Given the hornet’s nest of opposition stirred by a relatively small project like Billy Stein’s 360 Smith Street and the intense hostility directed at the Toll Brothers Gowanus condo rezoning proposal, there has been relatively little discussion about the huge Gowanus Green (Public Place) development between Smith Street and the Gowanus Canal. The picked the Hudson Companies development team to build ‘Gowanus Green‘ at Public Place between the Gowanus Canal and Smith Street. Rogers Marvel is the project architect. The original development was to include 774 apartments, 38,000 square feet of retail and 100,000 square of open space. Since the original announcement, more land has been added and the total number of residences could be close to 1,500. Yet, again, there has been very little public protest.

Until this weekend. That is when the city shot itself in the foot by scheduling a “scoping meeting” on the environmental impact study for Tuesday (December 16) at the height of the holiday season. Even worse, the news was only widely circulated starting on Friday. CORD, which fought hard against 360 Smith Street, circulated this email:

To: Elected officials and community groups surrounding the Public Place site

From: Gowanus Green Partners

We wanted to remind you that a public scoping meeting for the Gowanus Green proposal (aka Public Place) will be held on Tuesday, December 16, 2008, at 5 PM at Brooklyn Borough Hall, 2nd floor auditorium (the Court Room), located at 209 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201. HPD is the lead on the proposal. The environmental documents are available for download on the HPD website at:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/html/developers/Gowanus-Green-proposal.shtml We hope you will join us at the scoping session and provide your thoughtful comments and feedback on the proposal there, and in writing until January 23, 2009.

We can’t even find an emal from Community Board 6 in our inbox, although we did find several invitations to their holiday party at Aunt Suzie’s on Fifth Avenue tonight. (Maybe we’re just missing it or deleted it by accident, but we don’t think so.)

One person is not too thrilled with the development–both its size and the fact that it is going into a highly toxic site which can’t even be fully cleaned wrote us to say “this must be one of the most least advertised least known about scoping hearings in recent CG history.” Which is saying something, given that the city has slit its wrists numerous times and enraged people by not informing them well in advance of key meetings. One person who we believe to support the project strongly emailed us to say that “There’s always been a communication failure when these meetings are scheduled to let people know!” There are horrendous environmental issues connected to the site, which had been the site of a manufactured gas plant.