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Rally Against Demolition for Enormous ‘Temporary’ Parking Lots

Forest City Ratner plans to demolish two entire city blocks â€“ including historic buildings that should be reused like the Ward Bakery - to create enormous â€œtemporaryâ€ surface parking lots for over 1400 cars that would blight Brooklyn for decades.

By Aaron Donovan

10:59 PM EDT on April 1, 2007

Forest City Ratner plans to demolish two entire city blocks â€“ including historic buildings that should be reused like the Ward Bakery – to create enormous â€œtemporaryâ€ surface parking lots for over 1400 cars that would blight Brooklyn for decades.

These parking lots will also encourage more people to drive, leading to worse traffic, worse air quality, and worse quality of life for those living in the surrounding neighborhoods. And they simply arenâ€™t needed. No other large-scale development in the city has required the demolition of two city blocks for parking.

We need to send Eliot Spitzer and Mike Bloomberg a simple message: New Yorkers deserve better. Please join BrooklynSpeaks.net to rally against demolition for parking. There will be passionate speeches and great music â€“ the Lafayette Inspirational Gospel Choir and singer Dave Hall will be performing.

Aaron Donovan

Before he began blogging about land use and transportation, Aaron Donovan wrote The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund's annual fundraising appeal for three years and earned a master's degree in urban planning from Columbia. Since then, he has worked for nonprofit organizations devoted to New York City economic development. He lives and works in the Financial District, and sees New York's pre-automobile built form as an asset that makes New York unique in the United States, and as a strategic advantage that should be capitalized upon.

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