Myrtle Street Furniture Design Initiative
The Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership, in collaboration with the Pratt Design Incubator and a team of Pratt industrial design students, has begun a process for designing innovative and artistic street furniture elements for Myrtle Avenue. The "MyAve" Street Furniture Initiative held its first community design meeting, open to the public, on November 13th, during which time designers presented preliminary concepts for seating, bike racks, tree guards, and any number of possible street elements, and received extensive community feedback. Images of concepts from the workshop are available for viewing and comment at our flickr site. The goal is to have 10 final conceptual designs completed by late spring, which can then be built and prototyped on the avenue.

Public Space Enhancements for Myrtle
Beginning in the fall of 2005, we began hosting community planning workshops open to the public in order to gather input from local stakeholders on where we should focus our efforts for improving the commercial corridor. Improving the streetscape and the avenue's public spaces became a major emphasis of the workshops, as individuals expressed their desire to have great public spaces to sit, eat, relax, and people-watch, and to otherwise create a better sense of place. In collaboration with Project for Public Spaces (PPS), we studied four sites along the avenue: (1) Myrtle from Carlton to Ashland, which fronts Fort Greene Park and the Walt Whitman Houses; (2) the intersection of Myrtle and Vanderbilt Avenues; (3) the intersection of Myrtle and Clinton Avenues; and (4) Myrtle from Hall Street to Emerson Place, the four-block section of the commercial district with a parallel service road and single-story retail buildings. For a summary of the reports and proposed improvements, visit Placemaking and Public Space Enhancements, where you can find links to each full report in PDF format.

Home Grown & Locally Owned
If there's one thing Myrtle Avenue has an abundance of, it's independent, locally owned businesses. Our new marketing campaign, Home Grown & Locally Owned, features postcards and ads of 18 local businesses in this first phase of the campaign. From your family-owned hardware store to your mom and pop cafe to your friendly neighborhood mechanic, Myrtle's merchants are your neighbors in business, and the entire community benefits when our commercial districts thrive. If you haven't visited the avenue lately, it's time to pay your neighbors a visit.

Help Protect the Historic Wallabout Neighborhood
Our recently completed Cultural Resource Survey of the mixed-use Wallabout neighborhood north of Myrtle Avenue and south of the Brooklyn Navy Yard proposes the creation of a residential landmark district, in addition to the landmarking of a number of notable industrial and religious complexes north of Park Avenue. Researched by noted architectural historian Andrew Dolkart, who completed the landmark designation reports for both Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, the survey is now available here in PDF format. (The file is 2.1 MB, and requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)