Will Red Hook Residents Smackdown Yale Students?

Gowanus Lounge is sorry we're going to have to miss what promises to be a most amusing show on Saturday. No, not Jill Scott, Queen Latifah and Erykah Badu at Celebrate Brooklyn. That, we'll catch. We're talking about the Yale Architecture School grad students that created the unpleasant visions of Red Hook's future and came up with such neighborhood-sensitive ideas as turning The Hook into parking for 31,000 cars and an animal preserve. Perhaps someone will tell them such suggestions are totally unhelpful and offensive in the context of a vital neighborhood with a proud history. Even better, someone should point out that their ideas could be misconstrued as being vaguely, well, insensitive or worse.

Do these students know that Red Hook's population is largely African-American and Latino? Are they are that two-thirds of its residents live in public housing and that the median income is slightly above $10,000 a year?

Now, whose neighborhood exactly do these Yale students want to pave and turn over to lions and tigers and bears?

Oh my. Listen hard, and you can hear the Political Correctness SWAT Team Strapping Up.

“Wow, is that what they’re teaching at Yale?” Craig Hammerman, district manager of Community Board 6 told the Brooklyn Papers' Dana Rubinstein. “I can’t imagine worse public policy.”

We have had our share of fun with these drawings and ideas. The broader point is that they embody everything that is wrong with the architecture and planning professions. Neighboroods are flesh and blood communities populated by real people. They are not blank canvases or backdrops for abstract academic exercises. Red Hook has real issues that are in need of real solutions. Too bad these Yale students couldn't apply their talents to them. Or, maybe, it's a good thing.

Professor Edward Mitchell and his students will be on hand on Saturday, Aug. 12, at 4 pm for an "artists’ talk." (The location is the Beard Street Pier site of the BWAC Summer Art Show at 499 Van Brunt Street, by the water.) Gowanus Lounge hopes that they're shown some Red Hook love.