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February 27, 2010
Forest City Ratner: Carlton Ave Bridge Closure “a Bit of a Conundrum”
StreetsBlog
by Ben Fried
This account of last Wednesday's meeting on street closings for the proposed Atlantic Yards project focuses on Forest City Ratner's pushing the schedule to rebuild the Carlton Avenue Bridge much further into the future than promised. Attention is paid to the more than 1,000 "interim" parking spaces on the project footprint. With a 25-year buildout allowed, these spaces could remain a blight on the area for decades.
Forest City Ratner did discuss its failure to reopen the Carlton Avenue bridge. This missing piece of the Prospect Heights/Fort Greene street grid -- a critical link for cyclists who use the Manhattan Bridge -- was originally expected to be rebuilt two years after closing in January 2008, with Forest City facing a three-year deadline to complete the work before incurring penalties. Now the reconstructed bridge is unlikely to open until 2012 at the earliest, and Oder reports that Forest City's explanation, along with its timetable, keeps on shifting.
Largely unmentioned at the meeting was Forest City's intention to construct more than a thousand "interim" surface parking spaces on the site, mostly to store vehicles belonging to their employees and construction workers. Since all this new parking could sit around generating traffic and blighting the landscape for quite some time, neighborhood groups want to know how exactly how much would be constructed, and how it will be priced and managed. They didn't get any answers on Wednesday.
Posted by steve at February 27, 2010 8:49 AM