Oh Columbia

Oh Columbia

So the bad news I found out this weekend was on the front page of the mostly reliable Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill Courier.

Seems the massive amount of work Keyspan has been doing all summer in the neighborhood -- basically tearing up nearly every sidewalk and street along Columbia Street from Atlantic to Hamilton -- is only "prep work" for a two-year project that will leave major portions of the neighborhood dug up and intermittently without water.

What Columbia will be getting, it's in need of: new lighting, new traffic signals, roadwork, water main and sewer work, and new street trees. However, two years is a very long time. This is already a transportation challenged neighborhood, and to make it worse, the B61 bus (which I usually take to the Borough Hall subways) will be rerouted, I suspect to the other side of the BQE.

What the article doesn't mention is what happened here in the 1970s. Granted, well before my time, but as I understand it, the city dug up all of Columbia Street to fix the water lines. Then the city went bankrupt. And the long pit remained open all along Columbia Street. Eventually a few buildings caved in and a handful of people died. All this happened shortly after the BQE was built, one block away, parallel to Columbia. And apparently there was talk at the same time of the city using eminent domain to seize more property between the BQE and the waterfront. So all three of these situations combined to basically leave this little neighborhood isolated and pretty much abandoned. Businesses closed, people moved out and no one bothered to repair buildings thinking they'd be seized anyhow.

So what makes it rather unsettling now is that the neighborhood has really only been coming back in the last few years, with new shops and destination-restaurants opening up along Columbia and Union. But if they shut down the whole of Columbia for long stretches, take away our bus, and disrupt the businesses, you figure that's just going to wind the neighborhood backward until the works done, no?

Anxious to see if one of the papers can sort this out before the project begins Oct. 24. The website for Community Board 6 is supposed to have more info, but I haven't been able to find it yet.

And just to clarify here, I'm not sure of all the dates and specifics on the BQE and bankruptcy stuff. It's just the way it's been told to me around the neighborhood. If someone knows more about it, please point me in the right direction. Thanks.
- posted by Amy @ 10/03/2005 11:09:00 AM