Results tagged “gowanusexpressway”

Mayor Bloomberg is calling for the MTA to eliminate the fare of the most frequently used—and very slow—crosstown bus lines such as the M50 and M14. Perhaps sensing that the campaign season was beginning to get bogged down in talk of neverending term limits and a recent poll that showed challenger Bill Thompson closing the gap among voters, the Bloomberg campaign came out today with a 33-point proposal to reshape the transit system throughout the five boroughs. After largely letting the MTA stew in its own juices throughout the budget crisis, Bloomberg is reminding New Yorkers that he is still the mayor who not that long ago attempted to make congestion pricing his legacy.

The American Institute of Architects is looking to supplant the idea of replacing the Gowanus Expressway with a tunnel, and instead proposes a suspended highway and formation of a Gowanus Greenway. In 2006, the Dept. of Transportation gave a green light to a $12.8 billion proposal to build a 3.5 mile, seven lane tunnel underneath the Brooklyn Waterfront and then destroying the elevated highway. The plan for a Gowanus Tunnel appears to be in perpetual stall though, and would take approximately 15 years to finish.

Early Sunday morning, 20 cars were involved in a pile up on the Gowanus Expressway near 40th Street. While the damage to the cars was minor and no one was seriously injured, the suspicion was that a hose that had been left on by construction workers caused icy road conditions during the unseasonably cold night. Water is used to help set concrete.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a 4-alarm brush fire on Staten Island, a missing child report at 3rd Ave. and East 117th St. in Manhattan, and a stabbing on Boston Road in the Bronx.
• Finding parking in NYC requires a guide. Here it is (garage parking only). Street parkers must continue to survive on guile, cunning, and skill.
• The winning $105 million Mega Millions lottery ticket was sold at at The Magazine Store on 31st Street in Astoria, Queens. The winning numbers are 24, 32, 34, 36, and 39, with the Powerball number 6. Now go check your pockets.

Gridskipper solicited picks for the city's ugliest buildings from eleven architecture-minded New Yorkers. The list includes Astor Place’s The Sculpture for Living building (which replaced a parking lot), the Queens Citicorp Building, the Pan Am Building (now the MetLife Building), the AT&T Building on Church St., the Cross Bronx Expressway and anything by Trump – but the Trump World Tower isn't really that ugly. Someone even mentioned the Hearst Tower. Wow.

Kuma Flowers, by Will at Untitled Name

Yesterday morning, a truck drove into a column on a Gowanus Expressway overpass and burst into flames. The driver was rescued by two other drivers on the road who saw the accident - an off-duty firefighter and a computer technician. Firefighter Donald Casey and Jon Kalleberg managed to pull the driver, Franklin Montes, from the truck's rig before its fuel tanks exploded. Montes was screaming about his broken leg, but as Casey told the Daily News, "I thought to myself, if I don't get him out of here he's going to have a much bigger problem than his leg." Montes was taken to the hospital in critical condition, while Kalleberg and Casey went on their way.

The Post reports on two motorcycle deaths yesterday. Ivette Hernandez was killed after being thrown off her boyfriend Louis Perez's motorcycle on the Gowanus Expressway. According to the Post, a car had swerved towards them, and when Hernandez fell, another motorcycle in their group hit her. Perez, who was supposed to propose to her that day, was charged with DUI and "blamed the accident on a motorist trying to merge into traffic."

Remember yesterday when we thought the body-count for last weeks heat wave was at 10-13 people? Yeah, scratch that. Coroners for the City are now upping that number by ten to 20-23 deaths. The three-body spread is due to suspicious looking circumstances which the coroner is looking at extra closely before blaming on the high temperatures (a man in his 30s found under the Gowanus Expressway and a 82-year-old woman and her 47-year-old son found dead in their beds in Brooklyn). Of the ten people added to the heat-waves death toll 2 lived in Brooklyn and 8 lived in Queens, though none of them lived in the areas affected by all the blackouts. Six of the victims were women, four were men, and they ranged in age from 52 to 99 years old.

Get ready to open your mind to a new culinary experience. Prepare yourself to take a trip to a neighborhood that the subway doesn’t reach for a treat you’ve never tried. Don’t you think it’s about time you tasted a frozen, chocolate-covered mini key lime pie on a stick? I do.

Could it be true? The New York Post is reporting that the DoT has approved a plan to build a 3.5 mile, $12.8 billion, seven lane tunnel under the Brooklyn waterfront, and then demolish the existing Gowanus Expressway. If funded, the project could be complete in about 15 years. Since Robert Moses approved construction of the expressway over a disused elevated rail in 1939, the highway has been a huge headache for the city. It's perpetually under-construction, traffic clogged, and worst of all, it cuts off all of Red Hook and the Sunset Park Waterfront from the rest of Brooklyn. Just as the Cross Bronx Expressway cut off the South Bronx from the rest of the city and caused it to spiral into decline, Moses' Gowanus project resulted in a crime-ridden, rubble strewn Brooklyn waterfront, where there could have been a vibrant neighborhood filled with puppies and parks and families. That bastard!

Starts and Fits has a great comparison of two photographs of the corner of E89th and Lexington-- the first was taken in 1913, the second in 1991. As you can see, the sidewalk decreased in width by about 75%, and the stoops and first-floor entrances of each building were eliminated entirely. The block used to have a wonderful, airey feel-- but with the widening of the street, it's now one of the more congested, dirty corners in the Upper East Side. Sure-- we can speed down Lexington Avenue at 45mph, but now it's hard to walk in anything other than single file down the streets. S&F writes:

Gothamist loves the NY Times article about the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge being too fat, because for a moment, we thought, "Hey, that's not nice, calling a bridge fat!" But then it was actually an interesting (and a little scary) look at how the suspension bridge is being re-engineered, with new technology and materials, to make sure it can support the traffic in the future. For instance, Robert Moses had engineers add concrete to the bridge; to stop the swaying (even though it was still safe), and in order for drivers to perceive it was stable, cables were added, which some people have felt ruined the skyline.

Kevin Walsh, Forgotten NY

That Marty Markowitz - he's always coming up with some new and crazy idea. Like signs at Brooklyn's exit points that say, "Leaving Brooklyn...Fuhgeddaboutit." The NY Post reveals the wacky Brooklyn borough president's thinking - "Once you enter Brooklyn, there's no good reason why you should ever leave" - and goes on to point out that many Brooklynites (and sports teams) do leave in fact, and it's possible that one in four Americans has roots in Brooklyn.