The Battle of the Ugly Smith Street Cement Thing: Round Four

Oh, wow! This story is just fantastically appalling.

If you've read the Brooklyn blogs lately, you know that "architect"/public scourge Robert Scarano wants to build an ugly, eight-story metal—sorry, brick—building where the Carroll Street subway shed and plaza are. Residents largely don't want him to. I mean, really don't want him to.

So, they started raising a ruckus. One of the ways they did this was to paste informative (and snarky) materials about Scarano's plans on the sloping cement ledge which borders the subway shed on the Smith Street side. OK. Then, Round Two: a mystery SUV showed up in the middle of the night a week back and ripped a bunch of the stuff off and sped away. Round three: protesters pasted up new material. Now comes news of Round Four, and it's even more laughably unbelievable than the goon-action of Round Two. The cement thingy has been totally painted over overnight. According to Gowanus Lounge:

Mr. Kim at the deli and his employee told me last night that a van with the NYPD loaded with men in it came up to the concrete wall AND PAINTED OVER our signage!

Can you believe it? Is this what the NYPD has time to do? They left a broken down shopping carriage and a wall with ugly graffiti on it (i guess that was "as of right) but they managed to do a SUPERB job on covering all our signage with a nice grey paint.

So does Scarano have friends in the Police Department? Or did Carroll Gardens cops suddenly get proactive about graffiti? Creepy. Anyway, the Rebels have since already taped new material to the ledge. There's also a lot of stuff taped to the wall next to the subway entrance. (Hmm. That wall sure looks in need of a paint job.)




Gowanus Lounge also provides a little visual tour of Scarano's great works. Ee-Yikes!