RAAAAAAAR!

Sunday's final call: Chinese New Year parade won out!

South Street Seaport Museum - Back Underway!

grey skies...


are




gonna


clear


up!

Yippee! I'd read the news last year the South Street Seaport was going to reopen under the auspices of the Museum of the City of New York (an institution I used to enjoy when I lived on the Upper East Side back in the 90's) with happiness. I'd seen January. On January 8th, the day I took the SeaStreak out to hike at Sandy Hook, I'd left myself loads of extra time for weekend delays (the Q train's been running in parts on weekends and there was one and only one ferry that was going to get me there early enough to make it worth the price of the ride, so I wanted to be absolutely sure I'd be on that one), the delays that day weren't too bad, so while I waited I decided to run over and see if they had the opening day on the door yet. They didn't, but at least I had a little time to walk around & take some pictures of the old ships & boats there. I hadn't gotten around to posting them and the funny thing is that I'd just been thinking that I should do that this week, and wondering if the day had been announced, and then I wandered over to Jessica DuLong's Facebook page to see when her BookCourt reading was (details here) and was absolutely delighted to see that the grand reopening bash had actually just happened the night before!

Jessica was there, she loved it.

The New York Times has an interesting article about the reopening - not just a review of the new exhibits, but a good outline of the troubles of the past and the challenges the institution faces now.

I hope enough people go visit in the next 18 months that by the end of that time, the Museum of the City of New York can't imagine letting it go. Me, I can't wait.

Oh. And maybe I don't have to, at least not too long.

I've actually been completely torn about what to do on Sunday - hit the water, or take the Lumix to the Chinese New Year parade. I'm itching to paddle; between a shoulder that got a bit "tweaked" by some overenthusiastic New Year's Day rolling, bad weather, and a cold, I haven't been out since the Frostbite Regatta (pool doesn't count, really) - but if I went to the parade for a couple of hours, I could probably squeeze in a visit to the museum, too. Two birds, one stone, all that, right?

Hmm. Shoulder's mostly all better but it does still twinge a bit here & there. What do you think, should I maybe give it another week to recover?

Wetlands Strategy Draft on "A Walk in the Park"

Further to the Four Sparrow business - as I mentioned in a post on Facebook yesterday, that meeting report actually ended up being a rather hard one to write:

" don't know why I'm having such a hard time doing it, used to do that sort of thing all the time...guess I'm out of practice. Or Mill Basin doesn't feel like my turf the way the Hudson River Park was, where I first got involved when the Trust was a Conservancy, knew the people, followed the stories, maybe even got to help write little bit of its now and then before they shut down the barge and I left for the shores of the Paerdegat. This one, I was seriously jumping in in a chapter in the middle of what turned out to be a much longer tale than I realized & aside from the initial incoherent spluttering I did the other day I'm at a bit of a loss."

I did finally cough up a report last night, but I was reading it and feeling like it just wasn't very good precisely because I didn't have any sense of the backstory or how this one development fits into the bigger picture.

Fortunately the same paddling birder friend who told me about the plan and the meeting in the first place forwarded the following message that had been sent out among the birding community. I saw it AFTER I'd posted last night, looked at the link this morning, and there it was, a summary the big picture that I knew I wasn't seeing. Wish I'd read it before I wrote my report, might have made it easier!

Thanks, Prof. M!
*****************

A Walk in the Park: City Releases Wetlands Strategy Draft.

The attachment in the link above ( "Read On" in the second link ) is a very important conservation proposal put out by our city Jan 18th ( last Thursday) . The draft is 63 pages long but necessary to understand how critical this proposal is in the fight to save places like 4 Sparrow Marsh ( 64 acres) which the latest development plan threatens the marsh ecology with a large car dealership Kristol Auto next door at the current Toys R Us site; Kristol Auto is under investigation by the NY State Dept of Environment Conservation (NYSDEC) for its current location elsewhere for brownfield contamination

If you can comment on the proposed Wetlands policy, please do even if it isn't much. The deadline is February 18th.

Thanks for Brooklyn's birds and her habitats !

P

Four Sparrows Meeting Review

Just a quick bit of scribbling (note later: quick bit of scribbling? who was I kidding, when did I EVER do a meeting writeup that was "quick"??? oh well, at least it's done!) out my recollections of the updated plan for the Four Sparrows - I'd gone looking for the updated version of the plan, found an older version over on Sheepshead Bites & figured I'd just do one of my Microsoft Paint-jobs on it. Not very pretty but it gets the idea across. This isn't perfect, I should have done it sooner as sitting here 5 days after the meeting I'm not sure I'm remembering it right, but this is my best recollection.

The great thing is that the area I outlined, crosshatched & marked Gone in blue, covering buildings "Retail A", "Retail B" and the parking to serve them, are relics of the Ratner plan. Those are GONE now, thank goodness -- although as the invitation to the Community Board meeting pointed out, developers are likely to keep taking flyers at that unless it's eventually properly handed over to the parks department.

What's left is a couple of businesses that are already operating in the area, Toys 'R' Us (owners Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Bain Capital Partners LLC - and did that get a gasp when the manager started reading out the owners - and Vornado Realty Trust, who also owns the Kings Plaza Mall where the meeting was held) and Kristol Motors trying to rearrange things a bit. I've outlined the lot that they're working with in orange. The squarish building marked "Old" is the Toys 'R' Us. The polygonal building marked "New" is the car dealership. Where the marsh comes into play is that that new building will be taking up what is currently a large part of the Toys 'R' Us parking lot, so to replace that parking, they are proposing that a 60 foot wide "easement" be carved out of Four Sparrow (comprising roughly 5% of that land that everybody thought was a park)and handed over for a parking lot.

The developers were making all kinds of reassuring noises about how it was being set up so that nothing but a parking lot could ever be built on that strip, as though a parking lot is somehow a completely neutral thing to add in and of itself.

Ida Sanoff, president of the Brooklyn/Queens division of the Natural Resources Protective Association called them on that one, and I was glad to hear that as it seemed to me that putting a parking lot right on the edge of a marsh is pretty much going to guarantee that every time it rains, it's going to mean oil and gas and anything else that leaked from the cars that park there are going to wash into the marsh.

Dan Mundy from the Jamaica Bay EcoWatch followed up and said that by pointing out that with all of the money that's being poured into the maintenance and restoration of the marshes of Jamaica Bay, not protecting the Four Sparrow Marsh just didn't make sense. Well, he said it better than that but that's what it boils down to.

The residents seemed to have mixed emotions - on the one hand, Kristol is a genuine local businessman and they'd like to see him do well, but chairwoman Dorothy Turano expressed a lot of frustration with the way the developers had evaded requests for a preliminary meeting, and concern about how the development was going to deal with the increased traffic (there'd been hopes for a bus turnaround and that didn't seem to be part of the plan), and most of all, she was quite vehement about the residents not wanting even the smallest piece of that park used.

A couple of other comments that stick out in my mind -

An individual asked Kristol about his role in the brownfield status of the land where his current dealership stands - he said he inherited that when he took over the land & had nothing to do with it but that was something people seemed to be pretty clearly concerned about.

There was a very strange moment when Councilman Lew Fidler began talking about how it was his understanding that the strip of marshland was just going to be used a buffer, tree plantings, etc. etc. - he must have arrived late because the fact that that land was intended for parking cars had been one of the first things the developers said. The developers corrected him although he didn't really seem to acknowledge it - hopefully that did sink in. That mistaken assumption was also posted on Sheepshead Bites & I made a comment I sort of wish I could revise, I was just there looking for the map, saw that the Councilman had posted a comment saying the same thing & posted a rather snappish correction, thinking he'd just ignored the developers' correction...then realized he'd posted that the day before the meeting. Oh well, at least there's a correction with it now.

hmm, and back to "I'm not sure I'm remembering it right", I swear they said the strip was for parking but Dan Mundy's report says " 'some parking but mostly as a buffer area with trees and plants' according to EDC. " Maybe I misheard...still, definitely not just trees.

Most depressing moment of the evening was when someone proposed that approval be hinged on guarantees that the park be left alone. A gentleman who I believe was representing the Empire Development Corporation was quick to remind everyone that a community board doesn't actually have any power to DO something like that, they're only there in an advisory capacity.

Weirdest moment of the evening was actually before the meeting. I'd made a poster and while I was standing in line, the guy in front of me said "Nice pictures". I said thanks & told him I'd taken them from my kayak & that I paddle out of Sebago. He paused for a second & then said, "You know, I'd like to like your club but you want to ban all the motorboats from the Paerdegat". Coulda knocked me over with the proverbial feather - sure there are a couple of turkeys who just WON'T slow down when they come under the bridge, but the neighboring yacht clubs are just that, our neighbors, I can't imagine asking to have them turned out! Anyways, turned out that he was from Canarsie and some club member had said something to that effect at some planning meeting - somebody's personal opinion clearly got mistaken for club policy. Bizarre though.

According to my notes, the next meeting on the topic will be on February 8th at 5:30 at Brooklyn Borough Hall, and then there'll be a followup in March, and in April or May it'll go to the City Council.

Guess I won't throw away my poster yet.

Susan Fox Rogers comes to Yonkers, Saturday, 1/28/2012 (and Jessica DuLong reads in Brooklyn on 1/30)

Oh, goodness - the very last reading in a series of readings by Susan Fox Rogers, author of what ended up being one of my favorite books of 2011, is coming up this Saturday, January 28th at the Beczak Environmental Education Center's in Yonkers. Her reading will be the first of the center's monthly RiverTalks in 2012.

Click here to visit the RiverTalks blog for full details.

I'm so glad that I made it to her reading in Brooklyn - this one's going to be even better, she's the sole presenter of the evening, they'll be serving Hudson River wines and cheeses, and all my friends from Yonkers will be there. Aeriously, if you live anywhere within a reasonable travel distance, you're not a kayaker already, and you've ever thought you might like to be one, you absolutely owe it to yourself to go to this thing, listen to the talk and then see if you can introduce yourself to some of the nice folks from the Yonkers Paddling and Rolling Rowing Club. If you ARE a Yonkers-area kayaker, well, you were probably planning on going long before I got around to posting it, right? :D

I was actually trying to figure out if there was a way I could go myself. It would have taken a borderline weaselly move on my part, only I did myself in (or spared myself from being tempted into weasellitude, depending on how you look at it) last week on Facebook when a blogging friend messaged me asking if I was going to either this one or Jessica DuLong's reading on Monday (another event worth attending, My River Chronicles is another really good book), and I blithely replied,

"1/28 is our snow day for the pool classes TQ and I are teaching, but it's looking like we won't need it so it'll just be a bonus practice session. I'll have to see what the other instructors think but I'd really like to go to Yonkers..."

Of course simply making a comment like that rendered all such considerations moot - that's right, I accept at least part of the blame for the Saturday snowstorm, saying something like that is about as close to doing a magical snowbringing dance as a person can get while clickety-clicking away at a computer. Worked great, didn't it?

Happy Lunar New Year!

Enter the Dragon!

Welcome Dragon!

Here's an article with a video of one of the most unusual dragon dances I've ever seen! :D

And here's a link to this year's scheduled festivities in Manhattan's Chinatown on ExploreChinatown.com. Firecrackers today, and the big parade is next Sunday, January 29th. BTW the picture above is from a Lunar New Year gallery I did back in 2006, the year I finally made it to the parade - if you click on it I think it will take you to the Buzznet gallery.

Subway Series #2-and-a-half

A very New Yorky wishing well.

Three coins in the trackbed,
through the ripples, how they shine

(with apologies to Jules Styne, of course)

Can't quite count it as a Subway Series post 'cause those were supposed to involve me actually carving out a little time to go take pictures, but this just fits in!

Frogma Is 7!

Good grief, next thing you know the blog is going to be a teenager, start dating, talking back, calling me to come pick it up from parties when everybody drank too much to drive...


Wow, it's Froggibloggiversary Number 7, still hopping along just fine! Thanks to anyone who's been following my adventures in urban kayaking, sailing, food, gardening, wildlife, doodling, photography and whatever else happens to catch my easily-distracted attention for a moment. Amazes me how much easier it's been for me to keep a journal going when keeping a journal actually involves socializing - every one I ever tried to keep on paper died of inattention within a month.

It all started in a much nastier, colder January than this one we've got going on now - Click here to read Frogma Post #1.

PS - adding a note slightly later: Comments on that Post #1 are moderated but I am putting them up! Sorry!

TOP GEAR BREAK! Yowza! Woohoo! Vrooomvroomvroom!

OK, between yesterday's SOPA/PIPA thing, the grumbling about the Music Publishing Rights Collection Society's claiming that they own rights to one of my Dempsey's set video, and the Four Sparrows Marsh thing I feel like this blog needs a frivolity break, and I think that Top Gear's instant-classic jet-powered kayak vs. TomCat race is just the thing. I know, I know, I should probably be philosophically opposed to the very concept but shoot, it's fun!


I was planning to come home and do a bit of a writeup here about the meeting last night, but you've been spared 'cause I have a cold, I came home from work & immediately crashed for several hours on the Evil Futon of Nap and I'm now just having a quick cup of herbal tea with honey (fresh outta Balvenie, sigh, I must have a word with the butler about how this oversight was allowed to happen) and messing about on the internet for a bit before I transfer to actual bed. Way too late to get started on a Serious Post now, plus there are limits to just how much seriousness I can take in one week!