Community Garden Razed To Make Way For Amphitheater

In the makings of a classic “evil corporation” Christmas story, the NYC Economic Development Corp demolished a decades-old community garden to make way for a $53 million dollar amphitheater, a long time pet project of Brooklyn Borough President Marky Markowitz.

The demolition of the 70,000 sq ft garden took place at 4 AM, bringing a sour tinge of underhanded play in the eyes of affected community members. But it gets better.

Markowitz previously tried to build the amphitheater at Asser Levy Park but was shouted down by community members who filed a lawsuit to prevent the construction. It appears that Markowitz has won this time around, with the City Council approving the project last week despite the local community once again voting against it in September.

Under the current plan, the city would purchase a neighboring building to turn into a restaurant and concert area while the garden is slated to become a seating area. The razing was done rapidly, with gardening implements and resident animals (several chickens and a family of feral cats) displaced on the street.

Downtown Jamaica Business Improvement District Courts Food Businesses

Downtown Jamaica is showing some major economic growth this season and seems intent on proving its worth as a business improvement district. The area’s developers and economic leaders met with restaurant owners to tap into the roughly $430 million in unused ground-floor space.

Since the onset of the Jamaica Center Business Improvement District in 1979, the area has seen major economic growth under the management of the Greater Jamaica Development Corp (GJDC). Queens developer Carl Mattone and his real estate firm the Mattone Group developed the Jamaica Center building itself in 2002. In the past few years, GJDC has opened brand new retail outlets, a hotel and a department store and recorded roughly 86,000 people in foot traffic. Despite these numbers, downtown Jamaica only offers three dedicated restaurants and the meeting was an effort to fill that gap.

Jamaica Center BID research consultant Mark Lohbauer rhetorically asked restaurant owners “You’ve got hundreds of other choices right here in the five boroughs of the city. You could go anywhere. Why would you go here?” He then pitched the growth Jamaica downtown has seen in the recent years and the need to fill out ground-floor restaurant space. “They (GJDC) bothered to treat their district much like a mall,” he said “and they intend to manage it much like a mall.”

Sangria’s, CityRib and Applebee’s are the three dining options in the area, and those surveyed during Lohbauer’s study reported that they had food on their minds. Dedicated sit-down restaurants, healthier cafes and specialty food stores were all high priorities for those traveling through downtown Jamaica.

Japan Practices “Stealth Demolition”

There is a certain raw excitement to watching a building be demolished. It’s watching the colossal amount of force and explosives typically reserved for action movies being used in real life to unmake something right in front of us, but with that excitement comes a certain level of danger.

Demolitions go wrong more frequently than most people would like, with newsworthy tragedies as recent as August. Japan seems to have found a way to dismantle buildings that minimizes damage and maximizes safety.

Japanese architects have developed a technique to dismantle buildings floor by floor as the structure is slowly scrapped. The effect is subtle, and it appears that the structure is shrinking on its own as time passes.

A spokesman for the technique’s inventor, Taisei Corporation, said the technique resulted in much more reusable material from the old building and was a much greener practice than traditional demolition. The practice is also much less disruptive to the area around the structure, as the building looks intact (but smaller) over an extended period and work being done from the top down is typically covered so as not to be visible from the street.

Japan is a somewhat unique case in that they suffer from both a glut of office buildings and a lack of space, but the “stealth demolition” technique is an alternative for dense metropolises where loud demolition is impossible to do safely.