The City Council has approved a 32-story tower to rise next to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The City Council approved a massive, 32-story tower next to the Brooklyn Academy of Music after the city agreed to increase the number of below-market-rate apartments at adjacent sites, a move that won the support of a key holdout.

Councilwoman Letitia James (D-Crown Heights) said she signed off on the $135 million development after the Bloomberg administration vowed to boost the number of affordable units from the traditional 20% to at least 30% at two separate development sites to the north of the site.

“This is really a victory,” James said after the vote Monday.

Earlier this year, James supported the plan to convert a parking lot across from BAM into a tower with space for cultural groups.

At the time, she called the project “a mix that reflects the needs of a creative and diverse district.”

But James, who is term limited and running for public advocate, changed her mind and demanded more affordable units. She also sought promises that developer Two Trees Management would use union builders.

The project has the support of many, including Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and Chamber of Commerce President Carlo Scissura.

The building is expected to include 50,000 square feet of cultural space, including BAM cinemas, the Pacific St. public library, and rehearsal space for local groups operated by 651 Arts.

The tower would rise above the parking lot at the center of this aerial photo.

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The 300-unit building will also have 60 apartments set aside for affordable housing, a 10,000-square-foot public plaza and several retail storefronts.

“I have always supported Two Trees vision for the project, and I believe it was important to ensure the project included significant community benefits,” James said.

The Council vote was 46 to 1, with Charles Barron (D-Brownsville) providing the opposition.

The vote was originally scheduled for last Wednesday but was delayed to get James on board. City Councilmembers typically defer to the lawmaker in whose district a project is situated.

The Two Trees building will not add more affordable units. The below-market rate units won by James will be in the adjacent sites, which are still in the earliest phases of development.

Two Trees Principal Jed Walentas was pleased with the overwhelming win.

“With cultural space, much-needed affordable housing and a new public plaza, we will be transforming a parking lot into an iconic building with many public benefits,” said Walentas.

The so-called BAM South building, plus the two other sites, is part of a larger BAM Cultural District, which city officials hope will be a Lincoln Center for Brooklyn.

rblau@nydailynews.com

Henry Miller SLEPT HERE

by Sean Silleck

Henry Miller loved to write about how much he hated New York, but all his life he remained nostalgic for the youth he spent in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He called himself “a patriot—of the Fourteenth Ward.”

A century ago, the Fourteenth Ward, as Williamsburg was then more commonly known, was a densly populated, working-class district, where the various  ethnic groups—Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Polish—lived elbow to elbow and constantly clashed. In his many recollections, Henry Miller described the neighborhood as “tender with violence,” filled with both warmth and sudden ferocity.

The unsparing honesty that distinguishes Miller’s writing was learned in the streets of Williamsburg. Nothing was hidden; everything was out in the open and seen by all. Love, sex, death, heartbreak, madness—the entire human spectrum—was there for Miller to observe. The dramas played out on the streets were as entertaining as any of the plays performed in the theaters and burlesques lining Broadway between Graham Avenue and the waterfront.

Here he met such friends as Lester Reardon, Eddie Carney, and Stanley Borowski, who later became characters in his novels and who, till the end of his life, he revered more than any Napoleon, Lenin, or Capone. Neighborhood personalities supported names that might have been borrowed from a playbill: Apple Mary, Jimmy Pasta, Crazy George, Crazy Willie Maine, Billy Wheeler the oyster seller.

Miller’s time in Williamsburg was the happiest of his life; he called it his paradise time. Like Hemingway’s Paris, the Fourteenth Ward was Miller’s moveable feast.

Between 1891 and 1901 Miller lived with his family—mother, father, sister, and grandfather, and the occasional aunt—at 662 Driggs, between North First and North Second. Virtually unchanged in a hundred years, the brick building is typical of much of the architecture of the neighborhood, with two floors of apartments above a nondescript, and now disused, storefront.

The massive Domino Sugar Factory that faces the East River with its iconic yellow sign is expected to soon be dwarfed by towering skyscrapers. However, there are some supporters who are rallying to get public support to turn the old factory into a cultural center.

Projection by the Illuminator on the Domino Sugar Factory (viaBrooklyn Paper)

As the Brooklyn Paper reported, late last month and through this week projections have appeared on the brick sides of the Domino Sugar buildings, with messages like “Buy Back Domino” and “Ka-Boom” (and also an “Occupy Istanbul” message, for good activist measure).

“The goal with something like this is mainly to raise awareness,” explained Grayson Earle with the Illuminator to Hyperallergic. “Basically no one in NYC knows what is happening with the Domino Sugar factory, and while maybe only one or two hundred people experienced the projections directly, a handful of local papers and online magazines wrote about it and turned people on to what is happening with the building. In previous actions I’ve also been happy to project because it really lifts the spirits of people around us. I know when we changed gears and blasted a message to Istanbul we received tons of tweets from people over there that were happy to know folks in NYC were thinking about them. We sometimes think of it as producing a spectacle, or a counter-spectacle, around a situation.”

There’s also another group that projected “Save Domino” in red light near the factory this week. The “buy back” refers to buying it back from developers Two Trees Management that is transforming the site over the next 15 years. The art interventions were organized by representatives of Williamsburg Independent People with the Illuminator (whose activist projection work was featured last September on Hyperallergic, and was seen recently on the occupied Cooper Union). WIP is the same organization that proposed transforming the sugar factory into a Tate Modern-like museum back when the plans for the abandoned building were less set in stone (or, more accurately, glass and steel).

View to the Williamsburg Bridge from the Domino Sugar Factory

Plans for the development of the Domino Sugar Factory site (via SHoP Architects)

While the plans from SHoP Architects that were revealed earlier this year for the Domino Sugar Factory 11-acre site are startlingly giant, with their block-shaped, cut-out skyscrapershaving room for offices, residences, and retail, there’s no space like this for culture, and that’s being seen as a missed opportunity. North Brooklyn, despite its strong art scene, still doesn’t have the anchor of a central institution to showcase its art and bring in the art of others in a museum setting. There is a group aiming to create a Brooklyn Museum of Science and Art in Greenpoint by 2019, yet the Domino Sugar Factory plan would have offered a venue for community interaction in a neighborhood that has little in the way of meeting centers for the diverse groups who live there.

However, as Jeremy Soffin, a Two Trees spokesman, explained to Hyperallergic, the new complex will offer many resources that Williamsburg is currently lacking, such as large spaces for start ups and other businesses, waterfront access where there has long been none, and a major affordable housing components. All of the retail added will also be local, with no chains, with the commercial development similar to what they’ve done in DUMBO. The office components are especially essential in hopefully keeping more people who live in Williamsburg working in Williamsburg. ”There will be more jobs here then the height of the factory 50 years ago,” he said, and that “right now, creative people who live here often go to another neighborhood, and this can be a magnet to keep people in the community.”

Inside the Domino Sugar Factory

Old machinery in the Domino Sugar Factory