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Since 1978 • (718) 260–2500 • Brooklyn, NY • ©2019 14 pages • Vol.Serving Brownstone Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Williamsburg & Greenpoint 42, No. 37 • September 13–19, 2019
BUNCH OF BULL
MTA’s scheme of eliminating buses for B54 fails
Photo by Aidan Graham
Crown Heights community members gathered at the courthouse on Sept. 9 to show their support for
the ant-development lawsuit.
Botanic battle a go
Judge OKs lawsuit against development near BBG
Photo by Kevin Duggan
New weapon in war on rats – booze!
Boro president pushes for new trap program that intoxicates, drowns them
Your weekend, shot to L
MTA slashes L train service for Manhattan escalator repairs
UP TO 80% OFF*
rugs & carpet, furniture,
lighting, bed & bath, & more.
O U T L E T
3906 2nd Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11232
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
A scheme hatched by transit officials
to improve service along the B54 bus
route by removing buses has not resulted
in any tangible benefits, according to
straphangers, who say they’re still enduring
long waits and that buses continue
to stumble into the route’s Jay Street
terminus all bunched together.
“At Jay Street-MetroTech, there will
be like three B54 buses and all the bus
drivers... will take a break,” said one
attendee of a Sept. 4 town hall hosted
by Assemblyman Walter Mosley (D–
Clinton Hill) regarding cuts to the B54
and B38 bus routes. “Someone said they
waited 40 minutes the other day!”
Transit officials eliminated buses that
formerly serviced the B54’s Myrtle Avenue
route earlier this week, saying that,
while riders may experience slightly longer
waits, they could expect more reliable
service, as buses would be more
likely to arrive at stops on time and that
issues such as bunching — a phenomenon
where long delays are followed by
several buses arriving one after the other
— would be less likely to occur.
Of course, the real reason for the
cuts to the B54 and 22 other bus routes
throughout the city was to shave $7 million
off the Metropolitan Transportation
Authority’s operating budget, and
when locals complained that the silver
lining officials had promised didn’t materialize,
a rep for the Authority simply
blamed Kings County traffic.
“The fact is that our buses run on
busy city streets — our buses are subject
to traffic that everybody else is subject
to,” said Andrew Inglesby, Assistant
Director of Government and Community
Relations at MTA.
Commuters were invited to fill out
question cards ahead of the meeting, and
one disgruntled straphanger claimed that
the MTA provides so-called “on-site dispatchers”
to manage bus traffic along
the Queens side of the route, but that the
B54’s bustling Downtown side doesn’t
benefit from the extra help, and locals
weren’t thrilled by the revelation.
“Why would you have to call someone
to Jay Street if there’s an issue — there’s
always an issue at Jay Street,” said Clinton
Hill resident Cheryl Edmead.
Another Transit Authority rep admitted
to the snafu, and blamed the uneven
distribution of dispatchers on ongoing
union negotiations.
“That has to do with unions, to have
dispatchers at both ends” said Patrick
Pitts. “That has to do with a union issue
and also availability.”
A spokesman for the union representing
the agency’s dispatchers, the Subway
Surface Supervisors Association,
did not return a request for comment
by press time.
Inglesby said the agency would consider
providing additional staff to the
Downtown area to get the buses rolling
faster.
“We will can see what we can do to at
least have more crews there,” he said.
He added that any issues with the
B54 or any other Kings County route
will be addressed by the agency’s upcoming
year-long overhaul of the borough’s
bus system, which is slated to
kick off this fall.
And all borough bus routes are set
to benefit from a new command center
opening soon near the agency’s East
New York bus depot, according to one
Authority honcho.
“We are in the process of finalizing
plans to open our new command center
located in East New York, which will
bring to us all kinds of tools that we can
have at our disposal to help manage service
and help reduce bunching,” said
Mark Holmes, chief officer of the MTA’s
Department of Buses. “Our road operations
team right now has some of these
tools at their disposal and we are doing
our best to manage bunching.”
By Aidan Graham
Brooklyn Paper
A judge quashed an effort by real
estate bigwigs to dismiss a lawsuit that
would block two controversial Crown
Heights developments from rising up
near the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
on Sept. 9 — setting the stage for a
prolonged courtroom showdown that
could determine the fate of the borough’s
world-class horticultural museum,
according to local activists.
“Justice was done today,” said Alicia
Boyd, the lead activist behind antigentrification
group Movement to Protect
the People. “It was done because
we, the people, will no longer allow
the destruction of our community, or
the destruction of our green spaces for
the greed of developers.”
Boyd and her fellow activists — who
are acting as their own lawyers — sued
developer Cornell Realty Management
and the city in April for allegedly failing
to conduct a proper environmental
review ahead of a City Council vote that
gave developers permission to exceed
zoning height regulations in building
two 16-story towers at 931 Carroll St.
and 40 Crown St., both of which are
located a block away from the botanical
garden.
Attorney’s for the developer asked
Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Reg-
Dozens of transit riders slammed the cuts to the B54 and B38 routes
at a town hall hosted by Assemblyman Walter Mosley.
See GARDEN on page 11
By Rose Adams
Brooklyn Paper
You won’t smell a rat!
Borough President Eric Adams
showed off dozens of dead
rats to media assembled outside
Borough Hall on Thursday as a
demonstration of new rat trapping
technology, which can store rodent
carcasses for months — without
causing a stink!
“It drops them into the bottom
and they’re contained in
there, there’s no scent, there’s no
smell, there’s no decaying, there’s
no spread of bacteria,” said exterminator
Anthony Giaquinto, who
joined Adams for the macabre publicity
stunt on Sept. 5.
The metal contraption, created
by the pest control company Rat
Trap, lures rodents with sunflower
seeds and nuts, before dropping
them into the box’s alcoholic
solution, which intoxicates the
rats, eventually knocking them
out and drowning them, according
to Giaquinto, who works for
Rat Trap.
“It’s quick!” exclaimed Giaquinto.
Adams claims that the boozedup
rats drown after about three
minutes, and demonstrated that
the trap could hold more than a
dozen dead rodents at a time.
Beyond giving the rats a tipsy
farewell, the trap’s alcoholic solution
prevents their carcasses from
smelling, making the trap preferable
for inclosed spaces, and attracting
more beady-eyed pests,
since rats don’t approach areas
where they smell other dead rodents,
Adams explained.
“Rats don’t go to a place where
they smell dead rats. So when you
use the rat candy that the city uses,
once a rat dies, other rats won’t
go there,” Adams said.
The borough president’s announcement
comes after a surge
of rat sightings in Brooklyn. According
to a recent report , anywhere
between 250,000 to millions
of rats live in the city, and
Brooklyn houses more rodents
than any other borough. In 2018,
Brooklynites logged more than
6,500 rat complaints to the city’s
311 complaint hotline, dwarfing
runner-up Manhattan’s 4,300 complaints.
Sanitations officials have repeatedly
tried to mitigate the infestation
crisis, shelling out $5.3
million dollars for mint-scented
garbage bags that supposedly deterred
the vermin, and releasing
a $32 million war on rats in 2017
— both of which failed to shrink
the number of pests.
At the press conference, Adams
assailed the city’s failed extermination
efforts in claiming officials
should adopt his new rat
killing tech.
“Something is wrong when we
continue to throw money away
on something that isn’t successful,”
Adams said, adding that the
new devices only cost between
$300 and $400 a piece, including
maintenance.
And, while Adams noted that
the city has no plans to continue
installing Rat Traps, he hopes to
use discretionary funds to expand
the program around Borough Hall,
speak to the health officials and
city council members about implementing
the devices, and launch
two more pilot programs at a public
housing development and in
Bedford-Stuyvesant.
“Our goal here at Borough Hall
is to really look at the problem
and come up with solutions, and
we believe we found just that,”
he said.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams (right) demonstated
Rat Trap’s new rodent-killing contraption on Thursday.
Photo by Colin Mixson
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
The Metropolitan Transportation
Authority will ax L train service
in most of Brooklyn and all
of Manhattan this weekend from
Sept. 13–16.
Transit honchos are suspending
service between Broadway Junction
in East New York and Eighth
Avenue in Manhattan starting at
10:45 p.m. Friday to accommodate
upgrades to an escalator at
the Union Square station across
the river, and service won’t resume
until 5 a.m. Monday.
The improvements to the Manhattan
station are part of accessibility
improvements transit honchos
promised during the original
L-train shutdown plan, according
to a senior official, who said the
weekend shutdown is not a symptom
of repairs to the inter-borough
Canarsie Tunnel that was
severely damaged during Superstorm
Sandy.
“While the L Project was initiated
because of the damage from
Superstorm Sandy, it was designed
to address many other critical needs
— namely, accessibility,” said New
York City Transit’s Senior Adviser
for System-Wide Accessibility
Alex Elegudin. “Advancing this
work now at these critical stations
as we had promised will help to
minimize disruptions later while
also getting the accessibility and
ease-of-access improvements done
as quickly as possible, a huge win
for our customers.”
The authority will roll out two
free shuttle buses in Brooklyn during
the closure, including one that
will run from the Lorimer Street
L train stop to the Marcy Avenue
and Hewes Street J and M train
stops, and another shuttle that
will run from Lorimer Street to
Broadway Junction, and also stop
at Marcy Avenue, according to the
agency.
The transit authority will enhance
service along the G line,
which will run every 8 minutes
instead of every 10 minutes during
the day, and they advise riders
to also use the M train as an
alternative.
For a station-by-station breakdown
of alternative options, check
out the agency’s service changes
page .
In addition to the cross-borough
closure, the L train will stop running
in Brooklyn between Lorimer
Street and Broadway Junction at
weeknights from midnight Fridays
to 5 a.m. Mondays from Sept. 23-27
and Sept. 30-Oct. 4 and throughout
the following weekends of Sept.
27-29 and Oct. 4-6.
There will be two free shuttle
buses with one running between
Broadway Junction and Myrtle Avenue
Wyckoff Street, and another
between Myrtle Avenue-Wyckoff
Street and Lorimer Street, according
to the agency.
RIVER OF TEARS
PLUS: ROGUE BIKE
DELAYS SERVICE
SEE PAGE 6
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