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February 2, 2007
City deaf to Railroad’s call
The Brooklyn Papers
By Christie Rizk
Downtown Brooklyn is still under siege from eminent domain:
It’s easy to ridicule Bruce Ratner for partnering with a slavery-linked British Bank on his Atlantic Yards mega-project.
But as Lewis Greenstein and Joy Chatel are finding out, Ratner isn’t the only one ignoring America’s slave-owning past.
Greenstein and Chatel live on Duffield Street in Downtown Brooklyn. And like a couple of lone Yankee soldiers battling General Lee’s troops, these two activists are fighting to keep the city from destroying their buildings, which they claim were once stations on the Underground Railroad.
The city would rather have an underground parking lot.
...
In 2004, an Economic Development Corporation official was caught lying at a hearing to determine the houses’ historical value. He testified that he had consulted with dozens of experts and black culture research institutions and that they had agreed that the Duffield Street homes didn’t deserve to be saved.But he hadn’t and they didn’t.
The lie was bad enough, but what really bothers Greenstein is that the city would tear down his building simply to create a parking lot for the New Brooklyn, chasing, as he called it, “the Almighty dollar.”
Posted by lumi at February 2, 2007 7:48 AM