In late September 2018, the North Brooklyn community first heard about the City's plan to turn the Brooklyn Heights Promenade into a six-lane highway during the reconstruction of the BQE. We reprint here a letter recently circulated by Otis Pearsall, one of the key citizens in the original battle to build the Promenade where it is. We also include a link to the 1965 Landmarks document designating Brooklyn Heights an Historic District. We do so because Brooklyn Heights is our near neighbor, and what affects them, affects us.
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
My name is Otis Pearsall, and I was the primary leader of the Brooklyn Heights community’s seven year struggle culminating in 1965 to achieve both the Landmarks Law and designation of the Heights as the City’s first Historic District. Much later, I was for 14 years a member of the City’s Public Design Commission, as designee of the Brooklyn Museum.
Together with our Boundary Chair, Richard H. Lange, I was responsible for delineating the boundary of the Historic District, later approved by the Landmarks Commission, to include the Promenade (although not the underlying highway) because, commanding in combination the finest natural and manmade panorama to be found anywhere, it was deemed by all an integral part of the Heights. Please see the attachment and its map.
Brooklyn Heights, with its dense collection of well preserved buildings exemplifying each of America’s principal 19th Century architectural styles, is quite simply the City’s finest microcosm of early New York. But construction of the DOT’s proposed 6-lane highway in place of the Promenade immediately adjacent to this treasure trove would absolutely decimate the Historic District, destabilizing if not destroying its fragile 150 year old buildings, scattering many residents who have built lives and investments here, loosing on our families incessant noise, pollution and other environmental hazards, collapsing real estate values, and eviscerating its quality of life and social fabric. Such community-crippling impacts would be deadly serious, hardly akin to ripping off a band-aid as our Mayor would insensitively trivialize them.
Taken together with its unique Promenade, the Heights is a world-acclaimed cultural gem of ranking international importance. Destruction of the Promenade with its concomitant desecration of the Historic District would be more than comparable on the world stage with the worst of the recent monument depredations by Isis. Think Egypt tearing down the Pyramids and smashing its Sphinx. Really!
This the City of New York cannot be permitted to do. There are alternatives, and Mayor DeBlasio with all the resources and creativity he has available must find them. Failure is not an option.
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Here is the link to the 1965 NYC Landmarks document designating Brooklyn Heights as a Historic District.