SCA Marks Its Turf at P.S. 133 Site
The city recently put up a big rendering outside of the P.S. 133 construction site on 4th Avenue between Baltic and Butler streets. The School Construction Authority’s sign says work on the controversial new building, which is slated to hold 960 seats, is supposed to be complete in about three years. Meanwhile, click through for…
The city recently put up a big rendering outside of the P.S. 133 construction site on 4th Avenue between Baltic and Butler streets. The School Construction Authority’s sign says work on the controversial new building, which is slated to hold 960 seats, is supposed to be complete in about three years. Meanwhile, click through for a shot of what remains of the community garden on the site, which was mostly ripped up several weeks ago.
City Council Vote Seals P.S. 133’s Fate [Brownstoner]
Council Subcommittee Hears Case of PS 133 [Brownstoner]
PS 133’s Most Desperate Hour [Brownstoner]
New PS 133 Plans Revealed [Brownstoner] GMAP
SCA To Build New P.S. 133, Tear Down Old Building [Brownstoner]
Proposed School Replacement Facility for P.S. 133 [DOE]
Miss Muffet – a group of local residents were told by the District 13 CEC president that there is a “task force” working on the new school, but that parents (from both districts) have been excluded. We’re supportive of efforts to get parents involved in the planning – as well as local residents – perhaps the District 15 CEC president can give you more background.
Not sure if anyone is still reading this thread, but my kid is in school in District 15 and my school community has been urging parents to get involved with PS133 – there is currently a rumor that PS133 will be split into half District 13 and have District 15 school and, given demographic differences between the 2 districts (big black/white divide), this would be terrible. It’s unfortunate that the process up to now has shut out community concerns but moving forward hopefully the community can advocate for this school to be one that serves the *overall* surrounding community as well as possible.
The comment about what the school construction area will look like and related parking spaces wasn’t a complaint – it was informational. (The last thing that actual local residents are complaining about are parking spaces…despite what was said in some of the early articles about the site)…sorry I mentioned it.
The actual complaints have always been about the refusal to look at options besides demolition – such as renovation and the building of an annex – which was supported locally and an idea that the State was interested in. The complaints also were about a rushed and deceitful process that did not allow time to look at options other than more big boxes, cut the community out of the process (and shouldn’t new schools be community focused?), misrepresented environmental impact, forced the public to FOIL for information about toxic problems on the site and for disclosure of the comments the State had made about the design, ignored the fact that the existing structure had architectural and historic significance and was an anchor in an neighborhood, and on and on…
And yes, we’ve heard rumors of changes in district lines too – with this school going into district 15, instead of district 13 (a poorer district) where it is now. Such changes would mean that the kids who live close to the new building (but are on the “wrong” side of 4th Avenue or Union) won’t have a shot at getting into a new building. Unfortunately, this does not come as a surprise.
It wasn’t about posies – it was about process. Opposition was never anti-capacity building – it was about dumb building.
11217 and slick, can’t you understand the absurdity of this project? They’ve taken possession of an exiting community greenspace next to an existing school that is architecturally significant. The plan is to built a new school on the community garden site AND rip down the architecturally significant existing school. This makes no sense.
They’re not adding a big extension to the existing school. Again, the plan is to tear down the existing school…it makes little sense if any.
Outrage? Complaints about parking places? Really?
They complain about building over “green space.” However, if there was a building, they’d complain about that too.
With some people, you just cant win.
They should have applied for stimulus money to build/expand many schools in the city so that they could catch up with increased demand.
A brand spanking new school being built in Brooklyn during the deepest recession in 50 years.
WHAT A TRAVESTY!!!!!
This is an utterly disgusting waste of wonderful public green space and an eventual waste of the exiting school building. Why take over the only green space on a huge stretch of 4th Avenue, destroy it and build a school building on it meanwhile tearing down the historic school next door?
Is this some effort simply to keep contractors employed? So high-handed–unbelievable…AND completely insane on the face of it. I guess there’re probably money issues in the background motivating all this insanity. Complete disregard for the community and waste of public funds.
Sigh. One of the many sad back stories to this new building has come to light courtesy of the HDC, which FOIL’d correspondence between the SCA and the State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. Seems that while the SCA was telling the City Council (and everyone else) that they had been working with OPRHP, they were (as usual) only telling part of the truth. On August 18th, OPRHP sent a response to documents submitted by the SCA on July 20th (also after the early July Council hearings) stating pretty clearly that they were not convinced that there were sufficient reasons (including cost) to demolish PS 133 and asking that the SCA provide a “more refined analysis to demonstrate why a scenario that would preserve PS 133 was not a better alternative to demolishing it.†The SCA responded, in effect, that they were bound and determined to do it their way and even had the nerve to cite “community open space needs†as a factor that supported their decision. (If I could figure out how to do it, I’d post the PDF that included the correspondence).
Local residents have been told that there will soon be a 10 ft high steel fence surrounding the site and that the work site will intrude about 5 ft onto the street. There will, of course, be no parking on the stretchs of 4th Ave, Butler and Baltic surrounding the site.
What a waste.
Does anyone know if the PS133 zone is going to expand because of this? And would this cause PS282 or PS321 zones to shrink? Or does anyone know who to ask about this?
I heard a rumor from an agent that this PS133 expansion would shift the school zones and cause the PS321 zone to start only from 6th avenue and run east to the park. This doesn’t seem credible to me, but still I want to check out the possibility.