Brooklyn Heights preservationist Pearsall: Feisty new blood fighting BQE plan for landmarked Promenade
Six-lane plan would ‘decimate’ historic Heights
Young people in Brooklyn Heights are “springing up” to defend the neighborhood against the city’s plan to knock down the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and replace it with a six lane highway during reconstruction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Otis Pratt Pearsall told the Brooklyn Eagle.
Pearsall is the celebrated preservationist who led the community’s seven-year effort in the 50s and 60s to designate Brooklyn Heights as the city’s first Historic District. The district includes the beloved Promenade itself, with its protected views of Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge and Statue of Liberty.
Pearsall compares today’s BQE struggle to the battle to preserve the Heights 60 years ago. It seemed to the neighborhood’s new, young professionals back then that the staid Brooklyn Heights Association (BHA) “wasn’t doing anything to stop efforts to tear Brooklyn Heights apart.”
In 1958, a “new group of young activists” formed the Community Conservation and Improvement Council — CCIC (pronounced “Kick”) — and poured their energy into the fight to landmark the Heights, Pearsall said.