Feb 9, 2012 2 min read Board of Standards and Appeals

50 Percent More Parking Added At Bay Pkwy Medical Facility

Protest-10-13-11-442x590 — A flier from an October march which protested the removal of parking spaces from the Calko Medical Center

The city’s Board of Standards and Appeals (BSA) has ordered the developers of a controversial new medical facility on Bay Parkway and 60th Street to include an additional 61 parking spots in its on-site garage.

The Calko Medical Center first aroused anger in the surrounding neighborhoods of Borough Park and Bensonhurst last year, when builders reduced the amount of parking spaces originally planned – despite the 231 spaces required for a project of that size. According to Yeshiva World News, developers had discovered a loophole that would allow them to reduce the original 231 spots to 116.

In August as the public review process kicked into full gear, parishioners at Saint Athanasius organized a bus to lower Manhattan in order to make their presence felt at a preliminary BSA hearing on the parking changes.

Then in September, Bensonhurst Bean reported that City Councilman David Greenfield had come out against Calko’s proposal to decrease the amount of parking in the facility by nearly half.

Yesterday, Yeshiva World News reported that the Board of Standards and Appeals – under pressure from Councilman Greenfield, Assemblyman William Colton, as well as the communities of Borough Park and Bensonhurst – had approved “the new facility, at 6010 Bay Parkway, under the condition that it has 177 parking spaces – 50 percent more than the developers wanted.”

“One of the top quality of life complaints in the community is the lack of parking. With a nine-story, seven-day-a-week medical facility under construction, you can only imagine how difficult the parking will become in the neighborhood,” Greenfield explained. “That’s why I am proud to have led the fight with dozens of community members to force the developer to increase on-site parking. The agreement to increase parking by over 50 percent on this facility is a major victory for the entire community. I thank the BSA, led by Chairman Meenakshi Srinivasan, for taking these issues into account, and Assemblyman William Colton for his role in this fight for more parking.”

While the final number of 177 fell short of the original 231 spaces, neighbors of Calko Medical Center still emerged victorious. They can rest assured that presenting a unified front got them more than 116 – an amount that most residents believe would have been deleterious to parking on the blocks between Bensonhurst and Borough Park.