By Raanan Geberer
“Fix the Ditch” has been the cry of neighborhood residents in Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and the Columbia Waterfront District for years.
The “ditch” they are referring to, also known as the “trench,” is the below-ground but uncovered portion of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that runs through the area.
Now the city’s Economic Development Corporation has released a request for qualifications for a study of the highway section in question. This study is being funded by a $300,000 grant secured by Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez with the support of Community Board 6 and local groups.
The official document from the EDC mentions that it will act as lead agency “to look for ways to ‘fix the ditch,’ namely, ways to mitigate its noise and pollution, and reconnect communities on both sides. Solutions may include beautification projects such as green planted buffers, overhanging walkways and/or pedestrian crossing bridges.”
“We’re working with the Department of Transportation to find a cost-effective means of beautifying both the streets that are adjacent to and those that cross the section of the BQE between Hamilton and Atlantic avenues while also mitigating BQE noise and pollution and helping to reconnect communities on both sides,” said Janel Patterson, spokeswoman for the city Economic Development Corp.
The BQE ditch, built in the late 1940s and early ’50s, “is an open wound inflicted on our communities by Robert Moses,” says Craig Hammerman, district manager of Community Board 6. “We’re looking to heal that wound.”
Problems associated with the ditch, according to community residents, include noise impact, visual blight, air pollution, and too few ways to get across the trench from one part of the neighborhood to another.
Jeff Strabone, president of the Cobble Hill Association, says the BQE ditch serves to divide the eastern and western areas of the neighborhood “because of difficulty of passage — there are few overpasses or through streets. We would like to build bridges to reconnect that part of the neighborhood. But we absolutely don’t want to see housing built on a deck over the trench [an option that was talked about some years ago].”
This study-to-be is only the latest in a series of proposals for the much-maligned underground highway stretch.
“There’s a whole range of ideas that people have put out there over the years,” said Hammerman. “They range from doing some minimal treatments along the ditch, either providing more pedestrian access across it, putting some devices there to baffle sound, some decorative plantings along the edge, to potentially building out roadway connections above it, or at the most extreme, decking over the trench to make it a tunnel.”
In 1987, Hammerman added, the city issued a draft environmental impact statement on the subject of decking over the BQE, but found that the idea would not pass environmental reviews because of pollution concerns.
“In the last 22 years,” he added, “car emissions have become much cleaner, scrubbing technologies have become more sophisticated.”
Maria Pagano, president of the Carroll Gardens Neighborhood Association, said that about six or seven years ago she worked with a “core group of people from Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill” on the issue.
“The hope was,” she said, “that we would develop this for passive recreational use, to cover the ditch, or at least a good part of it, and find a way to reconnect east and west.
“We talked in terms of uses like soccer field, and we wanted three additional foot connections. There was actually an artist and architect brought in on this, and there was a rendering made.”
However, she added, there were financial problems, and then, “out of the blue,” others not connected with her group proposed the aforementioned idea of building a large residential complex above the ditch. Then, she continued, “everything disintegrated” and both ideas got shelved.
For the current initiative, said Hammerman, “We would expect planning consultants with an expertise in transportation” to reply to the request for qualifications.
Cantilever Overhaul?
In a related matter, the 1.5-mile section of the BQE to the north of the ditch, which includes the cantilevered section in Brooklyn Heights, will be the subject of an informational meeting on Monday, June 22, at Polytechnic Institute of NYU’s Dibner Building between 3 and 6 p.m., and again between 7 and 10 p.m.
An environmental review for rehabilitation of this portion is being supervised by the state Department of Transportation in cooperation with the Federal Highway Administration.
This segment, according to a DOT document, “is characterized by narrow lanes, lack of shoulders, short merge/weave distances near on-off ramps that do not meet current highway design standards, and vertical clearance constraints.”
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