Brooklyn Promenade Protesters Call For Better Way To Fix BQE

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK -- Hundreds of angry and fearful New Yorkers packed the Brooklyn Promenade Saturday morning to protest the city's renovation plan and heckle elected officials who hadn't yet come out against it.

"I am against the damn plan as it stands," Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams told the chanting crowd. "As an environmentalist, I can’t accept the same old paradigm."

Adams was among several elected officials — including City Comptroller Scott Stringer, Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon and state Senator Brian Kavanaugh — to join the more than 300 residents who gathered at the Pierrepont Street entrance at 11 a.m. for a protest hosted by local grassroots organization, A Better Way NYC.

"While Governor Cuomo is taking an innovative approach to avoid the devastating consequences of closing L train service, Mayor de Blasio is taking a page out of the Robert Moses playbook," said the group's leader, Hilary Jager, "proposing to spend nearly $4 billion to bulldoze local neighborhoods."

"Our communities refuse to stand idly by while the City attempts to ram through a closed-door plan that will increase pollution and traffic. "

Locals complained they still don't know why Department of Transportation chose to pursue their plan, which calls for closing the Promenade for six years and building an elevated roadway in resident's backyards that would carry more than 150,000 vehicles per day.

The DOT has still not released the bulk of their data and research, recently explaining to Stringer that they receive 7,000 public information requests a year and cannot reply to all of them, he said.

"To this day, the NYC DOT and the City have remained silent on the environmental consequences that will arise from the construction of a highway on the national landmark," Stringer said.

“When the City plans a massive years-long project, their top priority should be transparency."

Residents voiced a long list of objections to plans, including the environmental concerns, the lost of a historic Brooklyn monument and the DOT's lack of community outreach or transparency.

Kids held up signs asking the city to avoid a "highway to hell," preserve their playgrounds and prioritize "lungs over lanes."

Peter Bray, executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association, said his organization has provided DOT officials with an alternative plan that would reroute the supplemental highway to the vacant land adjacent to Brooklyn Bridge Park and underneath the BQE.

Those plans, which the DOT has promised to consider but made no mention of in a recent letter to City Comptroller Scott Stringer, will be released to the public in February by BHA, he said.

"If DOT built the promenade highway, in fact where we're standing right now would be right in the middle of the eastbound lanes," Bray said. "And we would all be flattened."

"We've got to prevent that from happening."

Photos by Kathleen Culliton