The same NYC Council that voted to permit the Barclay’s Arena in Brooklyn’s most traffic-congested area now has the gall to consider the soon-to-be-engulfed residents with a new “privilege”: paid parking permits.
The Barclay’s Center area never offered adequate parking. The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower generated tons of daily dental traffic, plus all the the residential parkers, both day and night — all in an area loaded with white-hatted police traffic mediators trying not to be swallowed up by the over-loaded traffic coming to the intersection of Fourth Avenue, Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic Avenue.
Each council person who voted for this disaster should come and see for themselves.
They could have admired the braveries of white-gloved officers constantly flagging or gagging the frantic, quagmired motorists at each of those entangled intersections.
Long before the wonderful Dodgers fled to Los Angeles, the tema’s management turned down our borough’s offer to park their new home field on the very empty lots we now gave to the Barclay tycoon!
In the many years that I’ve travelled for my semi-annual dental trials there, I preferred the subway because of the horrid daytime parking!
Now, after the brazen City Council defied area residents and chose to add a giant basketball arena to their already congestion-filled neighborhood, the same City Council and local leaders offer us the same overnight parking takes that we endured in the Ed Koch era. What rewards did our city offer us in the “Ed Koch Era?” — The Sound of Music? No! The incessant dramas of awakening to all-night auto-alarms … honk, honk, ring, ring, all through the night because of a lack of police protection!
Remember the privileges we had to have our tires stolen, and politely replaced with milk-boxes? Remember whole wheels — or rear-view mirrors, vanished in those nights when there was no sleep for we, the weary.
I paid a city warden who came to my home one Sunday to secure my dear wife’s four hub-caps with rivets for $100 each! I also recall three days later, dear Irene stayed home in a snow storm — and asked me, “How did he steal my hub-caps during the night?” I could not believe it until we cleared the snow from her wheels. Gone.
Selling stolen tires, hubcaps, radiators, and side-view mirrors was a raging industry in those Koch-ian years that rolled into David Dinkens!
But how can this City Council permit this injustice in an area of dense residential congestion, overly trafficked with intersections of Brooklyn’s major Avenue intersections — while they dare to permit our same city to seek to tear down the sports-zoned Abe Stark Convention and Sports Center in a rarely congested huge Coney Island location with its very own park lot?
Let’s blow the whistle against the City Council’s efforts to impose upon us an overnight parking tax!
This is Lou Powsner.
America's Columnist, 92-year-old Lou Powsner's prose appears twice a month on BrooklynDaily.com. He doesn't have an e-mail address or a computer.
