Dutch Kills Questions Rezoning Plans
BY THOMAS COGAN

Following a stormy Dutch Kills Civic Association meeting 10 days earlier, the Department of City Planning held an environmental assessment hearing just before Thanksgiving. The meeting, held in the school auditorium of Evangel Church on Crescent Street, was the latest part of the long process toward completing the Dutch Kills rezoning project. It lasted several hours, providing an opportunity for Dutch Kills residents and developers who are currently busy in that neighborhood to address a City Planning panel that was headed by Robert Dobruskin, the department's director of environmental assessment and review. It included Penny Lee and Joy Chen, who have worked long and hard in the cause of Dutch Kills rezoning.

The night's last three speakers live and work in Dutch Kills and were anxious about its fate. The first was Rita Rivera, who lives in an apartment house between 40th and 41st Avenues that faces an uncertain future. There are 32 families in the building, all of whom would be forced to leave if it were torn down to make way for a hotel or some other structure that a developer might erect before the new zoning law that prohibited such construction went into effect. Rivera said the landlord and superintendent refuse to answer any questions about what might become of the apartment house. She said she was driven from Philadelphia by a similar situation and certainly doesn't want to go through it again, especially since, as she said, "I love this area."

Gloria Maloney, the second of these final speakers, is literally a lifelong resident of Dutch Kills, never having lived anywhere else. She now resides in the house that belonged to her parents, but for some time she lived in a house on 27th Street that, she said, was ultimately torn down to make way for a hotel. She said the rezoning plan was aimed at enabling the construction of twoand three-family houses, a move that was retarded by the old zoning. But, she said, "on the verge of significant change". Hotels began to rise. Decades of forbearance seemed worthwhile as long as Dutch Kills remained substantially intact, until hotels a dozen stories high and built as-ofright transformed the neighborhood into a highrise area despite the new zoning.

The last speaker was Pastor Robert Johansson of Evangel Church. Johansson has been at Evangel for 20 years and he believed that the rezoning was a plan the neighborhood "could live with". He wondered aloud why a stop-work order was never instituted while the rezoning plan was instituted. "There is something wrong," he said, with a plan that allows 200-foot-high buildings to go up in a neighborhood where, for one thing, nothing nearly that high had ever been built before and where, for another, construction would not be permitted higher than 35 feet once the new zoning is finally in effect. He appealed to the Planning panel before him to institute the new zoning before its requirements have become worthless.

It is not solely up to the Department of City Planning to determine when the new zoning will be effective. The channels that the zoning plan must go through might take it at least another year. It could be an interesting year for Dutch Kills.