A special GL correspondent was kind enough to send along some photos of a religious procession on Smith Street yesterday as it wound its way past the site of the building site known as 360 Smith Street. The emails that included the photos bore the subject line “Blessed Mother Visits 360 Smith Street.” We love these processions when we stumble across them. We particularly enjoy this one because it juxtaposes an old neighborhood tradition with a development site that has sparked a wideranging discussion about preserving the character of Carroll Gardens. An email we got in advance of tonight’s Carroll Gardens Neighborhood Association meeting that will deal with 360 Smith said in part of the developer and the development:

no one who loves Carroll Gardens would want to develop to the scale (height/density) that he does, with an architect like the one he chose at the start, when a simple row of town houses or a smaller, contextual condominium building would have made so much more sense for the block.

These contextual, good-looking development projects can also be seen here in Carroll Gardens (though, perhaps, nearly enough). Of course, everyone here would welcome that kind of development. What so many people here oppose is the monster sized stuff that dwarfs everything around it and is a giant eyesore to the historical blocks around it, looking like it ought to exist someplace else. Carroll Gardens has a very distinctive style of architecture and not everything works here but then again why should it? Every neighborhood and its own distinct character and flavor…Carroll Gardens is a community, not a development site.

More pics below.