Catholic Church and City Stick It to Fort Greene
Here’s a rumor straight out of The Da Vinci Code…The eight-story pre-war building on the corner of Clermont and Greene has been home to a group of priests for years. According to a tipster who lives nearby, the priests began moving out last week to make room for the building’s new occupants: 155 juvenile delinquents….
Here’s a rumor straight out of The Da Vinci Code…The eight-story pre-war building on the corner of Clermont and Greene has been home to a group of priests for years. According to a tipster who lives nearby, the priests began moving out last week to make room for the building’s new occupants: 155 juvenile delinquents. The Catholic Church reportedly has leased the entire building to the City which obviously feels that Fort Greene is getting too nice. After a neighborhood has spent a couple decades pulling itself up by its heels, why not throw up another roadblock. Anyone have further details?
Update: It appears that the Church is partnering with a non-profit group called ANCHOR to create an urban boarding school, 15 or 20 of whose students will be housed in this building. It’s unclear if the rest of the building will continue to house priests.
Wow, from Brownstoner’s original post to many of these responses, I am really offended. The church has been a continuous presence in Brooklyn and it has provided services to generations of Brooklynites. It owns a piece of property and is making some money by renting it to the city (for delinquent teens?). The money will probably go to providing more services to people you don’t want to look at but who for some reason insist on staying in Brooklyn and messing up your property values.
These kids may have nowhere else to go. I have no idea if the halfway house will be good or bad, but I know the kids there will be better off than they would be in the streets, which is where you’d people like them to be–as long as they weren’t gentrifying streets of course.
term ‘juvenile delinquent’ sounds so 50’s. The building on Boerum Pl. -St. Vincents I think -just north of Atlantic used to be a home for years (maybe still is)-featured in that novel by whatshisface from DeanSt.
And I don’t recall being such a negative factor in neighborhood – so don’t get yourselves all worked up over something you don’t really know about.
Your very centrally located ever-gentrifying neighborhood has to house some of these facilities too.
Ok, that is it… I’m off this Board, Brownstoner. You class bate and race bate at every chance you get.. You don’t give a damn about social issues underpinning neighborhoods. You simply don’t care… I think that cavalier attitude, in a forum such as this, is really insidious. It encourages trolls and nastiness that you pretend to want to discourage.
Did it ever occur to you that some people want to visit their kids when they are in detention? That it has been proven that keeping families close together during incarceration decreases chances of recidivism?
Anyway, it has been fun the past 6 months, but I won’t be back.. I wish you all the best, but encourage you to keep more focused on architecture. When you look at social issues, you bring down your own blog. Best of luck.
Ever wander around Ft Greene in the middle of a weekday? It’s a real different scene… With all the gentries at work, many of the folks you see during these non-office hours are remants of the old Ft Greene. Some actually live at the half-way houses (for lack of a more precise term) that still pepper the landscape, perhaps even quietly tucked in a brownstone next door. In other words, the neighborhood is already home to shelters of various sorts and the fact that people don’t know this isn’t a function of some sort of cover-up. There is rarely, if ever, any trouble coming from these transitional homes. Why should we expect any less from the corner of Clermont and Greene?
I lived on a block in Bed Stuy that has a converted brownstone that was residential housing for PINS boys. Ten years after we moved in, the program changed to a day program for boys that had been removed from public school for infractions but who were not otherwise in trouble. At no point during the time that I lived there were there ever any problems with the boys. The people that ran the facility were always very thoughtful about the impact on their neighbors. The kids did not hang outside of the house and when they were outside they were always accompanied by staff members. This was a state-run facility but until they hung a sign outside of the building few people off the block even realized it was not a private home.
If the adults in charge set a good tone, this may be invisible to the neighborhood.
As folks have said this is still a rumor. It may be foster kids, or children waiting for adoption or any of a hundred other needy types of children. Why not wait for more info before deciding that the project is worthless?
We don’t even live in Fort Greene but if we did live around the corner from this, we’d be bummed for sure. We can just imagine the cat-calls and harassment that our daughter would have to go through every day walking home from school in a few years. No thanks. It’s ridiculous that NIMBY has become this blanket label to throw at anyone who doesn’t want to tolerate shitty quality of life. This isn’t a binary issue where one has to embrace 1970s-style New York or move to Scarsdale. We suspect everyone is a little NIMBY, though the things they don’t want in their backyards may vary.
this is my favorite part:
“After a neighborhood has spent a couple decades pulling itself up by its heels, why not throw up another roadblock.”
let’s be real, most [observe the word ‘most’] of the complainers were not around when fort greene was tainted due to brooklyn’s general crime climate… i don’t think this gentrification process that the aforementioned are a part of can refer to themselves as ‘pulling the neighborhood up by its heels’…
rather, you can thank daddy and your trust funds – insert expletive here with an ‘ers’ suffix.
Before everyone gets down on Brownstoner, the truth is the building was vacated on Friday late afternoon around 4ishPM last week. It was a hush hush situation and there was no dialogue with the community. Perhaps they do not have to dialogue with the community but the fact remains the Archdiocese runs Bishop Loughlin High School next door. The school depends on tuition and the Fathers who lived in the recently vacated bldg often interacted with the HIgh School. Now that juvenile delinquents will be housed there perhaps that will have a detrimental effect on its enrollment. Afterall however you feel more parents are moving here. Sorry Church this one was stupid on your part. GIve brownstoner a break. Why were they so hush about this move???
The Pope personally wants to make Ft Greene his bitch.