We recently dedicated some time to removing graffiti from street furniture along Myrtle Avenue, and what a difference it made! Streetscape Inspector Raome Quinones, pictured, walked Myrtle Avenue to note graffiti locations and returned with the right tools for each job.

Myrtle Avenue street furniture like mailboxes, fire call boxes, and light poles look their best when free of stickers, spray paint, and other graffiti. Maintaining a graffiti-free streetscape requires ongoing efforts, and we aim to keep up with the graffiti as it crops up. In the meantime, enjoy the fruits of our labor: less graffiti on Myrtle Avenue street furniture.

The final opportunity for public input is fast approaching. Fort Greene Park is receiving $7M in funding to improve the park’s connection to Myrtle Ave, and we need to your input to make this project the best that it can be.

Join us, NYC Parks, and the Fort Greene Park Conservancy, Thursday, February 16, 6:30-8:00 p.m. at the Ingersoll Community Center. At this meeting, NYC Parks will present new design ideas, other updates, and solicit your feedback.

The Parks Without Borders competitive grant process began in late 2015. Fort Greene Park was seen as a natural fit for the program, particularly with the walled off northern border. Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership then teamed with the Fort Greene Park Conservancy to reimagine parks connectivity with the sidewalk and surrounding streetscape, outlining several possibilities in this document.

The meeting is free and open to the public. We’re excited about this opportunity for Fort Greene Park and hope to see you there.

Just the 411:
Fort Greene Park, Parks Without Borders Final Public Input Session
Thursday, February 16, 6:30-8:00 p.m.
Ingersoll Community Center

For live updates during the event follow our Twitter, @MyrtleAveBklyn.

Save the Date on Sunday, December 4th for the 3rd Annual Fort Greene Park Tree Lighting, sponsored by Apple Bank. Join us at the community event which will feature FREE cookies, hot chocolate, live holiday music performed by the Dr. Susan McKinney Secondary School of the Arts choir, a toy drive and Santa Claus!

Enjoy all of the fun happenings beginning at 4:30pm, and see the lighting of the tree at 5pm. Please bring new, unwrapped toys to be collected and donated to neighborhood holiday toy drives held by Fort Greene SNAP and the Whitman Resident Association.

FREE Hot Cocoa and Cookies are being served from Brooklyn Sweet Spot and Castro’s.

The event is presented by the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership and Fort Greene Park Conservancy.

After a long hiatus on the Myrtle Avenue Plaza construction project – being managed by the NYC Department of Design & Construction (DDC) – crews have returned to Myrtle Avenue in Clinton Hill to continue work on the forthcoming plaza.

During the week of November 14, crews will be excavating and laying framework for the small plaza area at the corner of Hall Street and Myrtle Avenue.  Once completed, this pedestrian space, directly in front of TD Bank, will include a raised planting area with two trees, six fixed benches and a number of bike racks.  The seating area – just outside of Key Food, Liberty Pizza, John’s Diner, and so many other eateries – may be a favorite new lunch spot for the neighborhood.

The city’s construction management agency, DDC, is projecting that plaza construction will be complete by mid-December 2016.

Do you have ideas on how to make Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill an even better shopping and dining district?  Share your thoughts on what types of new businesses you want to see or how you think the area could be cleaner or safer through our 2016 Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn District Survey.

Respondents to the survey will be entered to win one of four $100 gift certificates to a Myrtle Avenue of their choice (dependent on the availability of gift cards or certificates from the chosen business).  Hurry, the survey closes November 13!

CLICK HERE to take the short survey.

As the summer rolls into autumn, and construction on the Myrtle Avenue Plaza continues, we welcome the work of artist Nami Yamamoto that dresses the construction fence near the southwest corner of Myrtle Avenue and Emerson Place. The piece,  entitled Hakoniwa, is a wonderful use of construction landscape. Here is a bit of what Nami has to say about her work:

“The word Hakoniwa translates from Japanese as “miniature garden”, manifested as small, tabletop trays filled with sand and used by people to play out imaginative story lines tapping into inner feelings, thoughts, and unconscious insights. Borrowing from this idea, this piece takes the form of temporary banners used to cover the construction site along Myrtle Avenue and consist of arrangements of many motifs, creating different visual narratives based on the disparate yet orderly groupings of shapes of varying degrees of tangibility. These colorful, oversize silhouettes are drawn from a diversity of objects collected from the neighborhood, such as: a fragment from a plastic toy, leaves from sidewalk trees, crushed tin cups, plastic combs, a bicycle gear, oyster shells from a local business, and unidentifiable detritus. With these magnified collections of shapes, I invite pedestrians to engage in a visual dialogue of free association and reflect upon their relationship with the experience of identifying with a place.”

While you’re here please remember to stop and support the amazing restaurants, bars and shops in this area between Washington & Classon. They are all open for business and welcome you! Help us ensure that the 60 business impacted by construction continue to thrive by continuing to patronize your favorite businesses that have served the neighborhood for years.

Here’s how you can support businesses impacted by construction:

• Choose a favorite business to support consistently until the end of construction.
• Pick a business category (restaurants, salons or delis), and make an effort to visit every one of these in this particular area!
• Order food by phone instead of using online services, when possible. Restaurants sometimes pay a significant portion of their sales (sometimes between 12.5-20%) in fees when customers order their meals via online platforms. Ordering by phone helps keep all of your money in the neighborhood and fully supports our independently owned restaurants.
• Pick up an Eating & Drinking guide to see all of the restaurants and bars that are offering special discounts every Tuesday! Check out Tasty Tuesdays’ promotion.
• If you are a construction worker, check out our Hard Hat Specials.

…25th Street between Clarendon Road and Avenue D in Flatbush. We spent time there this morning in celebration of the 1st place Greenest Block in Brooklyn winners, the 300 East 25th Street Block Association. The 22nd Annual Greenest Block in Brooklyn contest, sponsored in part by National Grid, recognized green-space stewards from across the borough (including Myrtle Avenue). Congratulations to all of this year’s winners and thank you to all of the Myrtle Avenue merchants and partners that made our honorable mention possible!

Here’s how public space can engage us and, at times, teach us a lesson or two: Over the course of the last six months we have been working together with key community partners towards a sustainable approach to ornamental plantings in street tree-beds. The plants are being watered multiple times per week, and we’ve begun to place our informational decals at those tree beds housing native plants. Take time to stroll Myrtle Avenue as summer cools off to autumn and try to find some of the species of plants that are described on each decal. You can even take note of the soil conditions and watch as the conditions change in 1, 2, 3 years’ time. We’ve learned a lot from this entire process and are now planning for additional plants this fall. We hope to see you out on the Avenue, learning together with us.

With the first day of summer behind us, and the school year coming to a close, families may be looking for a few public places to cool off this summer in the Fort Greene & Clinton Hill sections of Brooklyn; lucky for you, we have a list of all of the sprinkler parks and outdoor pools for your family to enjoy as the temperatures rise in New York City. Here is what’s in the neighborhood:

Outdoor Pools

 Albert J. Parham Playground

Commodore Barry Park

Sprinkler Parks

Pratt Playground

Underwood Park

Cuyler Gore Park

Fort Greene Park

Greene Playground

Oxport Playground

Classon Playground

Washington Hall Park

Edmonds Playground

Commodore Barry Park

Albert J. Parham Playground

There is a lot happening on Myrtle Avenue this spring; here is a look at a few projects that are under way:

• Each year, and sometimes twice a year, we engage in planting annuals and perennials in the tree beds along the business corridor. This spring, with funds from the TD Bank Foundation, we were able to implement a program called TreEd on Myrtle; planting native plants in tree beds with the help of quite a few community partners including Benjamin Banneker High School.

• If you noticed, our tree guards (and benches) are a lot different than those in other parts of the city; they were custom designed with your help, and celebrate local art history. This spring we are sprucing them up with a special coat of paint (see the image above) that will mitigate rusting over time. Last week we also made final orders towards the installment of sixteen new benches and tree guards along the north side of Myrtle between Hall and Emerson.

• Over the years our benches, which have been a favorite among senior residents, have taken a bit of a beating over the years. We are wrapping up an order for new bench boards that are more durable, and look forward to them continuing to space for rest and relaxation on the avenue.

So, now that we have passed the official (unofficial) start of summer, and it’s safe to wear your white pants, please come out and enjoy your Fort Greene and Clinton Hill public spaces. And, while it is difficult to maneuver through the construction project taking place on the east end of the district at this time, please continue to support those businesses between Hall Street and Emerson Place. See you on the avenue!!!