05/01/10 11:31pm

Five Boro Bike Tour 2010

5 Boro Bike Tour goes through Dumbo on Sunday 10a-2pm (5/2/2010). As in prior years, 30,000 cyclists will be coming through Dumbo for the 42 mile TD Bank Five Boro Bike Tour.

On Sunday, the following streets near Dumbo Brooklyn will be closed intermittently to motorists from 9:15 AM to 3:30 PM for the Five Boro Bike Tour:

  • Navy Street from North Elliot Street to Gold Street
  • Gold Street from York Street to Front Street
  • Front Street from Gold Street to Old Fulton Street (Cadman Plaza)
  • Old Fulton Street (Cadman Plaza) from Front Street to Furman Street
  • Furman Street from Old Fulton Street to Atlantic Avenue

If you are parked on any of the streets above, your car will likely be towed to clear the streets. For more information:
NYC DOT
Bike New York

Please use caution along the route.

2010 Five Boro Bike Tour through Dumbo

Previously:
{Five Boro Bike Tour Street Closures, 03May2009}
{5 Boro Bike Tour 2008, 05May2008}
{5 Boro Bike Tour Coming Through, 06May2007}

02/15/08 2:35pm

Brooklyn Tow Pound

So your car got towed in Dumbo? I realize that this may not apply to a lot of people in Dumbo, a neighborhood that’s promoting environmental responsibility and green-ness, but I’ve received enough emails about towed cars and where to go that I’ll post a recent experience. I have a car, but only drive on weekends, so I park on the street. I’ve never had any problems finding parking but occasionally I forget to move the car on no parking days.

For the first time, my car was towed last week, and found that all cars towed in Brooklyn go to the Brooklyn Tow Pound in Vinegar Hill on the corner of Sands and Navy Street (thank god it’s so close!). It’s a 10 minute walk from Dumbo. You’ll need any outstanding tickets paid before you can redeem your car. Bring your registration and current insurance card. If it’s in your car, they will allow you to get it. Once you get to the pound, (go early when there’s no line), pay your tow fee ($185 plus $20 per day) and you’re on your way. It was much easier than I had anticipated. I just have to remember to move the car next time. Anyone have other experiences to share?

Brooklyn Navy Yard; corner of Sands St. & Navy St.
Tel: 718-694-0696
Mon-Fri 8am-9pm; Sat 8am-4pm; Sun 12pm-8pm

[UPDATE: 23-Feb-2009; a reader informed us that the pound was closed on Sunday, despite what the NYC website states. Call the location before you make the trip out.]

{How to Redeem Your Towed Vehicle, nyc.gov}
{Towed Vehicles, nyc.gov}

08/25/06 7:30am


Navy Street (Sands St. to Hudson Ave)

The Brooklyn Greenway Initiative is a project to create a connection between numerous waterfront communities now divided by highways and transit infrastructure for waterfront access, bike trails along 14 miles of Brooklyn waterfront.

The planned pathway spans from Greenpoint to Navy Yards, Vinegar Hill, and Dumbo down to Red Hook. For joggers, bikers, and pedestrians, the route through Vinegar Hill and Dumbo would give a good view of the bridges and the waterfront:

Route in Vinegar Hill – Ideal route for Brooklyn Bridge Park and proximity to waterfront is Gold St. to John St. to the Jay St. park gateway. This could result in a segment of unique character through an historic neighborhood.

Looks like the project may finish by the time the Brooklyn Bridge Park is scheduled to finish around 2010.

{Brooklyn Greenway Initiative via The Brooklyn Record}

08/07/06 7:26pm


Image courtesy NY Times

Sweat darkened the brim of Nicholas Evans-Cato’s straw hat last week as he brushed oil paint onto a six-foot-wide canvas, all the while perched on the tar-paper roof of an old factory building in Dumbo, Brooklyn. It was scorching hot up there, but Mr. Evans-Cato had no time to waste.

In front of him was a half-finished painting of the Brooklyn waterfront, a panorama that includes the Williamsburg Bridge, several new condominium buildings and a quintet of towering brick smokestacks from the Consolidated Edison Hudson Avenue Generating Station on the edge of Vinegar Hill. The problem for Mr. Evans-Cato, who has been working on the painting for more than two months, is that the view is about to change.

In the next week or so, said the plant’s manager, Gus Sanoulis, workers will begin dismantling three of the five stacks. Only two are needed now because the plant is using fewer boilers to generate steam. The job will take about four months but will begin to alter the view immediately.

“I guess all I can say is I’m trying to paint better, faster,” said Mr. Evans-Cato, 33. “It’s a matter of not second-guessing myself as often as I usually would.

“They’re like musical notes on a staff,” he said of the 350-foot-tall stacks, erected three-quarters of a century ago. “If I lose them it disrupts the whole composition.”

Pointing to the canvas, he explained: “I’m using these stacks to tell me about these windows. The dark of these lines against the sky helps me calibrate the other darks. When they’re gone, there will be that much less to define the arc of the sky.”

The smokestacks Mr. Evans-Cato values have long been regarded as difficult neighbors by many who lived near them.

Don Condrill, 84, who grew up on the corner of Sands and Navy Streets, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, remembered how neighborhood women used to scramble to take their laundry off the lines when the stacks were venting black dust.

“They’d yell out, ‘Soot’s coming down! Soot’s coming down!’ ” Mr. Condrill, who now lives in Centreville, Va., and is a friend of Mr. Evans-Cato’s, said by phone. “They wouldn’t have any sentimentality about losing those stacks.”

Mr. Evans-Cato, who said change had always been a part of New York, isn’t out to save the smokestacks. But he has a show in October and had expected to work on his Dumbo painting until then.

“I’d never want to stop the clock,” he said. “It’d just be nice if I could slow it down just a little bit.”

{Now You Paint ’Em, Now You Don’t, NY Times}