They’re all ears!
Bushwick residents are clamoring for answers about what the developers of the neighborhood’s old Rheingold brewery plan to do with the site, and now they can cross one thing off the list — a giant rooftop cornfield.
Real-estate blogs were aflutter on Monday after uncovering renderings of an idyllic farm covered in golden rows of maize on the roof of a building at Flushing and Evergreen avenues, but the architect responsible says the property’s owner has already rejected the fantastical plan.
“Alas, it’s not gonna happen,” said architect James Ramsey of Raad Studio, whose firm is best known for creating the Lowline, a proposed subterranean answer to Manhattan’s High Line park.
Ramsey’s field of dreams envisioned a community garden atop retail stores, with an attached hotel and restaurant that would reap the benefits of the elevated farmland, serving up food and drink made from its harvest.
“It was going to be half amenity, half aggregation point for people to get involved in working the dirt,” said Ramsey.
Developer Read Property Group owns the site, according to city records — it once owned most of the former bottling complex, but sold some of it off to two other developers last year, and all eyes have been on the newcomers ever since.
That is because the city controversially rezoned the entire industrial site — bounded by Melrose Street and Flushing, Bushwick, and Evergreen avenues — in 2013 to allow for residential buildings, after Read made a non-binding promise to earmark 30 percent of the units there for below-market-rate housing, and locals have been demanding the new owners uphold that pledge ever since it changed hands.
Meanwhile, Read still hasn’t filed any plans for the Flushing and Evergreen avenues portion of the property.
Ramsey said he has no idea what the developer has up its sleeve, but he is still clinging to some hope it may see the light and give the community the glorious rooftop field he thinks it deserves.
“It would be awesome,” he said. “Maybe we’ll actually pressure them to go ahead and do it.”
