Greenpoint Gazette
October 29, 2015

Open space activists, Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park (FBIP), working with city, state and federal representatives as well as with Community Board 1, took a step forward, this week, to hold the City to its open space promises in the 2005 rezoning.

 

The latest neighborhood advocacy effort calls on the City to ban any change in zoning at CitiStorage – the crucial remaining 7.5 acres of waterfront property needed to complete the 27-acre Bushwick Inlet Park. Developer Midtown Equities is reportedly in negotiations with property owner Norm Brodsky to purchase the property and with Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen to swap promised parkland on the East River portion of the CitiStorage site for a change in zoning and towers that would include affordable housing.

 

In a show of unity, every elected official who represents the neighborhood joined together to write a letter to Mayor de Blasio demanding that no change in zoning ever be allowed on the CitiStorage property.  Bushwick Inlet Park was a central promise of the 2005 rezoning of 185 blocks of vacant, derelict Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront – the largest rezoning in the history of New York City.

 

Frustrated residents are already seeing a tsumani of development triggered by the rezoning that will usher in dozens of high-rise towers and tens of thousands of new residents along the East River with virtually no improvements made to the community’s infrastructure to accommodate this influx…

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