If all plans are finalized by the borough president, one of Brooklyn’s major thoroughfares will become unrecognizable in the coming years as it evolves from an accident-prone access road to a pedestrian-friendly commercial district.
A vision plan announced this summer calls for safety, beautification and commercial efforts to make Fourth Avenue more inviting. Long denigrated as the borough’s eye-sore and one of its most dangerous and congested traffic zones, the plan is intended to make the area comparable to Park Slope’s thriving Fifth and Seventh Avenues.
Josh Levy, chair of Park Slope Civic Council’s FORTH onFourth subcommittee, said the projects are also intended to correct problems arising from a 2003 rezoning law that resulted in residential buildings without ground-floor retail space.
“In 2003, there was a rezoning of a large swath of Fourth Avenue,” Levy said. “It allowed for large developments to occur. Starting in 2004, 2005, a lot of buildings went up … with disregard, reckless abandonment for the streets. Instead of getting retail at street level, interesting boutiques, cafes, stores, even professional offices — anything really — all we got were parking lots, empty walls, not anything that would grow the thoroughfare, encourage patronage.”
Carlo Scissura, the project task force chair for the borough president’s office, said the Fourth Avenue facelift will revive the district’s unique flare and unify the borough’s differing communities.
“It’s really such an important thoroughfare in Brooklyn,” Scissura said. “It brings [together] a group of diverse neighborhoods from downtown Brooklyn — from Park Slope, Sunset Park, Bushwick and Bay Ridge.”
Elected officials, community groups and task force committees are currently brainstorming potential courses of action. The ideas will be pooled together and passed on to Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who will compose a more concrete development strategy by this summer then seek funding for the project from city agencies.
According to Levy, the development efforts will consist of planting trees, creating street-level retail space, addressing community-wide traffic and safety concerns and enhancing subway lines.
“It’s going to be a long-term project — eight to 12 years,” Levy said. “It’s not a quick fix to transform a boulevard.”
The first step is to plant a few thousand trees and planters up and down the street, especially from 39th to 15th Streets, Joan Botti, chair of Community Board Seven’s Fourth Avenue Task Force, said.
One Fourth Avenue beautification project, the reconstruction of the Ninth Street subway station, is already underway.
For the first time in 40 years, Levy said the subway’s east station house is being opened for retail space.
“It will become the nicest and most renovated subway station outside of Manhattan, with the exception of [the station on] Atlantic Avenue,” Levy said.
Botti said the Fourth Avenue venture was born out of an older Ninth Street station rehabilitation effort. Markowitz allocated $2 million to refurbish the shopping area in the subway station, prompting Park Slope’s Civic Council to conceive the idea of the beautification of Fourth Avenue.
Other measures include installing elevators and security cameras in the R subway stops lining the avenue as well as improving the train schedule, Botti said.
“One of the items that has been coming up constantly is the lack of service or the tardiness, I should put it that way, of the N and the R train,” she said. “That’s one of the goals of the transportation committee, this committee and the task force itself to [decrease] the time between the R train and the N. What do they say, ‘rarely for the R and never for the N’?”
While plant life will make the street more environmentally friendly and aesthetically pleasing, the remodeled subway station with elevators will increase access for the elderly and handicapped and commercial businesses will promote economic growth, safety measures are developers’ primary concern. Proposals include increasing street signage, expanding medians between cross lights and alternating traffic patterns. Countdown timers were recently installed and traffic lanes reduced on Fourth Avenue.
Lifelong resident Duane Jackson attributed the increased development efforts to the other major construction initiative near Fourth Avenue — the Atlantic Yards project.
“The [Barclays Center] stadium has a lot to do with what’s happening,” Jackson said. “[The city] wants to make sure the area’s nicer to promote the stadium. That’s why I don’t understand the complaints, aside from being displaced. … I’m all for beautification.”
As Brooklyn neighborhoods become increasingly gentrified, concerns over displacement surround new development projects.
Local organizers said they would ensure that the area doesn’t turn into a sea of luxury high-rises that drive out lower income and rental tenants from the neighborhood.
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