By Samuel Newhouse
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

REMSEN STREET – “Welcome, folks, you’re in Brooklyn, how sweet it is!…and it’s ugly,� said one Brooklyn woman, describing the experience of coming off the Brooklyn Bridge and through the Tillary Street and Adams Street intersection.

“Tillary and Adams creates a wall as people come into Brooklyn,� said a local man. “It’s very uninviting.�

These were some of the comments and concerns about Tillary Street in Downtown Brooklyn that were brought up during a meeting with Department of Transportation (DOT) officials on Tuesday, Jan. 27, at St. Francis College.

The DOT has scheduled construction of the roadway to take place in 2012, with a budget for the project of about $12 million. The open meeting Tuesday evening gave residents an opportunity to sound off on the biggest problems in the area — and make suggestions about what types of changes they would most like to see.

“This is a once-in-a-century opportunity to re-create this area,� said Randy Wade, a DOT project director, before asking the 50 or so attendees to break up into seven small discussion groups.

The Eagle sat in on a lively discussion with one group that focused on the Tillary-Adams intersection.

This intersection alone, which accommodates south-bound traffic on Adams Street coming off the Brooklyn Bridge and north-bound traffic heading into Manhattan, presented several problems for members of the group.

The crossing can be forbidding, with three sections for pedestrians to cross, including two side service roads and the central bridge lanes. Members of the group discussed shrinking the service roads and widening the medians as a way of allowing more room for pedestrians to cross safely.

A wider central median on Adams Street could have additional landscaping and possibly even have park benches for locals to sit on, some people said. One woman who is a cyclist passionately argued for larger and safer bicycle lanes.

At the end of the meeting, members from each of the discussion groups summarized their findings. One man stated that the Tillary and Flatbush intersection is especially dangerous with its long crosswalks, and could be re-designed as a more appealing border between Downtown Brooklyn and Fort Greene.

Other suggestions found interesting by those in attendance included one woman’s plea that all special-permit parking along Tillary be prohibited.

It was also suggested that “barn-stands� be put in place at every intersection along Tillary, which would allow simultaneous crossing on all four sides and diagonal crossing from corner to corner — similar to what is permitted at Court and Montague streets in Downtown Brooklyn.

Among those who participated were several people from the Concord Village co-op complex at Adams and Tillary who are very interested in improvements for the intersection, and a professor from NYU-Polytech who brought students from one of his urban planning classes.

DOT organizers said that although the construction project is a few years away, collecting community input is essential for the project.

Another meeting will be held later in the year to discuss more concrete plans, they said.

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