URGENT Gloom & Loom Threatens BBG

I am a founding member of FLAC, Flower Lovers Against Corruption. We exist to defeat the out-of-control Dept. of City Planning’s fast-track effort to vacate a DOWN-zoning they issued in 1991 specifically to protect the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. From what? From from more of the long shadows and visual intrusion caused by construction of a single 33-story erected at Franklin & Crown a few years before. It’s the undistinguished sandstone apartment block known as Tivoli Tower that looms over the Japanese Garden. It's not the worst building in the world; it's just utterly out-of-scale and rudely out of place.

DCP and District 35 Councilperson Laurie Cumbo intend to UP-zone (Black) Crown Heights, allowing for a little Miami Beach of surely undistinguished – in keeping with everything else going up around here – towers, shoulder to shoulder from Eastern Parkway to Empire Boulevard. The first proposals have been issued: This threat is real and imminent. You can see the artist’s rendering at our petition page. It’s enraging. 

Maddeningly, BBG leadership has been absolutely SILENT on this looming threat. Why is that? Are the sun and the earth not still in the same relationship? Please call the office of BBG President, Scot Medbury at 718-623-7200 and demand to know why the Garden isn’t loudly opposing this threat in the press, why it has not even notified the membership of the potential for light-stealing desecration.

I encourage you to contact Laurie Cumbo as well as your Council person, if different. Call DCP in Brooklyn (718-780-8280), apprise the Mayor of your outrage. Sign the FLAC petition at change.org and please make a donation of any amount to help underwrite the shadow study we must commission at youcaring.com. If everyone who has signed the petition gave 5 bucks, we could bankroll an effective fight on behalf of human-scale development. We hope for $20.

The Garden is an oasis beloved by the people of Brooklyn, New York City and visitors from from across the country and around the world. We must protect it from rapacious real estate development. Growing things, living things need light to thrive and desecration is forever.  Please take action. Soon!