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Since 1978 • (718) 260–2500 • Brooklyn, NY • ©2019 16 pages • Vol.Serving Brownstone Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Williamsburg & Greenpoint 42, No. 14 • April 5–11, 2019
This hawk was discovered poisoned in Prospect Park.
A FREE BIRD
Ornery Prospect Park hawk will
survive poisoning, rescuers say
By Colin Mixson
Brooklyn Paper
This bird’s prospects are
looking up.
A Kings County hawk found poisoned
in Prospect Park last week
will survive thanks to the efforts of
a Queens firefighter and his animalloving
wife, who look forward to releasing
the downy hunter next week
at a more hawk-friendly park.
“We know there’s poison out there,”
said Bobby Horvath, who runs the Wildlife
in Need of Rescue group with his
wife, Kathy Horvath. “If this happens
again, it may not be so lucky.”
The on-the-mend hawk fell deathly
ill last week after snacking on a mouse,
or rat poisoned with Rodenticide, a
deadly toxin commonly employed by
city exterminators, and the big-hearted
firefighter swooped in for the rescue
after Prospect Park Alliance Forestry,
Wildlife, and Aquatic Technician Marty
Woess spotted the bird unable to take
flight near the park’s Le Frak ice-skat-
CLEAN IT UP FIRST! Gowanus residents: Sort out the Superfund mess before rezoning
Cleaning the
Gowanus
Guiding along Brooklyn’s tiniest feminists
Class in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens promotes ‘positive images’ to local tots
File photo
Members of Community Board 2 demanded the city to
appoint a dedicated public outreach liasion to handle the
replacement of the BQE’s crumbling triple cantilever.
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Wild
Brooklyn
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
The city must halt its rezoning until
the feds complete their cleanup of
the Gowanus Canal Superfund site, locals
demanded at a recent community
meeting.
Members of the local watchdog organization
the Gowanus Canal Community
Advisory blasted reps from the
Department of City Planning for moving
ahead with the controversial rezoning,
which would likely see thousands of
newcomers join the neighborhood, before
the Environmental Protection Agency
can mitigate the millions of gallons of
rainwater and raw sewage that run into
the fetid canal every year, according to
one Gowanusaur.
“Why wouldn’t the city go ahead and
finish the tank to bring some real Combined
Sewage Overflow relief before
any rezoning? That to me just seems
to be a no-brainer,” Katia Kelly said at
the St. Mary Star of the Sea retirement
home on March 26.
The department must wait until the
city can assess how much overflow the
canal can handle with the amount of
people living there now before its proposal
opens the floodgate for eager developers
to build 22-story towers along
Brooklyn’s Nautical Purgatory, according
to Kelly.
“Why wouldn’t you go ahead and plan?
I mean we’re talking about city planning,
planning enough to hold CSOs,”
she said. “Let’s build the tanks first and
then see what this area can hold.”
Some 377 million gallons of overflow
from raw sewage and rainwater pours
into the canal every year and the city is
required under the Federal Superfund program
and the Clean Water Act to invest
in infrastructure to reduce the amount
to 115 million gallons per year.
For years the plans were to build a four
Photo by Kevin Duggan
Members of the watchdog group Gowanus Canal Advisory Group
called out city agencies for rushing ahead with the neighborhood’s
rezoning before the feds finish up their cleanup.
and an eight million gallon tank at the
head of the canal, but two months ago, the
city proposed building a 16 million gallon
tunnel instead of the cisterns, which the
feds would still need to sign off on.
The construction of either the tanks or
the tunnel will not wrap up until 2030.
The city just announced it will host
a public scoping meeting on April 25,
when locals can weigh in on the environmental
review officials must conduct
before the rezoning proposal begins its
journey through the roughly seven-month
Uniform Land Use Review Procedure,
which it must pass before any of the tall
buildings can go up.
The department has yet to announce
a start date for the review procedure, according
to spokesman Joe Marvilli.
One local educator said that allowing
for the upzoning before making sure the
area could handle it didn’t make sense
and compared the process to her own
profession, asking why that didn’t apply
to keeping the public safe.
“We have to say in September where
we want to get to in June,” said Triada
Samaras. “We can’t start in September
and say ‘I think we’ll go this way.’ It’s
now illegal for teachers to do this; we’re
being held to this standard, so I don’t see
that when it’s the public health that’s at
issue, why we can’t start at the end.”
But despite residents’ growing concerns,
the rezoning’s chief planner argued
that waiting for the necessary infrastructure
first wouldn’t be feasible given the
city’s affordable housing crisis.
“When we propose density of moderate
density or higher, there’s a lot of questions
like this. Not just sewage, but also
transit and schools and people saying,
‘why don’t you build every single school
before any development ever happens?’
And so there’s a lot of differing opinions
on that,” said Jonathan Keller.
“But we also have to talk about the
tradeoffs, the tradeoffs of an affordability
crisis, the fact that we also have 60,000
people who are homeless and that we’re
looking to accommodate growth and that
we can’t just stop change from happening,”
the planner added.
The city previously tried to rezone
the neighborhood due to its location between
two of the borough’s most expensive
nabes, Park Slope and Carroll Gardens,
but put the redrawing on hold after
once-eager developers shied away when
the feds named the canal a Superfund
site in 2010, according to reports from
the New York Times .
The renewed push to allow for higher
density in the area is out of sync with
efforts by the city’s Department of Environmental
Protection and the federal
agency to clean up the site, according
to Kelly, which will create problems
for both current and new Gowanusaurs
down the pike.
The draft rezoning is still up for debate
by local pols and the community,
which will allow for them to have their
say as to whether the nabe can handle
the extra populace.
Voice your concern at the scoping
meeting , which will be held in the auditorium
of MS 51 at 350 Fifth Ave., at
Fourth Street, on April 25 at 4 p.m.
See HAWK on page 6
By Colin Mixson
Brooklyn Paper
Kings County tots between
the ages of 2 and 4 studied the
accomplishments and crafts of
great women at a feminism class
for kids held in Prospect-Lefferts
Gardens last week.
The March 27 event for Brooklyn’s
smallest feminists — who
donned shirts that read “little feminist”
and “the future is mine” —
featured some light lectures on
history’s top gals, including Frida
Kahlo and Michelle Obama.
But the women’s empowerment
lesson took a backseat to arts,
crafts, and adorableness, according
to the pint-sized pupils’ strong,
female instructor.
“They’re so cute!” said Vanessa
Raptopoulos, owner of the Awesome
Brooklyn gift shop at 617
Flatbush Ave. “We just thought
it would be fun for kids.”
The event kicked off with a brief
history of Kahlo and her status as
a feminist icon, before the kids
dug into Raptopoulos’s stash of
crayons and colored pencils, and
drew pictures of the famed Mexican
artist — although the kids
employed a decidedly more conservative
style than the Central
American painter’s, according
to Raptopoulos.
“There were no nudes,” she
explained.
And for Obama, the kids planted
flowers in emulation of the First
Lady’s White House garden, laying
seeds in egg crates which they
later took home to watch grow,
according to the purveyor of
novelties.
Throughout the event, Toons for
Tots entertainer Hannah Moore regaled
her diminutive audience with
songs related to the event’s feminist
theme, including “De Colores” for
Kahlo and “Zoom to the Moon” in
honor of female astronauts.
How much the pint-sized pupils
really learned about feminism and
the struggle for women’s equality
is anyone’s guess, but kids are
never too young to learn about the
great gals of history, according to
one mom.
“My daughter is only 2 years
old, but the more she’s exposed to
these positive images, it will benefit
her in the long run,” said Erica
Thomas Collier, who brought
daughter Cyan.
Singer Hannah Moore serenaded youngsters at a feminism
class for kids on March 27.
Photo by Caroline Ourso
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
They need to talk.
The city must establish a public
outreach liaison for the Brooklyn-
Queens Expressway’s repair project,
transit-minded civic leaders
demanded at a recent meeting.
The Department of Transportation’s
manager of the roadway’s
reconstruction, Tanvi Pandya, is
focused on the technical difficulties
of the project, so the agency
should add a dedicated staffer
to interact with the local community,
said the leader of Community
Board 2’s transportation
committee.
“We feel the existing DOT project
manager is rightly
concerned with the
engineering aspects
of it and figuring out
the right proposal, but
she’s probably not the
person to be spearheading
the public outreach
process. We need somebody
to specifically focus
on that,” said the committee’s
chairwoman Juliet Cullen-Cheung
at the board’s March 25
executive meeting.
During the March 21 transportation
and public safety committee
meeting, Cullen-Cheung and
her colleagues said the community
board should take part in the
process to find a better
way to manage the reconstruction
project,
given that many different
interest groups
have put forward their
alternative proposals to
repair the beleaguered
triple cantilever in the
past months and due
to the issue’s large impact on the
community.
“We were brainstorming how
the community board could participate
in that process — now
that all these other organizations
are coming out with their
own plans and initiatives — that
allows us to respond to it,” she
said. “Because this is such a huge
enormous process.”
The agency has been meeting
with several small groups of
residents, businesses, and politicians
since it first announced
its controversial plan to build a
six-lane highway in the beloved
promenade last September.
Department brass also met
with the leaders from community
Brooklyn Paper
Schneps Media
is proud to announce
that Brooklyn
Paper has named
Zachary Gewelb as
the Paper’s new
editor-in-chief.
Gewelb is coming
over to Kings County
from Queens, where he served
for a year as editor-in-chief of
Schneps Media’s TimesLedger
Newspapers.
In addition to serving as the
Paper’s top editor, Gewelb will
also oversee the editorial operations
of Schneps Media’s
four Courier Life newspapers
in the borough: the Park Slope
Courier, Mill-Marine Courier,
Bay News, and
Brooklyn Graphic.
“Zach has the
experience, passion
and leadership
to continue to grow
our reach throughout
Brooklyn with
award-winning content,”
said CEO and
co-publisher Joshua Schneps.
“He has proven to be a great
leader of the TimesLedger
group and we are thrilled to
have him take on the role as
editor-in-chief in Brooklyn.”
Gewelb, 26, first joined
TimesLedger in December 2016
to manage the newsroom and
run the TimesLedger’s website.
See BQE on page 6
See EDITOR on page 12
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