By Harold Egeln
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

BAY RIDGE – The old children’s song, “to market, to market we go,� is still awaiting a destination in Bay Ridge, where a proposed farmer’s market in a church parking lot was ruled out.

Councilman Vincent Gentile and the Greenmarket of the Council on the Environment of NYC teamed up earlier this year, announcing their proposal for a green market with farm-fresh produce and baked goods at a meeting at Our Lady of Angels R.C. Church. The proposal received a mixed reaction, with people favoring the idea, but a large minority not liking the location.

It was the location, the church parking lot by Third Avenue between 73rd and 74th streets, which put the concept on hold for Bay Ridge. As Father James Devlin, the church pastor, recently told the community. “It’s not going to happen. There are too many problems.� These include weddings and funerals that require the use of the large parking.

The proposed market would have operated from early July through mid-November late Saturday mornings into the afternoons.

Father Devlin agreed that the market is a great idea. And so do Gentile and supporters such as District Manager Josephine Beckmann of Community Board 10 (Bay Ridge-Dyker Heights), who expressed her hope that a suitable site could be found in time for next year.

The farmer’s market, said Greenmarket Director Michael Hurwitz, would be welcomed in Bay Ridge once an agreeable site is found. An alternative site in Bay Ridge is still the goal as supporters look to next year.

“We will have to look at another site. If not in Bay Ridge, maybe in Dyker Heights or Bensonhurst,� Gentile said recently. It was his persistent calls to the Greenmarket office last year for a farmer’s market in Bay Ridge that prompted Hurwitz, then just starting his job at the office, to work with the Gentile.

‘Supermarket Crisis’ Spurs Farmers’ Markets

The present “supermarket crisis� in Bay Ridge, as state Senator Marty Golden calls it, with the closing this week of the Key Food on Third Avenue at 95th Street is spurring the idea of more food choices for Bay Ridge residents. They have plenty of local groceries but have lost three major supermarkets in the last two decades.

A community uprising over the Key Food closing, however, sparked the planned opening of a new Key Food on Bay Ridge Avenue (69th Street) off Third Avenue for this fall, and a proposed Walgreens supermarket-pharmacy rather than a Walgreens retail drugstore at the 95th Street Key Food site. Golden is setting up a supermarket task force to reverse the supermarket decline.

Since 1976 when Greenmarket was founded, starting at Union Square, dozens have opened throughout the city. Brooklyn has nine, in Sunset Park, Fort Greene Park, Carroll Gardens, Grand Army Plaza, McCarren Park, Borough Park, Borough Hall and Flatbush.

In 1997 and 1998 Bay Ridge had a greenmarket in Leif Ericson Park on Fourth Avenue at 67th Street. But lack of pedestrian traffic due to its park location and the dearth of parking spaces doomed it. The closest greenmarket from Saturday from mid-July to mid-November is the Sunset Park Greenmarket on Fourth Avenue between 59th and 60th streets by P.S. 314.

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