MAS & Brooklyn Botanic Garden Urge City Planning not to Certify 960 Franklin

The Towers would cover the Garden in shadows for hours each day, destroying hundreds of species of plants and endangering thousands of others

The President of Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG), Adrian Benepe, and the President of the Municipal Art Society (MAS), Elizabeth Goldstein, today voiced strong opposition to a newly submitted development plan for 960 Franklin Avenue that would cause catastrophic harm to the Garden. They urged the City Planning Commission (CPC) to withhold certification of the rezoning application that is based on a review of the developer’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS).

The development in question is a nearly three-acre site in Crown Heights, which at its nearest point is merely 150 feet east of Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a world-class horticultural institution that is more than 110-years old. The huge structure would devastate large sections of it by casting a shadow over BBG for hours each day all year long, with a particularly severe impact on the Garden’s 23 glass houses, including the three conservatories that house its world-renowned Desert, Tropical, and Temperate living plant collections. It will also plunge the adjacent Jackie Robinson Playground into deep shadow every afternoon year-round, robbing the children’s play area and its many trees of crucial sunlight. A petition opposing the development has over 50,000 signatures.

“This entire ill-conceived, vastly out-of-scale project is an existential threat to Brooklyn Botanic Garden and its century-old living museum of plants, and it will also cast neighborhood parks into perpetual shadow,” said Adrian Benepe, President of Brooklyn Botanic Garden. “The project itself, and the developers’ insistence on pressing forward despite widespread opposition at all levels, is a slap in the face to the people of Brooklyn and New York City. We strongly urge the City Planning Commission to deny certification for ULURP, and if it proceeds, to completely reject this utterly inappropriate and destructive project”

The developers are requesting several rezoning changes that would allow them to create a mega-development that would be the tallest series of buildings in the surrounding area, topping out with two towers at about 420 feet with 40-foot bulkheads.  The requested zoning class, R9-D would dwarf the existing zoning, which was put into place in 1991 specifically to protect the Garden from a destructive loss of sunlight. The developers’ plan concedes that the project would cause “significant adverse impacts” to the Garden, in a phrase that is repeated throughout the DEIS document. It states plainly that the shadows’ “impacts to both the Garden and Jackie Robinson Playground are unmitigable.”

“City Planning cannot properly review a project of this magnitude without a realistic picture of its environmental impact,” said Elizabeth Goldstein, President of the Municipal Art Society of New York. “The existing zoning was put in place to protect sunlight on Brooklyn Botanic Garden; nearby spaces like Jackie Robinson Playground and Medgar Evers College have been protected by it as well. If a developer wants special permission to defy that zoning, the people of Crown Heights deserve an honest assessment of the way their neighborhood may be forever changed.”