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del.icio.usAll the new moms along a once-lonely stretch of the Brooklyn waterfront didn’t just give birth to children — they also delivered a new neighborhood association.
The Columbia Street Waterfront Neighborhood Association held its first meeting this week at the B61 bar, a de-facto capital of the cozy corridor south of Atlantic Avenue between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the waterfront.
And participants credited the newborns.
“There are new families moving in [so] we need to get organized,” said Gary Gatullo, who attended the meeting.
As a result, children’s needs will clearly be front and center.
“We need to watch what is happening at the schools,” said one parent in attendance, mentioning overcrowding at PS 29 on Henry Street.
Another resident at the Sunday afternoon meeting said he worried about a five-story temporary residence for mentally disabled people that is being built nearby.
“Is this something that people want to raise children around?” he asked.
In recent weeks, area concerns about development, traffic safety and school crowding have come into sharp focus. The city wants to transform the publicly owned waterfront west of Columbia Street — currently home to a working cargo port that will be evicted in March — into a maritime-themed industrial area with a still-undefined tourist attraction.
Many of the same people at Sunday’s barroom meeting came out against that plan’s housing component, a 350-unit development.
The city scrapped the plan last week.
“This is a neighborhood in transition and we need to make sure our voice continues to be heard,” said association organizer Michael Webster.
But to those who remember the neighborhood a decade ago, when it was better known as a playground for gangsters, the new quandaries don’t feel so bad.
“The longshoremen would die to see all these young women with strollers and worrying about traffic,” said Greg O’Connell, the developer who converted a Civil War–era warehouse into a new Fairway and artist condos earlier this year.
“These are the problems a neighborhood should have.”
©2006 The Brooklyn Paper
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