SUNSET PARK — If the MTA’s “worst-case scenario� cuts are put into effect, Sunset Park will never be the same.

Following a recent meeting, the MTA board announced that unless it gets an infusion of tax dollars, it would raise fares, impose new tolls and drastically cut transit services across the city. One of the proposed cuts would eliminate the B37 bus route, which runs the length of Brooklyn’s Third Avenue, from Bay Ridge to Downtown.

The B37 also runs through Sunset Park, under the solid shadow of the Gowanus Expressway, and it’s the only thing keeping that stretch of street alive.

Granted, the B37 placed 45th out of 54 Brooklyn routes in terms of ridership in 2007, according to an MTA study. But more than 1 million rides were taken on the bus that year.

Those 1 million riders would be forced to find alternatives — either the R train, which runs down Fourth Avenue, or the B63 bus, which runs down Fifth Avenue. But the B63 is already an often-overcrowded line; if its ridership surged, it could become nearly impossible to get a foot onto it. Also, particularly in Bay Ridge, the B37 serves a significant number of seniors who can’t easily climb the subway station staircases or walk uphill an extra quarter-mile to Fifth Avenue.

Straphangers will likely protest every service cut the MTA has proposed, but some of the cuts are reasonable. Times are tough — right or wrong, the agency is reporting a budget deficit of well over $1 billion next year — and every neighborhood will have to accept some sacrifices.

For instance, the agency said it might shorten the M train’s route, ending its trip in lower Manhattan instead of at its current terminus, a few stops from Coney Island. The M train has always seemed to be a luxury for west Brooklyn riders. It’s redundant, making stops along the R line before making the same stops as the D. A seat is always available. And it congests tunnels, idling at 36th Street and slowing down the R.

Eliminating the B37, though, would do more than inconvenience riders and Bay Ridge’s senior citizens. It would destroy what’s left of a neighborhood.

In Sunset Park, from 64th to 18th Streets, Third Avenue was once a commercial hub of the neighborhood, according to Robert Caro’s definitive biography of Robert Moses, New York City’s notorious urban planner. More than half a dozen movie theaters and dozens of restaurants and mom-and-pop stores lined its streets, operating in the slatted light streaming through the elevated tracks above — much like, one imagines, Brighton Beach Avenue today.

But Moses built a light-blocking elevated highway atop the old el tracks in 1941, despite pleas from residents to build it a block away on industrial Second Avenue. Moses refused, calling Sunset Park a “slum.� 100 stores were closed and 1,300 families were evicted from their homes. The avenue was widened to become a ten-lane truck route. “Once the avenue had been a place for people,� Caro wrote. “Robert Moses had made it a place for cars.�

The only thing keeping it on life support is the B37. Warehouses and wholesale retailers — places to which people drive — occupy much of the real estate on Third Avenue today. If local residents no longer have to walk there to catch the bus, it won’t be long before the last bodegas close and the desolate streets are overrun with drug deals and prostitution.

Moses did enough damage to the neighborhood when he built the highway; if, decades later, the MTA discontinued the bus route, it would turn the avenue into the “slum� Moses once accused it to be.

Henry Stewart is a journalism student at CUNY

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2008 All materials posted on BrooklynEagle.com are protected by United States copyright law. Just a reminder, though -- It’s not considered polite to paste the entire story on your blog. Most blogs post a summary or the first paragraph,( 40 words) then post a link to the rest of the story. That helps increase click-throughs for everyone, and minimizes copyright issues. So please keep posting, but not the entire article. arturc at att.net