expressway.
NYPD
ing her return, Stura said.
“Nobody will step forward
looking for the animal, because
they’re afraid of liability issues,”
he said. “If the animal causes an
accident, and she’s your animal,
you’re liable for it.”
And Palmer won’t only share
her lush new digs with the bovine
— she’ll spend her days frolicking
with other sheep, goats, pigs, turkeys,
ducks, and a goose named
Ted, some of whom also escaped
area slaughterhouses.
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
He’s signing off.
The leader of the Brooklyn
Heights Association will step
down after almost four years on
the job by the end of June, according
to a sudden announcement by
the organization.
The storied civic group’s executive
director Peter Bray will leave
his post to commit more time to a
serious health issue within his family,
association reps said in a statement
released late March 22.
“The Brooklyn Heights Association
announces, with much regret,
that it has begun a search for a
new Executive Director to replace
Peter Bray, who will be leaving his
post at the end of June to attend to
a serious health issue within his
family,” the release read.
Bray has been at the helm of
the organization during some of its
Wild
Brooklyn
most high-profile battles, such as
its opposition to the city’s planned
reconstruction of the beleaguered
Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the
closure of the prison complex on
Rikers Island, which is slated to
see the move of some 1,400 inmates
to the House of Detention
in Boerum Hill, and numerous
landmarking efforts in the historical
nabe.
He joined the civic group in
the summer of 2015 after more
than two decades of working for
affordable housing and access to
credit unions in the Bronx.
The Park Sloper has also worked
for years with his local neighborhood
civic group the Park Slope
Civic Council, where he remains
active to this day.
He decided to take the helm of
the Heights organization due to
its long track record of advocating
for the historic neighborhood
since its inception in 1910.
“It has this incredibly storied
history, in many respects it’s the
premier neighborhood association
in New York City,” he told
this paper.
The association claims to
Peter Bray
Katherine Davis
See SCHOOL on page 5
See HEIGHTS on page 5
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