What If...
What if you were a wealthy philanthropist who could write a $100 million check to fund any infrastructure or public project in Brooklyn? What would it be? A selective high school to rival Stuyvesant in Manhattan? Hundreds more patrol officers on the police force? A monorail above Atlantic Avenue? Let your imagination run wild.
What if you were a wealthy philanthropist who could write a $100 million check to fund any infrastructure or public project in Brooklyn? What would it be? A selective high school to rival Stuyvesant in Manhattan? Hundreds more patrol officers on the police force? A monorail above Atlantic Avenue? Let your imagination run wild.
I would take the money and attempt to duplicate in Bed Stuy or East New York what Geoffrey Canada is doing in Manhattan with the Harlem Children’s Zone. It’s a grand social experiment that floods a big chunk of Harlem with services to children and families to get them successfully through school and ideally into college.
Yes, low-income folks need job training, but there’s also something wrong going on with high school kids, particularly the huge proportion of low-income black boys who drop out in 10th or 11th grade. To prevent this, intervention must start much sooner, with both kids and families and schools.
If I had $100 mil to spend I would spend it on restoring some of Brooklyn’s historic churches like St Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights and Old First in Park Slope. St Ann’s has gorgeous bones and needs restoration badly so it lasts another 100 years.
i’d create a 300ft elevator to a platform, that looks like a parking lot with foam rubber flooring, where people can hang out and really do whatever above the borough.
we can call it the soft skydeck
i’d create a 300ft elevator to a platform, that looks like a parking lot with foam rubber flooring, where people can hang out and really do whatever above the borough.
Most of the school ideas people mention shouldn’t require additional money, it’s just reallocating what’s already there… Also bike lines are a waste.. average brooklynite it not going to use them.
designated bus lanes, with barriers, so that express buses are really express… could be real cost-effective alternative.
Building subways is too expensive these days, and trollys have too much liability issues.
Unfortunately, $100,000,000 isn’t enough to get rid of big developers like Ratner. I would rather give maybe $10MM to Marty Markowitz so he could run for governor or Promote Brooklyn in China- that way he’d ignore us for a few years. He would be upstate in old factories or farms trying to get the residents to say “Fuhgetaboudit!!!!!” Use another $30 Million to get rid of the other electeds who we’d be better off without. Then we could start giving our teachers and cops decent salaries, fill some potholes, start job programs, study the feasibility of trollies, help out local businesses.
Oh, but we’d better set aside a few million for a really big statue of all those politicians. That’s what they really want anyway. I think my solution will make everyone happy.
Bring the Dodgers back!
Also restore all the old movie theaters like the one on Flatbush and Church. Fix up Fulton Street/Downtown Brooklyn.
gowanus expressway — stick it underground. you’ll have to spot me a bit more cash…