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Since 1978 • (718) 260–2500 • Brooklyn, NY • ©2019 12 pages • Vol.Serving Brownstone Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Williamsburg & Greenpoint 42, No. 29 • July 19–25, 2019
ALL BREAKS LOOSE
MTA announces new slate of service cuts for northern Brooklyn
Straphangers will have to brace for several weeknights and weekends
of closures of the L train between Lorimer Street and Broadway Junction
Magazine-branded food hall shutters for health violations
Williamsburg cyclists are going postal
Locals blast city for failing to remove postal trucks from Borinquen bike lane
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By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
What the L?!
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority
announced it will shut down L
train service in most of northern Brooklyn
for nine weekends and several weeknights,
starting Tuesday.
The transit agency will close down
the 10 stops between
Lorimer
Street and Broadway
Junction stations
for construction
workers to
make accessibility
and power upgrades,
according
to its trendy-looking
weekly newsletter on the L train
project.
There won’t be any trains at those stations
from midnight to 5 a.m. on weeknights
from July 16 through Aug. 2, as
well as two weeks in September and
October.
The tube will not run at the stops on
weekends at all from July 19 though Aug.
4, for two weekends in September and
October, and for all weekends in January
2020, according to the agency.
Workers need the area to be train-free
while they finish hooking up two new
substations, which will allow for more
tubes, according to the newsletter.
“We’re also putting the finishing
touches on the two new substations in
Brooklyn — connecting them to power
means we’ll be ready to run more L
trains once the project is finished,” the
release reads. “We aren’t able to have
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L
active trains running while this connection
is made.”
Trains will continue to run every 20
minutes from 10 p.m. until midnight
ahead of the closures from Manhattan
to Lorimer Street and from Broadway
Junction to Canarsie Rockaway-
Parkway.
The agency will run free shuttle
buses at the closed stops every three
minutes, but advises straphangers that
the fastest alternatives will be the G,
M, J, and 7 trains, as well as the Williamsburg
Link B91A.
For more information, visit new.
mta.info/l-project .
stations, starting July 16.
File photo by Paul Martinka
Here are all the scheduled
closures:
WEEKNIGHTS
• Tuesday, July 16 to Friday,
July 19
• Monday, July 22 to Friday,
July 26
• Monday, July 29 to Friday,
Aug. 2
• Monday, Sept. 23 to
Friday, Sept. 27
• Monday, Sept. 30 to
Friday, Oct. 4
WEEKENDS
• Friday, July 19 to Sunday,
July 21
• Friday, July 26 to Sunday,
July 28
• Friday, Aug. 2 to Sunday,
Aug. 4
• Friday, Sept. 27 to Sunday,
Sept. 29
• Friday, Oct. 4 to Sunday,
Oct. 6
• Friday, Jan. 3 to Sunday,
Jan. 5
• Friday, Jan. 10 to Sunday,
Jan. 12
• Friday, Jan. 17 to Sunday,
Jan. 19
• Friday, Jan. 24 to Sunday,
Jan. 26
RIVER OF TEARS
Squad goals
Hundreds of dancers twirled in to auditions on July 13 for a chance
to become the newest members of the Brooklynettes — the official
dance squad of Kings County’s hometown NBA team. Judges at the
open tryouts — held at St. Joseph’s College in Fort Greene — evaluated
approximately 350 would-be dancers for 20 roster spots.
Photo by Trey Pentecost
Market gets a Time Out
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
This post office hasn’t gotten
the message — get out of the
bike lane!
Locals are furious at the city’s
failure to curb the illegal parking
habits of a Williamsburg post
office, where mail workers continue
to treat a nearby bike lane
as their own personal parking lot
more than a year after this paper
first reported the issue.
“I’m worried that one of the
bikers will get hurt — which is
due to happen any time,” said Herbie
Medina, a longtime Williamsburg
resident who tipped this paper
to the illegal parking nuisance
caused by the United States Postal
Service in January 2018.
Ever since the city installed
a bike lane on Borinquen Street
near the post office located on
S. Fourth Street, postal workers
there have swamped the cycling
path between Marcy Avenue and
S. Fourth Street with mail trucks,
and Medina claims his pleas to
local elected officials, including
Assemblyman Joseph Lentol and
Councilman Antonio Reynoso,
have fallen on deaf ears.
“Nobody’s doing anything
about it,” said Medina. “Nothing
has happened,”
The Postal Service — which
has a modest parking lot capable
of holding only a small portion
of its delivery fleet — has
stored their trucks along Borinquen
Street since before the bike
lanes were installed in October
2017, and a spokesman defended
the workers’ illegal parking as a
necessary expedient to permit
timely deliveries.
“We continue to explore feasible
parking strategies for this
office that allow for expedient
mail service with a minimum of
disruption,” said Xavier Hernandez,
a spokesman for the postal
service.
But one Bushwick cyclist —
who says she has to circumvent
the illegally parked mail trucks on
a daily basis — questioned the Department
of Transportation’s decision
to build the bike lane, only
to then allow the Postal Service
to overrun it.
“Why put the bike lanes in there
if the post office parks their trucks
there?” asked Tara Eisenberg. “It
causes safety issues because you
can’t use the bike lane.”
The Department of Transportation
did not return multiple requests
for comment.
Photo by Nicole Fara Silver
The intersection has not claimed
any cycling casualties, but two motorists
were injured after smashing
into each other at Marcy Avenue
and nearby S. Third Street last
May. Both drivers later claimed
they had a green light.
Mayor Bill de Blasio — in response
to a spade of collisions that
have claimed the lives of 15 city
cyclists since January, including
one biker who was struck not far
from the Marcy Avenue intersection
— recently announced that the
Police Department would step up
its enforcement of vehicles blocking
bike lanes for three weeks until
July 21.
Brooklyn’s
boulevard
battle lines
Federal postal trucks routinely block the Borinquen Place
bike lane, as Williamsburger Herbie Medina documented
with this photo he took on July 7.
Herbie Medina
The recently-opened Time Out Market shut its doors after the city’s health inspectors shut
down a communal fridge that most of its eateries share on July 10.
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
Time Out!
A Dumbo food hall named after
Time Out magazine closed its doors
on July 10, after the city’s Health
Department discovered that the
market’s fridge was too warm.
Inspectors found the market’s
massive walk-in fridge was operating
at a balmy 58 degrees — a hazardous
17 degrees over the 41-degree
threshold set by the federal
Food and Drug Administration to
prevent dangerous bacteria from
growing on meat and fish which
could induce vomiting and diarrhea,
according to the city’s Health
Department.
“The NYC Health Department
conducts food safety inspections
to protect the health of New Yorkers,
and when we inspected the
Time Out Market’s refrigerator
we found food at temperatures
that could be potentially hazardous,”
Michael Lanza said in an
emailed statement.
The market’s operator also
failed to produce a refrigeration
log recording the cooler’s daily
minimum and maximum temperatures,
suggesting operators were
ignorant to the dangers brewing
in their own fridge, according to
Lanza.
Inspectors ordered the fridge
taken offline, which by extension
necessitated the closure of 14 vendors
that shared space in the cooler,
and the entire food hall — which
hosts 21 of Time Out magazine’s
top-rated bars and eateries — subsequently
closed as a result.
The food-hall’s clement fridge
wasn’t the only source of violations
for the food-hall vendors, including
BKLYN Wild, which was
cited for a laundry list of health infractions
— including inadequate
hand-washing facilities, failure to
provide a Food Protection Certificate,
and failing to properly monitor
the temperature of foods during
cooking — which earned that
eater 102 points worth of healthcode
violations, or 74 points more
than the city require to shutdown
a business, Patch reported .
The British media company
opened the market on May 31
inside an old industrial building
between Dock and Main streets
with a scenic rooftop terrace offering
views of Brooklyn and the
distant Isle of Manhattan.
The market’s operators are currently
working with the Health Department
to reopen the magazinesponsored
food hall as quickly as
possible, according to a spokeswoman.
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