By Harold Egeln
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

BAY RIDGE -- For residents of Bay Ridge’s 19 private enclaves of cul-du-sac streets, Community Board 10 will hold a crash course at a Private Streets Information Forum Wednesday evening at 7 p.m. at the Shore Hill Community Room, on 91st Street between Colonial and Shore roads.

“It is an important forum with essential information that can benefit private street homeowners,� said Board 10 District Manager Josephine Beckmann at a recent board meeting.

Representatives from the Brooklyn Borough President's Topographical Unit, Department of City Planning, NYC Department of Transportation and NYC Department of Environmental Protection will attend to inform and assist residents of the nearly two dozen enclaves.

Bay Ridge's 19 private or “unmapped streets� that have short dead-end streets or off-street sidewalk courtyards are Baycrest Terrace, Barwell Terrace, Bennett Court, Colonial Court, Colonial Gardens, Forest Place, Hamilton Walk, Harbor Court, Harbor Lane. Also, Jackson Court, Lafayette Walk, Madeleine Court, Ridge Court, 78th Street Court, Shore Court, Stewart Avenue, Tabor Court, Westerly Lane, and Wogan Terrace.

Colonial Gardens Uproar Sparks Call for Forum

The need for the forum emerged from an emergency at one of the private enclaves when a water pipe broke at Colonial Gardens, a courtyard with private houses on each side of the yard, in mid-January, said Beckmann. The enclave is off Narrows Avenue between Shore Road and 89th Street.

After contacting the city for help, the one dozen residents learned that they were responsible for paying the cost of fixing the pipe, and not the city that supplies the water for which they pay property taxes.

The freezing residents, without hot water or heat for three days after the Dr. Martin Luther King Day holiday snowstorm, had to pay $10,000 to a private plumber to make the repairs. The only help they received from the city is when the DEP ran a water hose from a fire hydrant.

Residents, upset over what they called “taxation without representation,� appealed to Board 10 and met with its environmental committee and its chair, Greg Ahl. “City policy states that they are responsible for all infrastructure repairs,� said Beckmann, although the private street and enclave residents pay city property taxes.

Colonial Gardens is one of the more notable such enclaves in Bay Ridge, having won a borough-wide best gardens award in the 1990s.

Residents of private enclaves such as Bennett and Ridge courts have property lines that extend to the middle of their short streets, which is a bar to public parking, a frustration for neighbors seeking parking space in car-clogged Bay Ridge. Also, alternative side-of-the-street parking times are not in effect nor do sanitation sweepers plow along their little road. Residents must dispose of their own trash and remove snow.

Bay Ridge's small off-street enclaves date back over a century to when Manhattan residents bought vacation and suburban homes in then-rural Bay Ridge when it was dotted with hotels, farms, mansions and small business areas serviced by trolleys such as along Bay Ridge Avenue (69th Street) and Fifth Avenue.

For more information about Wednesday’s forum, call the Board 10 office at (718) 745-6827.

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