Sunset Park

Friendly note. This building is not colonial revival style. The NYC LPC historic report calls it “Arts-and-Crafts-inspired”, “vaguely medieval”, and a type of “tapestry brick dwellings” that were common in Brooklyn during this era.

This recently happened at a hotel in LIC and the PanAm hotel in Elmhurst. There are tons of these cheapo hotels being built in neighborhoods that don't see much tourism like Jamaica, Morrisania and Glendale, it seems easier to say you are building a hotel and later turn it into a shelter (which pays more) than it is to announce a homeless shelter and get push back from the surrounding community.

A lot of these coops don't accept financing.

Sunset Park dog owner here. Been living in the neighborhood 15 years. This article is kind of odd, and my guess is that it was written by someone who has never actually visited the park and looked around the areas discussed. I could be mistaken. Author says, "... they’d been pacified with a substitute semi-fenced-in area in Sunset Park near 41st Street and 6th Avenue." This is a very strange way of explaining the situation. This area has gone through phases of being locked and unlocked over the years with no clear rhyme or reason. But anyone familiar with it knows that the Parks dept. doesn't want people -- or dogs for that matter -- in the area. The same goes for the 44th-street side of the park. Both have very steep inclines to the street with no protective fencing at the bottom. This must be a huge liability/injury risk for the city and so instead of making it safe they just try to discourage people from entering. People enter anyway, locked or unlocked. Since there is a huge off-leash area already available, my guess is that the people who bring their dogs in there do it because either (a) they fear their dog will run away and it's a semi-contained space; (b) their dog is aggressive and can't be around other dogs; or (c) their dog might get hurt by other dogs. Anyway, people have ALWAYS gone in there, allowed or not. Same goes for the 44th street side. The fences are only waist high and so anyone can simply hop them or force the gate open just enough to squeeze through. And they do. One concern I have is that the area tends to suffer damage from the dogs. The grass has been stripped to bare soil/dirt in parts, particularly near the entrance gate, and there are large holes where the dogs have been given free reign by their owners to dig. Again, I'm a dog owner myself and use the park's off-leash privileges every day multiple times. So to a certain degree, I get it. But if you're going to go in there, at least treat the area with respect. The main area where dog owners congregate during off-leash ours, the broad sloping field just west of the soccer and basketball courts in the middle of the park, has also suffered a lot of damage to the turf. Huge swaths of it are now just pockmarked raw dirt. The rest is weed cover, not grass. Very little grass remains. It's also dotted with large and dangerous holes the dogs have dug (imagine what happens when a kid running full steam hits one of those). In the past the issue of a dog run has come up, but it's always been framed as a "you can either have a dog run or off-leash hours, not both" from my memory, and so the various interested parties can never come to a resolution. This is a good example of why it's so hard to do, build, improve any public spaces in the city. It's almost impossible to get the factions to agree on anything. And so nothing happens and we're left with the same busted status quo. Look at the BQE cantilever project. This same dynamic plays out across the country where rules about collective decision-making get weaponized to prevent anything from ever getting actually built.