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The Brooklyn Paper / Gregory P. Mango

Joralemon Street residents were perplexed by all the new lines — until The Stoop looked into it.

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Look! Down on the pavement! It’s a gas leak, it’s street art, it’s a military map of the D-Day landing!

No, it’s just a contractor digging up Joralemon Street.

Bright orange and yellow paint on the pavement at the corner of Hicks and Joralemon streets and the smell of gas wafting through the air were enough to make area residents nervous about a gas leak in their neighborhood — the second one in the last month.

“You can definitely smell gas if you walk around the neighborhood,” said resident Fran Bodkin. “And there were work crews marking up the pavement with bright orange paint. It looks like they marked off the spots where the utility mains are. I think we have a major gas leak.”

Bodkin also saw fire trucks in front of Grace Church — on Hicks Street between Joralemon and Grace Court — on May 1. “Someone called in the smell of gas,” he said, “and they were investigating.”

But this isn’t the first time area residents have complained about the sulphurous perfume permeating their street.

“We had the smell of gas on [nearby] Garden Place for more than a year,” said Judy Stanton, president of the Brooklyn Heights Association. “Finally, last month, the gas company showed up and fixed it. We were all really happy.”

Joralemon Street resident Murray Baldwin also saw the workers.

“They came around with their sniffers to try and find the source,” said Baldwin, “but I’m not sure what they did. We can still smell it.”

Keyspan spokeswoman Karen Young said that the energy company hasn’t gotten any more calls about gas leaks in Brooklyn Heights.

“I don’t have any record of a gas leak at Hicks and Joralemon,” she said. “We aren’t doing any digging around there.” But Young added that since the Garden Place leak was fixed on April 22, Keyspan crews have been back in the area “periodically, to take readings,” and haven’t found anything wrong with the gas mains.

So what’s with all the citrus-hued paint?

That mystery was solved when a contractor, DiFazio Construction, began tearing up Joralemon on Tuesday.

“We’re installing new conduits for Verizon,” said site supervisor James Ciccarello. “The services are being upgraded.”

The upgrades are likely part of Verizon’s new, and much-touted, FiOS system — Verizon’s attempt to break the Cablevision and Time-Warner Cable chokehold on most of the city. The service bundles high-speed Internet, phone service and cable television into one package.

The yellow and orange markings were laid down so that the workers could dig up the street without cutting into any utility mains, preventing the very kind of gas leak that Bodkin and other Heights residents are worried about.

It doesn’t explain where the smell is coming from, but at least Joralemon Street residents can rest assured that the wannabe street art doesn’t mean that Keyspan is planning an invasion.

©2007 The Brooklyn Paper

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