mobius1ski

Ever since I moved to the Gowanus/Boerum Hill area this past June, every day on my way to and from work, I feel as though I am walking through a trash dump. The west-side stretch of 4th Ave. between Atlantic Ave. and Warren St., which resides in Councilman Stephen Levin’s 33rd District, is abysmally filthy, with trash strewn everywhere, and it seems to never get cleaned either by sanitation workers or shop owners, who themselves I’ve witnessed littering the sidewalk. If I were calculating Community Board No. 6’s Acceptably Clean Sidewalks rating, they’d get a big fat 0% from me, because the condition of 4th Ave. is completely unacceptable. 

At the corner of 4th and Pacific, newspaper vendors abandon entire stacks of papers to rot in the rain and snow, trash receptacles overflow and are knocked over into the street, and even an abandoned, smacked-up motorcycle adorns the entrance to the Pacific St. subway station.

It’s the motorcycle which pisses me off the most. It was only last spring that the NYPD clipped the locks off and seized hundreds of bicycles lining the route of President Obama’s motorcade, fearing that they could be concealing pipe bombs. I am also often greeted on my way into the subway station by the Department of Homeland Security which is doing bag checks along with throngs of police officers who are, more often than not, standing around socializing. All the while, an abandoned motor vehicle – a perfect hiding spot for an explosive device – has remained untouched at the entrance of the largest subway terminal in Brooklyn. Yet no one has bothered hauling it away. This just feeds the public perception that all of these purported security precautions are pure theatre and that our local authorities are still completely incompetent and unprepared for a real attack.

Back to the trash: You have to wonder if Stephen Levin ever bothers walking around the neighborhood he serves, because there’s no way anyone with genuine civic pride could walk up 4th Ave. without their stomach turning. You’d also think that someone who sits on the City Council’s Environmental Committee would wish to address the problem of litter washing into our city’s storm drains and flowing back out into our waterways, polluting our rivers, oceans and beaches.

I would appreciate knowing what, if anything, the Councilman intends to do to improve the current situation, because maintaining the status quo only ensures that while 5th, 6th and 7th Aves. thrive economically, 4th Ave. remains a slum. I’d much rather see my neighborhood continue on the trajectory of growth that Brooklyn’s been enjoying in recent years, rather than remaining stagnant, or worse yet, sliding back into the abyss that made the borough synonymous with “scary” less than 20 years ago.