Which Historic Charm? Pt. 3
Via The Brooklyn Trolley Blogger, here’s a 1940s picture of Grand Army Plaza taken from President Street and Prospect Park West. (Click picture to enlarge.) The building on the left is 1 PPW, which is now a senior residence.
I love that streetcar. And no cars are parked on the Prospect Park Side of the grand boulevard.
See also the first Which Historic Charm? post and Which Historic Charm? Part 2.
Spell Check
It’s encouraging to see that under a post about a lawyer’s belief that a comment on a website is potentially libelous, you’ll find dozens of comments. The spirit of free speech is alive and well.
One of those commenters points out that Jim Walden, the attorney representing NBBL — or, at least, “a number of individuals and groups in connection with a bicycle lane on Prospect Park West” — spells the alleged libel victim’s name incorrectly while spelling it correctly elsewhere in the letter:
I guess you get what you pay for.
The Heirs of Max Bialystock
Undoubtedly, the mental gymnasts of NBBL will be able to justify their pro bono representation somehow, and there’s no need for me to point out why it’s absurd that a white shoe law firm would take up their case on the merits alone. Instead, I urge you to read this excellent piece of reporting from Streetsblog if you haven’t already.
In addition to the in-depth analysis and sourcing from various pro bono experts, you’ll find this little tidbit of information:
The group’s membership form [PDF], which solicits donations to help pay for “incidental costs of our litigation expenses,” instructs donors to send their non-tax deductible contributions to 9 Prospect Park West, PHA — the penthouse apartment in one of the most exclusive addresses in Brooklyn.
A co-op apartment in 9 Prospect Park West recently sold for $3.2 million dollars, with $3600 per month in maintenance fees. The penthouse apartment, one can safely assume, must command a higher price than that. To repeat: According to its membership form, the group receiving free legal services from Jim Walden and Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher is headquartered in an apartment likely worth several million dollars.
I’m no expert in the definitions of and limits to pro bono representation, and I’d love for someone to explain what kind of incidental expenses a pro bono client could incur. But I also wonder how a group headquartered at this exclusive address and headed by some of the most powerful, wealthy, and well-connected people in the city can’t afford money for photocopies and stamps.
What’s most galling to me is that while the primary members of NBBL are indeed quite wealthy, I’m sure there are more than a few well-meaning but misinformed Brooklyn residents who have sent in checks who aren’t of means. I’m not saying NBBL is pocketing money hand over fist this way, but considering the likely age of such donors and to whom the money is going, Steisel, Hainline, Weinshall and co. are almost literally taking money from little old ladies.
It is their right to use political connections and wealth to advance their cause, however unpopular it is. But when a group of millionaires request donations to cover their costs, it’s just more evidence of the true moral character of these so-called “neighbors.”
Pave Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot
Of all the absurd proposals to come from bike lane critics, this one from Alan Singer might take the cake. Blogging at the Huffington Post, the Hofstra University history professor writes:
If there was some kind of public plan for the park, bike use, and car travel, rather than just pitting people against each other over crowded space, we would all be better off. If Bloomberg and his DOT want to reduce traffic congestion in the neighborhoods surrounding Prospect Park and raise revenue for maintaining the park at the same time, they could build parking garages in the park so drivers would not circulate endlessly looking for spaces and people could leave their cars behind more easily and take the subway to work.
You read that right: “Build parking garages in the park.” Come on, Singer, why stop there? Whenever I have used Prospect Park, at least two or three times a week, I am one of the few people in it. For most of December, January, and February, I was the only one. Just pave the whole thing over and be done with it. The environmental devastation would be more than offset by all of the people who would drive, park their cars, and then take the subway to work! If you don’t stop to think about it too much, it makes total sense.
Read the whole thing. It’s satire worthy of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Only it’s not satire.
“All we wanted was what we had.”
Credit: Zoe Schlanger/Gothamist
After reading the NBBL/SFS press release I was curious about some of the people quoted in it, especially Jasmine Melzer, who attributes a position to City Council members Christine Quinn and James Vacca that they do not have. A quick Google search turned up a short article from the 3/31/1984 edition of the New York Times, titled NEW YORK DAY BY DAY; Of Precincts and Parking.
”It’s no picnic living in the city,” Jasmine Melzer said. ”This is a quality-of-life thing.”
Mrs. Melzer was talking about the right to double-park, a battle she and a group of other residents in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn have just won with the Police Department.
It started in January, when the police precinct boundaries were changed in Brooklyn. Mrs. Melzer and her neighbors were shifted from the 72d to the 78th Precinct, whose officers promptly began giving tickets to residents traditionally accustomed to double-parking.
Mrs. Melzer said it was an outrage because mothers couldn’t get their children to school and elderly people couldn’t get to the doctor if they had to park 10 blocks from home.
She organized a letter-writing campaign to the Mayor. The word filtered down to the precinct commander, Capt. Hugh Dunleavy, who agreed to ”enforcement with discretion.” His men, he said, would henceforth issue tickets only if someone was trapped at the curb by a double-parker.
”All we wanted,” said a pleased Mrs. Melzer, ”was what we had.”
“All we wanted was what we had.” If they ever make a documentary about the Great Bike Lane Battles of 2010 and 2011, I hope this is the title.
Twenty-seven years after fighting for the “right” to double-park, Melzer now lends her name to a press release that states, “When drivers need to drop off elderly and disabled passengers and local small businesses need to access their customers on PPW, traffic is reduced to a single lane.” I guess you can file this under unintended consequences.
UPDATE: Here’s one from the comments. In an April 2009 letter to the Brooklyn Paper, Melzer admits that she’s aware of PPW redesign proposals and agrees that traffic there “goes too fast.”
Neighbors For Better Bike Lane Quotes
By now it should come as no surprise that Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes will go to any lengths, willfully misinterpret any data that doesn’t support their position, and more or less make up anything in order to paint the successful, non-controversial Prospect Park West bike lane as unsuccessful and controversial.
As reported by Transportaton Nation’s Andrea Bernstein, in the wake of the City Council’s passage of package of bills aimed to open up car, bike, and pedestrian accident data to the public, NBBL and Seniors for Safety issued a press release, piggybacking their anti-bike-lane agenda on top of the announcement of this important legislation. There’s just one problem with the press release: almost none of it has any basis in reality.
After praising the bill, the NBBL/Seniors for Safety press release reads as follows:
They also support the moratorium, called for by Speaker Quinn and Councilman Vacca, on the imposition of new bike lanes until this background data is available online.
Wouldn’t that be nice for NBBL if Quinn and Vacca had taken that position? Too bad neither Quinn nor Vacca have called for such a moratorium, as Bernstein reports:
But according to city council spokesman Jamie McShane, “neither Speaker Quinn nor Councilman Vacca support a moratorium on bike lane construction.” In fact, McShane said, the question came up at a press conference after the traffic safety bill was passed, and the council specifically rejected the idea of a moratorium on bike lane construction.
Remember, this is no simple misinterpretation or misquote by a bike-friendly reporter. These quotes come straight from the horse’s mouth. Here’s a quote from one member of Seniors for Safety, taken directly from the NBBL/SFS press release:
“The fact that Councilmembers Quinn and Vacca are calling for a hiatus on the imposition of new bike lanes until this data is readily accessible online is an important indication that City leaders want bike lane decisions to be made with greater care and community involvement. We are happy to know that our public efforts to ensure that all of our bike lanes are safe and appropriate have contributed in a positive way to this City-wide debate and to this legislative victory,” added Jasmine Melzer, a Seniors for Safety member.
“The fact.” Quinn and Vacca are not calling for any hiatus on anything until anytime. This is simply a lie. Someone needs to ask Norman Steisel, Louise Hainline, Iris Weinshall, Lois Carswell, Jasmine Melzer and anyone else associated with this press release how and why they so blatantly made up the council members’ positions.
This is not some mic-in-the-face quote, given by a random, not-quite-media-savvy PPW resident, but a calculated press release from an official organization with deep ties to former city officials, a current U.S. senator, and white shoe legal representation. They can not very well claim ignorance of the art of the press release.
I think this is a very serious misstep on NBBL’s part, or at least should be. It’s a willful act that should undermine what little credibility NBBL still has, if it still has any.
Also, by claiming that their “public efforts” contributed to this legislative victory, NBBL trivializes the hard work of Nancy Gruskin and the Stuart C. Gruskin Family Foundation, Transportation Alternatives, and other safety-minded individuals and organizations that actually were involved with getting the bills passed. If it turns out that I’m wrong and that NBBL was instrumental in getting these bills passed, I’m happy to publish an explanation from anyone from NBBL or Seniors for Safety.
There are more lies and contradictions in the press release and I’ll get to those in a subsequent post, but fabricating the positions of Speaker Quinn and Council Member Vacca is enough to completely discredit Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes.
If a Cyclist Rides in a Forest…
I’m glad Chasing Wheels posted this video of Central Park during car free hours. In fact, we need more videos like this to help make the case that the NYPD bike crackdown, especially in city parks, is a complete misallocation of resources.
On any given weekday there are few problems with cyclist and pedestrian interactions, hardly enough to warrant the $270 tickets and large police presence that have become so common this winter. When one considers that overall crime in the park was up 44% last year when compared to 2009, the cycling crackdown seems like an even bigger waste. NYPD resources are hydraulic: An officer who’s staked out by a traffic light waiting for a cyclist to run a red light can not be elsewhere in the park, preventing more serious crime.
I wonder how it feels for any of those 101 robbery victims to know that while they were being held up an NYPD squad car was probably a hundred yards away, waiting for a member of the NYCC to go through a red light. If our tabloid media wasn’t falling over themselves to report on the next hyped-up case of bike bedlam, it’s exactly the kind of scandal they usually love to report: Average New Yorkers wronged by bureaucratic ineptitude. Where have you gone, Marcia Kramer?
Wiki Tweaks
Someone updated CBS2 reporter Marcia Kramer’s Wikipedia page on Sunday to reflect the strange direction her reporting has gone in during these recent months. It’s the first entry that comes up when you do a Google search for her name and more or less reduces her Emmy-winning career to her Ahab-like obsession with Janette Sadik-Khan and the Prospect Park West bike lane. There are also not-so-subtle digs at Prospect Park residents Chuck Schumer and Iris Weinshall, whose own obsession with JSK is boiled down to a bad case of not wanting to be outshined by her successor.
Despite my more Inigo-Montoya-style PPW obsession, I’m not a Wikipedia contributor and had nothing to do with the edit. I first learned about it when I saw this tweet. As entertaining as it is to read, I’m not even 100% convinced that this kind of tactic or political satire, if that’s what you want to call it, is all that helpful.
Since Wikipedia pages get changed all the time, here’s a lengthy reposting of the relevant paragraphs, all under the sub-heading of “Journalistic Credibility Issues.”
By the close of 2010, Kramer’s journalistic ethics and credibility suffered another serious blow as she launched a dubious crusade against the New York City Department of Transportation’s redesign of Prospect Park West in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. Despite data showing DOT’s street reconfiguration had reduced dangerous motor vehicle speeding and provided numerous benefits to cyclists, pedestrians and motorists, Kramer repeatedly aired news segments disputing the City’s data and claiming DOT’s redesign had made Prospect Park West more dangerous. Though the Prospect Park West redesign was the result of years of community process and extensive surveying by the local Community Board and two City Council members showed the project was popular with an overwhelming majority of local residents, Kramer’s coverage selectively portrayed the project as being disliked and imposed upon the community by the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.
If it was somewhat of a mystery why CBS2’s chief political correspondent would spend so much time on a popular, well-functioning one mile-long stretch of bike lane in Brooklyn, the reason behind Kramer’s ongoing negative coverage became clearer in February 2011 when Streetsblog, a New York City transportation policy web site, exposed Kramer’s close personal relationship to U.S. Senator Charles Schumer. Schumer is a long-time resident of Prospect Park West along with his wife Iris Weinshall. As Sadik-Khan’s predecessor at the New York City Department of Transportation, Commissioner Weinshall was known for her adherence to outdated automobile-centric policies and for stymieing projects aimed at making New York City streets safer and more accessible to cyclists and pedestrians.
Upon taking over in 2007, Sadik-Khan rapidly transformed NYC DOT into the nation’s most innovative and widely admired big city transportation agency. Weinshall, for her part, largely stayed away from New York City transportation policy issues until the redesign of her own street in the spring of 2010. Later that year, Weinshall helped to create a group calling itself Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes (NBBL) aimed at the removal of the Prospect Park West bike lane. Kramer’s ongoing coverage provided a platform for NBBL press releases and “exclusives.”
Despite all of the discussion and debate over street safety, the biggest casualty on Prospect Park West was Marcia Kramer’s journalistic credibility.
Ouch. Is Tony Aiello next?
Family Bike Ride – Request for Help
I’m thinking of organizing a family bike ride during Bike Month in May and would love to speak with other like-minded people about getting something going. It’s just a thought at this point, but the idea would be to do a ride for people with young kids too young to ride on their own and who typically put their kids in bike seats or trailers.
The general idea is to meet somewhere family friendly and convenient, such as JJ Byrne Playground on 5th Avenue, and then ride up to Prospect Park for a lap or two followed by a bring-your-own picnic. I’m open to other ideas, but that seems easy enough and the right balance of street riding and protected lane and park riding. Overall, I’d love to encourage more people to ride with their kids. It’s easy and safe, especially in a big group.
I’d want to talk with someone who could help organize. Who knows? Even though there’s nothing on the Bike Month event list yet, maybe someone already has an idea like this in the works. See the about page for my email address or leave a comment below.
Boneshaker Mag, Issue 4
I’m very excited for the arrival of the fourth issue of Boneshaker Magazine, straight from the UK. It’s at the printers right now and the team behind the magazine is gearing up for a release party in their hometown later this month.
I was very honored to be asked to write the introduction to the new issue and contributed an adapted post from this blog about the joy of simply riding, which is something I think we all need to remember as Mother Nature gives us these on-again-off-again tastes of spring. (Here’s a squint-and-you-can-barely-see-it preview of the issue with my into in there.) The past issues of Boneshaker were filled with beautiful artwork and well crafted stories on riding and the small corners of bike culture that I can’t wait to read the next one. Boneshaker is great reminder of how much fun it is to ride a bike, and the latest issue can’t land in my mailbox soon enough.
I hope you’ll support Boneshaker by ordering a copy or a subscription. You can also pick up a copy in New York at Adeline Adeline, in the Boston area at Ride Studio Cafe in Lexington (which is where I first found it) or at any of these retailers. You won’t be disappointed.
Brooklyn Spoke 
