The fight to stop Gethsemane Church’s sale of its garden has expanded beyond the cash-strapped congregation to a local real-estate broker involved in the sale.
New flyers have gone up around the churchyard at Seventh Avenue and 10th Street urging Park Slopers to “boycott Betancourt,” the agency that the unsigned flyer calls “the broker who betrayed the South Slope.”
“Betancourt and Associates … is planning to destroy the churchyard park … to develop another one of the oversized condominium monsters that have been invading Park Slope recently.”
The real-estate agency is, indeed, buying the churchyard for several million dollars — but has promised that the building will not be out of scale from its low-rise neighbors.
The flyer was so inflammatory that other opponents of the sale of the churchyard have distanced themselves from it.
“FYI, the new poster up in the neighborhood is NOT from this Churchyard Preservation Group,” Peggy Cyphers, who is leading a group that hopes to either buy the lot from the church or block the sale, wrote in a mass email.
Rev. Liz Alexander, who runs the Presbyterian parish, says the yard must be sold so that the church can continue serving its congregation, which consists mostly of recently released prisoners and the families of people in jail.
