If it sounds crazy, it probably is.
That’s the message community affairs officers from the 76th Precinct brought to the Carroll Gardens Neighborhood Association [CGNA] Monday night in response to chatter on the blogs earlier in the week that “gangs” had descended on Carroll Park.
It turns out that the incident in question was nothing more than a dispute between a couple of kids.
According to Detective Paul Grudzinki and Police Officer Vincent Marrone, one of the youths involved in the dispute decided to call in his brother, who then showed up with a knife.
The community affairs officers say cops were immediately alerted and successfully diffused the situation without incident.
A similar incident between stroller moms and unruly kids at Carroll Park sparked a minor firestorm last summer before cooler heads prevailed.
“It’s like a domino effect,” Grudzinki said of the way some incidents in Carroll Gardens have a way of being exaggerated. “We’re rumor control as well.”
It’s probably safe to say that Carroll Gardens’ need for a post office of its very own isn’t an exaggeration.
Many say that the Red Hook Post Office at 615 Clinton Street just isn’t adequate to serve Carroll Gardens – especially with the influx of new residents moving in as the result of new development in the neighborhood.
While local elected officials have pressed for a new post office for some time, nothing has materialized in Carroll Gardens except a series of failed substations.
Dan Wiley, aide to Rep. Nydia Velazquez, partly blamed the neighborhood’s chronic postal problems on changes made back in the 1970s which transformed the United States Postal Service into a quasi-public/private entity that now operates more like a corporation than a government agency.
“They act like a corporation and talk about their bottom line,” Wiley complained.
Because of those changes made some 30 years ago, Wiley said that Congress now has very limited leverage over the postal service.
Representatives from the Army Corps of Engineers, meanwhile, said that their plans to either dredge, cap or pursue a combination of both approaches to clean up the perpetually polluted Gowanus Canal, hinge on a number of factors – one of which includes assurances that big developments like the giant Atlantic Yards project would not continue to foul the waterway once the canal was cleaned.
The Army Corps of Engineers’ presentation sparked a bizarre outburst between Buddy Scotto and a neighborhood resident who accused Scotto of supporting development around the Gowanus Canal for selfish reasons, after Scotto suggested that the government would only act to clean the waterway if people were actually living there.
Local blogger Katia Kelly said that bringing new residents to the fouled Gowanus Canal would be “criminal.”
