NYC Council will hold an oversight hearing on G train service on Tuesday, April 8th at City Hall.

City Council Resolution #1262 (Sponsored by Council Members Tish James, Liu and Mendez) calls on the MTA to immediately improve service on the G line and to suspend implementation of service cuts.

Growth dictates that the G will become more needed, not less but the MTA has no plans to make any improvements. Many of us ride the G train and have been frustrated by its limited service--infrequent schedule, short trains, lack of transfer and connection opportunities.

Come out to the hearing on April 8th and tell the NYC Council about your experiences, your commute and the places you have had trouble getting to because of poor service between Brooklyn and Queens:

Time/Date: Tuesday, April 8 at 1:00pm Location: Council Chambers, City Hall Re: What is the MTA doing to improve service on the G line?

Spread the word!

Councilperson Letitia James is asking the MTA to study whether the G Train at Fulton Street could be connected to the Atlantic Avenue transportation hub via an underground tunnel. If the stations were linked, the G train would directly transfer to 10 additional lines.

A group of G train commuters are circulating a petition in support: petition

NYC Department of Transportation and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum presents CityRacks, a national bike racks design competition. Think you can design an "elegant, innovative and durable" bike rack? What are you waiting for, register here: http://nycityracks.wordpress.com

The Task Force for Community-Based Planning, of which MARP is a member of its executive committee, is hosting the following series of panel discussions.

Our new trees are being planted. For the fall 2007 planting we’re expecting some 40 new trees for Myrtle Avenue.

These trees are funded by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation as part of their Million Trees NYC initiative.

To be consistent with our existing trees, the new tree pits will measure 8x5 feet and will be lined with Belgian blocks. The trees are a variety of species and should all be planted by mid December.

The Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership and the Pratt Design Incubator held a community workshop on Tuesday the 13th at Pratt Institute. The event attracted some 30 participants, including Pratt President Dr. Thomas Schutte, representative Chris Hrones from the New York City Department of Transportation, students, local designers, Myrtle Avenue merchants, and interested residents.

The Pratt Design Incubator presented concepts for new and improved street furniture and relevant design, such as innovative bike racks, lighting, trash containers, temporary fencing installations, seating, tree guards, paving treatments, and informational kiosks. Participants wrote comments on sticky notes and stuck them to the drawings. The feedback will help the Pratt Design Incubator to refine concepts for the next phase of design.

The concepts have been uploaded to our Flickr site to give more people an opportunity to view them and to provide additional comments. Please browse and make comments: Street Furniture & Design Concepts.

Construction has begun on Carlton Avenue (Myrtle/Park) to build a raised median with trees. This bike lane and traffic calming project aims to connect bike lanes from Northwest Brooklyn to Prospect Park and is a collaboration between the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) and NYC Parks Department (Parks). The DOT is constructing the median and Parks will maintain it.

The project has moved very quickly. Planning began in 2006. By early 2007, the DOT made adjustments to the street configuration with painted lines. Now that construction has begun, the raised median should be completely installed by the end of the year. The planted median will have a mid-block break to allow cars to make a U-turn. To read more about the project, click the following link to view the PDF: Fort Greene Bike Land and Traffic Calming Project.

The Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership is in collaboration with the Pratt Design Incubator and a team of Pratt industrial design students to begin a process for designing innovative and artistic street furniture elements for Myrtle Avenue. The project started in September with MARP being awarded $12,500 from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), and Myrtle's Business Improvement District deciding to allocate additional funds in order to hire the Pratt Design Incubator. The Myrtle Avenue Street Furniture Initiative will have its first community design workshop in November. At the public forum participants will be asked to contribute their designs/thoughts and designers will present preliminary concepts for seating, bike racks, tree guards, and any number of possible street elements.

Commercial streets in NYC are quite often lacking many amenities that define great spaces: seating, public art, decorative paving, interesting architectural details, sufficient light, and so on. Myrtle Avenue is no exception. Aside from our many historic buildings, "historic" street lights, and Fort Greene Park, the avenue has few distinguishing physical amenities. The Pratt Design Incubator will be studying the avenue's existing conditions, will survey users of Myrtle Avenue, and examine existing street furniture concepts in New York City and beyond. The ultimate goal for this next year is to create concepts that will lead to prototypes of off-the-shelf designs for artistic, sturdy, multipurpose, and cost effective streetscape furniture and amenities.

The Incubator’s Director, Deb Johnson, put together a team of industrial design students that is being led by research coordinator Samantha Razook-Murphy. The team has already begun research and preliminary design concept development, and began surveying the community on Park(ing) Day at Myrtle Avenue's temporary Adami Park.

Integral to the research and concept design is the public design workshop, which we are holding on Tuesday, November 13, 2007, from 6pm to 8pm at Pratt's Higgins Hall (61 St. James Place: southeast corner of Lafayette and St. James). Once in the building, informational signs will direct participants to the workshop room. Please RSVP to vkungys@myrtleavenue.org if you plan to attend.

The workshop will:

• introduce the project: background, goals, process, and timeline
• share preliminary design concepts
• invite participants to join topic tables to discuss and/or sketch concrete elements (bike racks, benches, pavings, etc.) as well as general topics (identity, sense of place)

We also hope to gain more information about the reasons for why people visit the avenue and what design issues would facilitate these visits. Questions to think about before attending the workshop:

Do you shop or dine on Myrtle? If so, what design elements would make this experience easier or more pleasurable?
Do you park your bike on Myrtle? Where and why?
What do you like about the avenue, and what street furniture items do you wish existed?
Aside from the goods and services, are there streetscape amenities along other commercial corridors that draw you to shop there?
How are the current elements on the sidewalk spaces useful, or problematic?

Although the workshop is not being held until November 13th, 2007, we ask that prospective participants pay close attention to design elements on NYC streets in order to be able to provide specific information in describing what works well and what does not. Also, feel free to submit photos between now and the workshop to give the Pratt Design Incubator specific examples of good/bad street furniture and streetscape design. Email the images to incubator@pratt.edu and write "MARP" in the subject line.

The Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project was awarded $200,000 in the fourth round of New York Main Street (NYMS) program funding from the Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR). This is the third time MARP has been awarded a NYMS contract, having been awarded $105,000 in 2005 for the first round of NYMS funding, and $195,000 in 2006 for the third round of funding. The NYMS program allocates funds to organizations working to improve historic commercial corridors in order for them to distribute matching incentive grants to owners of mixed-use buildings looking to restore their properties.

The NYMS Program is funded by the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) and its Housing Trust Fund Corporation (HTFC). The program aims to strengthen local economic development throughout New York State by rebuilding downtowns and main streets by providing matching grants for façade and interior building renovations, as well as streetscape enhancements such as improving lighting, landscaping, signage, street furniture.

To date, MARP has rehabilitated five building facades, with before and after photos viewable on our site's Program & Projects area. This work restored historic elements such as cornices, masonry, cast-iron details, doors, windows, storefronts, and brownstone. We also enhanced the streetscape by expanding 97 tree pits to make them all consistently sized 8 feet long by 5 feet wide, 40 square feet in size. Before the expansion, they were much smaller and inconsistently sized. The tree pit expansion project removed over 1600 square feet of concrete to give the trees more access air, water, and nutrients, and the tree pits were lined with Belgian blocks to give them an ornamented edge.

Having completed five building rehabilitations and streetscape enhancements from the first award, we are making significant progress toward rehabilitating Myrtle’s historic character. The additional funds from this fourth round of funding will allow us to continue providing financial resources to help property owners to renovate their buildings and restore historic detailing, thereby improving Myrtle Avenue's building stock, making it more beautiful and better for business.

As a result of the NYMS program, by the end of 2007 we will have brought about façade improvements to seven buildings and improved the street's tree pits, totaling over $230,000 in private and public investment.

The next façade rehabilitations that are just starting work are located at 413 and 478 Myrtle Avenue.

If you are a property owner of a mixed-use building on Myrtle Avenue between Flatbush and Classon and are interested in making restorations to your building, please contact us.

Trees are a major asset for cities. They provide fresh air, reduce noise, cool the environment and make it more pleasant. In addition, studies have shown that trees add value to nearby properties and even attract shoppers to well-planted commercial districts.

Nevertheless, urban trees have many challenges that range from physical damage from cars to soil contamination from salt. One problem that isn’t frequently thought about is the amount of soil that roots have to grow in. You might think that any tree in the ground can put its roots out forever, but the reality is different. When sidewalks are prepared, the base beneath the sidewalk is compacted to ensure that the concrete surface does not move. This compaction makes the base so dense that roots regularly cannot penetrate much further than then area of the tree pit. So what we get, essentially, are many potted plants submerged in the ground.

Fortunately, a new technology has been developed to solve this problem. The solution is called CU Structural Soil , a product that, when installed beneath the sidewalk, can safely bear pavement loads after compaction and still allow for root penetration and vigorous tree growth. The above image demonstrates the difference that CU Structural Soil can provide.

In December 2006, MARP won funding from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to pilot installations of CU Structural Soil and to plant more trees around Myrtle Avenue. The first installation is taking place tomorrow, Monday, October 15, 2007 at the sidewalk adjacent to the Exxon gasoline station at 143 Vanderbilt Avenue (Myrtle/Vanderbilt) around the tree pits. We hope this is the beginning of a larger effort to not only plant more trees, but to plant and maintain them well, and keep them watered during the hot summer months.