City and state officials should never have let developers build their luxury condos and swanky hotel inside Brooklyn Bridge Park knowing that they would one day interfere with rebuilding the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway’s crumbling triple cantilever above it, according to a Brooklyn Heights pol who urged the city to consider every option possible before turning the beloved Promenade into a speedway for cars and trucks.
“The city and state together built out Brooklyn Bridge Park and so you have like the new Pier 1 development, the hotel and Pierhouse — kind of right past where the cantilever ends, also the berms — and all those things were built out over the last seven or eight years, and at the time a number of us were saying, ‘This is going to be a problem when they have to rebuild the BQE,’ ” Councilman Stephen Levin (D–Brooklyn Heights) said during an interview with WNYC on Thursday. “The city, the state, and federal government all deserve a fair amount of blame for letting deterioration happen as long as it has.”
Levin echoed his constituents’ pleas to nix the idea of building a six-lane highway on the Heights’s historic walkway during reconstruction of the 70-year-old triple cantilever as part of the city’s so-called “innovative approach,” and instead looked at laying down the asphalt on the nearly fully developed waterfront meadow’s multi-million-dollar berms.
“Using parts of Brooklyn Bridge Park, that would be a shame, but the berm area, if that’s needed to do this less impactfully to the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, it needs to be looked at,” said Levin, who took office in 2010, on the radio show. “I’d like to explore any and every option that might be available.”