Greenpoint
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A New York Shitty Public Service Announcement
(and a long overdue one at that!)
It has been almost a year since I posted the above photograph of this park slated to grace the northernmost tip of Manhattan Avenue. It looked almost finished April 29, 2008. A press conference was conducted there last July. A friend of mine saw two officers from very own 94th Precinct citation a chap for catching crabs at this location shortly thereafter. Ones of the eating— non-venereal— variety, mind you.
“Almost finished” this park has remained for almost two years now. Unlike the little train that could, this humble patch of land hasn’t. This is probably in large part due to the fact that the guard rails designated for this park were stolen and sold for scrap by some of our more enterprising, if criminally inclined, fellow citizens.
Today, April 12, 2009 I have some very good news:
Our new guard rails have arrived…
and they do not appear to be going anywhere anytime soon! (Note the “footprints” of the old ones)
Anyone care to guess when this park will at long last be open to the public?
If anyone reading this post knows the answer please speak up via comments or email me at:
missheather (at) thatgreenpointblog (dot) com
In the time it has taken to build this park thus far:
- Children have been born, learned to walk and have been potty-trained.
- I have seen, at long last, rents in Greenpoint start to drop. Hopefully to find their way to fair market value. $2,900 for a two bedroom apartment in this neighborhood is ridiculous. (Yes I’m talking about you, Viridian.)
- An African American gentleman has been both elected and assumed the office of the President of the United States.
Now that I think about it the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation and United States Constitution were each respectively knocked out in less time than this park. Now throw in a (not so) minor colonial conflict commonly known as the American Revolution and you’ll get a notion of where I’m headed with this.
Were our founding fathers made of better stuff than us? I doubt it. What’s more, we are not operating under duress or the threat of British occupation. There is no legitimate reason I can think of as to why completing one tiny park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, U.S.A. is taking so damned long.
Thoughts anyone?
Miss Heather
Comments
4 Comments on A New York Shitty Public Service Announcement
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missheather on
Sun, 12th Apr 2009 5:30 pm
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bitchcakes on
Sun, 12th Apr 2009 7:29 pm
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mbrooklyn on
Mon, 13th Apr 2009 5:40 am
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pablitostar on
Mon, 13th Apr 2009 5:55 pm
This comment comes courtesy of Mr. Belvedere. I accidentally deleted it. Sorry!
it seems sadly ironic to me that this area (similarly to the williamsburg “state park”) was more freely accessible before it was made into a “park”; which seems to consist of erecting a better fence. i wish they would open it up.
I have been keeping an eye on this too – I often go to the tip of Greenpoint on my local bike rides and first found this park on Thanksgiving 2007. It looked nearly complete then. I stumbled upon it a few weeks ago and was shocked to see it is still taped up and closed off as you noted above. It looks like they did a nice job and it offers such a great view of the city – that, coupled with the proximity the Brooklyn Ice Cream factory would make for a fun summer date night – but I wonder if it will ever be accessible. I’d love to get the story too.
yep, it used to be better. when i lived in dumbo in 1990 the pier was a ramshackle falling into the water arrangement of planks. then our access was cut off while the city created a spanking new shiny suburbanesque pier, followed by tour buses and eventually gazillion dollar condos. sigh. (weirdly, the brooklyn icecream factory ended up there too…)
sometimes broke is really fixed and fixed is broke… dont fix it if it aint…
I don’t know when it will be done, so my comment won’t be much help. That little daysailer has been moored there forever. I hope they don’t kick him out when they finally do open it. Last winter I released 4 or 5 young rats there (what else was I supposed to do?) who had come through our rotting bottom floor and all got stuck together on a glue trap the previous owner had left there. Ah, Greenpoint. Now, if only that feral cat that found a way in last night had come a year earlier, I wouldn’t have had to deal with all that. Anyway, here’s a link that is a possible 2nd chapter to park at the end of Manhattan Avenue.
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and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
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