Submitted by tom gilbert, Sep 15, 2007 16:10

Re: "Over the years, some have tried, but none have succeeded, in bringing back the play center. In 1994, community activist Phyllis Yampolsky and others formed the McCarren Park Conservancy, but their plan to rehabilitate the facilities fell victim to shifting budget priorities after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001." -- This account is extremely misleading. Despite a long standing community consensus to replace the original 1936 pool with a year-round recreational facility including a smaller pool, so-called "preservationists" have stymied efforts to accomplish this for more than twenty years. Rather than take responsibility for depriving the community of a needed facility in order to save the bathhouses, two buildings of dubious esthetic merit and historic significance, they have attempted to shift the blame to alleged racists in Greenpoint. This is dishonest and balmes the victim. The planned rec center, funded and ready for construction in 1984, was stopped by Ms. Yampolsky and her allies. The 2001 plan, created not by Ms. Yampolsky's group, but rather by a CB#1 Task Force (on which I sat), which was quite similar to the 1985 plan, received overwhelming community and political support, but was stopped by the budgetary fallout of 9/11. The latest plan, part of Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC, is also quite similar to the 1985 plan, with the exception that it calls for preserving the bathhouses, no doubt in order to avoid dealing with the determined opposition of Ms. Yampolsky and her friends. The bottom line is that soon, we will have a facility quite similar to the one envisioned in 1985. Ms. Yampolsky and the preservationists will have succeeded only in delaying the project for 30 years, a huge price to pay for saving two useless and ugly piles of brick.

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