Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz isn’t giving his State of the Borough speech until tonight, but somehow The Daily News already knows that he’s going to trumpet support for creating state-of-the-art recreation centers at both the Bedford-Atlantic Armory and the Sumner Avenue Armories similar to the one that’s recently been completed in Park Slope. “Bedford Stuyvesant deserves it as much as Park Slope, and so does northern Crown Heights,” says the Beep, who will announce that he’s earmarking $1 million towards each project. (Council Member Tish James has pledged to come up with another $10 million for the Bedford project.) The contrast—with the comparatively wealthy neighborhood of Park Slope getting a fancy gymnasium while the poorer neighborhoods of Bed Stuy and Crown Heights get stuck with more than their fare share of homeless shelters—has not been lost on, well, just about anybody with any sense. The city however, continues to try to argue that Bedford Avenue is the most efficient place to locate the central intake center for the city even though the large majority of homeless are in Manhattan. To try to placate people in the neighborhood, the Department of Homeless Services has said it would build a $10 million rec center in the Bedford-Atlantic Armory, but only as a quid pro quo for moving the intake center there, a combo residents say (and we agree) won’t work. “The two cannot coexist,” Crown Heights Revitalization Movement co-founder Sandy Taggart.
Markowitz Wants to Turn Two Armories into Rec Centers [NY Daily News]