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Today, the organization American Atheists unveiled the billboards that have been stirring up controversy since first announced last week. The Williamsburg sign, which features both Hebrew and English writing, is located near the Williamsburg Bridge.

To the non-religious eye, the billboard seems controversial in its message and location, but JewishPress.com sheds new light on just how offensive the sign is to the local religious community. According to the site, not only does the billboard’s unveiling coincide with the important Jewish holiday of Purim, which begins on Wednesday,  but also it contains a Hebrew word that cannot be erased. This makes trashing the billboard a sin.

“The Hasidic Jews of Williamsburg have certainly not been involved in pushing a national agenda of any kind,” writes JewishPress. “Posting an intrusive and insulting billboard in the midst of their neighborhood is nothing short of an unprovoked attack.”

Meanwhile, Dave Silverman, the president of American Atheists who ironically has a Jewish-sounding name, told CNN, “The objective is not to inflame but rather to advertise the atheist movement in the Muslim and Jewish community.”

Update: I’ve been having trouble finding a photo of the billboard. Turns out, it wasn’t unveiled on Monday as planned.

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On Friday, Gizmodo posted about some of the craziest urban plans ever proposed for New York City. One of the most fascinating and bizarre is Dr. Kennard Thomson’s 1916 proposal to fill the East River and create a new waterway between Brooklyn and Queens. The project would have united Manhattan and Brooklyn to create more space for housing and business.

Despite how crazy the proposal seems now, Thomson was a well respected and experienced urban designer. He called the proposal “A Really Greater New York” and published it in Popular Science, writing that it would “prepare New York for a population of twenty million.” The project would add fifty square miles of land and one hundred miles of waterfront and cost $50-100 million (about $1-10 billion now) for each year of construction. “As a result of the construction,” Thomson wrote, “it would not be much harder to get to Brooklyn than to cross Broadway.”

It seems that nothing was ever made of the project, but it wasn’t long before someone else proposed something similar. In 1924 the city’s traffic commissioner proposed a plan to drain the East River and convert the land into a highway in order to alleviate traffic problems.

google books

These projects seem insanely ambitious now, but the website BigThink writes that “land reclamation” was in vogue at the time, coinciding with the growing popularity of the zeppelin and exploration by air. Around the same time, there were proposals in Europe to connect England with the mainland and to dam the Mediterranean.

It’s clear today that at least someone thought Thomson’s plan was a bad idea. Had the city gone through with the project, Brooklyn no doubt would have taken on Manhattan’s aesthetics and costliness and most of us would probably be living on Long Island.

Check out the full proposal here, thanks to the magic of Google Books.

Jimmy Fallon as Neil Young. Bruce Springsteen as a younger Bruce Springsteen. This rendition of LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” appeared on last nights final night of Fallon’s Springsteen Week as well as the three year birthday of his show being on NBC. There was also a lengthy interview with The Boss on the episode. It’s all very special. And even if you don’t laugh out loud or enjoy the parody world of songs being sung in other genres, you can still appreciate this for how incredibly endearing it is.

freewilliamsburg

It’s probably not a coincidence that a green and white school bus with “OCCUPY” painted on it is currently parked outside the future site of Brooklyn’s first Whole Foods.

As I posted yesterday, the city granted Whole Foods a zoning variance that would allow it to build at 3rd Avenue and 3rd Street in Gowanus, ending an eight year effort to get the project going. No word yet on what the Occupy activists are planning to do there.

Update: It turns out that the bus has been parked in that location for at least two years. The vehicle is known as the “Vroom Bus” and predates the Occupy movement, with which it has since aligned itself. According to a blog post from February 2011, the bus runs on vegetable oil and belongs to “the Vroom Collective – a group dedicated to transporting activists and artists throughout the country.” So it looks like it is a coincidence after all, but at least they won’t have to travel far for this cause.

Does anyone have a picture of the actual billboards? From CNN:

The billboard wars between atheists and believers have raged for years now, especially around New York City, and a national atheist group is poised to take the battle a step further with billboards in Muslim and Jewish enclaves bearing messages in Arabic and Hebrew.

American Atheists, a national organization, will unveil the billboards Monday on Broadway in heavily Muslim Paterson, New Jersey and in a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood, immediately after the Williamsburg Bridge.

“You know it’s a myth … and you have a choice,” the billboards say. The Patterson version is in English and Arabic, and the Brooklyn one in English and Hebrew. To the right of the text on the Arabic sign is the word for God, Allah. To the right of the text on the Hebrew sign is the word for God, Yahweh.

Dave Silverman, the president of American Atheists, said the signs are intended to reach atheists in the Muslim and Jewish enclaves who may feel isolated because they are surrounded by believers.

“Those communities are designed to keep atheists in the ranks,” he says. “If there are atheists in those communities, we are reaching out to them. We are letting them know that we see them, we acknowledge them and they don’t have to live that way if they don’t want to.”