Rev. Liz Alexander, pastor of the Church of Gethsemane, is fighting back: “We are talking about trees versus people here,” she told me.
By “here,” Alexander means the controversy over her church’s plan to sell its backyard — on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 10th Street — to a developer who plans to put up condos.
Not a high-rise Ratnerville, mind you, but an in-context apartment building.
Naturally, there has been the normal hue-and-cry about the danger of overdevelopment and the loss of open space (an odd argument, considering that the churchyard is one block from the ultimate open space: Prospect Park).
For a few weeks, a group of Gethsemane neighbors have gotten all the attention — “We’ll buy the lot ourselves!” was one cry; “We’ll get the zoning changed!” was another — but now Alexander is answering back, making it clear that the very survival of her church is at stake, and it’s a lot more important than a weed-filled lot that no one really thought about until they heard was being sold.
“If the sale of the yard is stopped, then the church will close and the whole site will be sold, not just the yard,” Alexander said, reminding me that the church’s building is not landmarked.
“The sale is about the survival of our unique congregation.”
Gethsemane’s congregants are people who have family members in prison, people who are incarcerated themselves, or just-released ex-prisoners. Caring for such people isn’t free, and the church is out of cash. Gethsemane has no endowment, and the Presbyterian Church stipulates that all its churches be self-supporting. Inside, the church is sparse.
If there were anything else to sell, it would’ve been pawned months ago. The windows need repair, the retaining wall in the back needs to be fixed. And the congregation remains as needy as ever.
The churchyard has to go.
We all read about recidivism rates in our city, yet when Liz Alexander tries to make a difference, all she gets is scorn from her neighbors. Her congregants may not all come from the streets of the Slope, but they are our neighbors nonetheless.
“Christ was for the most marginalized people, the outcasts of society, and that is who we are talking about here,” Alexander said.
I sympathize with the group that wants to save the empty lot. It is a lovely square of green, a remnant of the days when our borough was not the hottest spot in the real-estate market.
But life is about making hard choices: would you chop down a tree to help a family put food on their table? Would you uproot some daffodils to help get a child a warm coat?
It is all well and good to say that we want to help the neediest, and it’s guilt reducing to send a check to the Red Cross or put a dollar in the Salvation Army jug, so how come we think differently when the needy are in our neighborhood?
The Kitchen Sink
Hey, Joe Torre, your doppelganger is running around Park Slope. The other day, he was at Dizzy’s, where he denied being the Yankee skipper. “But I wish I had his job,” he said. … Ran into Councilman Bill DeBlasio at the Tea Lounge the other day and overheard him explaining to the barista why Shelly Silver didn’t step in and block Atlantic Yards. DeBlasio’s take? It’s all about power — and how Silver chooses to use it … Good news for all Windsor Terrace bookworms: Babbo’s Books, at 242 Prospect Park West, opened this fall. With its selection of new and used fiction, children’s books and books with political focus, you will no longer have to go to Seventh Avenue to get that new book on Che Guevara. … Even the raptors are leaving Manhattan! Arthur and Guinevere, a pair of American kestrels (the smallest type of falcon), now call Brooklyn home. They have a new “condo” with a floor to ceiling glass observation window, but theirs was not designed by Richard Meier. Watch them dive for dinner at Prospect Park Zoo’s Discovery Center. … Is Park Slope a great neighborhood or what? On a recent Saturday night, we caught guitar legend Danny Kalb — for free! — playing everything from Lead Belly to a song from “the Sound of Music” in the backroom at Barbes. Kalb, who co-founded the Blues Project in the 1960s with Al Kooper, wore his red, white and blue “Park Slope suspenders” and joked, “I don’t see any contraction.” He lives in Center Slope.… We have 10 new police officers on patrol. Capt. John Scolaro of the 78th Precinct introduced three of them at the Park Slope Civic Council meeting on Jan. 4. One had served in Iraq, one was a Marine, and one was in the Army Reserve. … The Civic Council meeting was chock-full of political celebrities, with both old (Councilman Bill DeBlasio) and new (state Sen. Eric Adams) politicos coming in to say how much they look forward to working with the council for the good of the community.
