OUR FIRST EMAIL TO GREEN-WOOD subject line: Placement of a boulder at the corner of 36th & 5th Tony Giordano May 29 (7 days ago) Dear Administrators: I apologize for the provocative subject line, but I wanted to capture your attention and yet be accurate with the point of this communication. Sunset Park Restoration Committee was the oldest and largest civic group representing Sunset Park. In keeping with our changing community and technology we have re-invented ourselves as Sunset Park Restoration 2000. We believe we are now the first cyber civic association in NYC. You can visit our web presence at churchroad.wix/sprc. Also we have a very active Facebook presence as Sunset Parker (not to be confused with several other Sunset Park sites without the er ending). Our FB site has hundreds of hits per day and holds discussions on the history of the community and current issues. With nearly 1,400 members we have a very diverse following. Aside from introducing you to us, we were wondering if you would be interested in a project that was just made possible by an excavation in front of OLPH at 60th & 5th Avenue. While making underground utility repairs a large boulder was removed from the ground and put on the sidewalk for later removal. Some folks waiting for the bus have taken to sitting on the boulder and calling it a bus bench. We felt that this was an incredible opportunity for Greenwood to help us create a tourist spot in Sunset Park. The oldest story of Sunset Park is The Legend of Martense Lane. It dates back hundreds of years and basically tells the story of a Black American slave coming home to Gowanus from a party in Flatbush. He meets a stranger on Martense Road (which actually skirted the southern border of Greenwood) and he and the stranger engage in a contest or duel. Some tellings of the story say it was a dance contest, others a fiddling contest. But in the end, the stranger is defeated and in anger stomps his foot against a boulder in the intersection. The foot imprint was that of a hoof - like a devils foot. And thus the story is one of the devil being defeated. The actual boulder was near Greenwood, but has been lost to history. We believe the appearance of this boulder just a mere 24 blocks away from 36th & 5th would be a great opportunity to have it moved to the sidewalk against your fence at the corner of 36th & 5th . We would pay the expense of imprinting the words Martense Lane on the boulder and a form of hoof print alongside. This requires very little cost and could become an instant point of interest for our community and Greenwood. We would like you to consider giving your approval (of course add any specific protections that Greenwood would like to have in your letter of support so as to not incur any liabilities from this). Time of course is of the essence to secure the boulder before it is removed. If you agree, we would immediately call our Councilmember Menchaca and our Assemblyman Ortiz to have them make arrangements for the boulder to be moved to the corner. Once it is on the corner we will have enough time to continue moving forward in a slower more deliberate fashion. We hope this is not too strange a request and look forward to hearing from you. Even if you decide not to support this effort, we hope that this communication will mark the beginning of a working relationship between us from here on
Posted on: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 21:49:06 +0000
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