Back to the drawing board, please: The Brooklyn Heights Association (BHA) on Monday met with top Department of Transportation honchos and pushed them to consider alternatives to the city’s plan to replace the Promenade with a six-lane highway during the $3.4 billion reconstruction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE). They also challenged DOT to drop several restrictions that limited engineers’ ability to spare the venerable esplanade, known as the jewel of Brooklyn Heights. DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg along with other DOT officials, project engineers and elected officials met with BHA leaders for two hours. BHA presented its alternative plan conceived by Marc Wouters Studios, a Heights-based architect-urban planning firm. The Wouters design would move traffic to a temporary two-level structure west of the existing triple cantilever, as opposed to DOT’s six-lane highway on the Promenade.

BHA said in a statement that the alternative design would impact Brooklyn Bridge Park’s noise-attenuating berms — steep, grass-covered hills — to some extent but would not affect the park’s usable space. It would also involve noise protection features so that the area now occupied by the berms could become useable parkland post-construction. BHA Executive Director Peter Bray told the Brooklyn Eagle on Wednesday that Trottenberg “was receptive to having her engineers analyze Marc’s concept and for a later meeting with them to enable us to go into the technical aspects of the alternative proposal — what we call the Parallel Highway vs. DOT’s Promenade Highway. We anticipate that that meeting will occur once DOT has done a preliminary analysis.” Read entire article here:

Brooklyn Heights Association presents alternative BQE plan, challenges DOT to think outside the box