"State officials have slammed the brakes on a controversial plan to eviscerate part of historic Brooklyn Heights in order to modernize the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, conceding on Wednesday night that the shocking scheme is untenable," according to an article today at The Brooklyn Paper by Garry P. Buiso, who had reported July 12 that the state was considering condemning buildings in the northern part of the neighborood as part of a long-term project to widen the roadway.

The Department of Transportation last night announced that it would "simply need to buy too many homes and businesses near Willoa and Middagh Streets."

"When they finally did a ground survey, state inspectors discovered that 300-400 residential units and 80 commercial properties would need to be condemned, admitted Peter King, a project manager overseeing the $300-million first phase of the renovation of the BQE between Atlantic Avenue and Sands Street. You cannot talk about an alternative that runs roughshod in a neighborhood, regardless of what benefits you might have," King told a stakeholders group that met at St. Francis College on Remsen Street, the article said.

The announcement drew sighs of relief through the Heights and beyond, the article continued, adding that Stephen Wood, a Remsen Street resident, declared that "this would have been an environmental disaster."

Aaron Karp, the article continued, "said he was considering buying a condo in One Brooklyn Bridge Park on Furman Street - until he learned that the tony building may have been clipped by a widened BQE.

The article cautioned, however, that "but just because homes in the northern Heights have been saved, doesn't mean that eminent domain is off the table." adding that "That's because other possible scenarios to cure the aging highway include lower-impact designs that would involve little new construction and no property takings, but also three tunnel alignments that would involve property takings at the south end of the tube, at Kane Street in Cobble Hill, and at the northern portal at North Portland Avenue in Fort Greene.

Indeed, when the BQE was first constructed in 1954, historic Brooklyn Heights homes on Columbia Heights were razed to make room for the highway.

A final configuration and design isn't due until 2018, with construction to begin shortly thereafter. Final costs are unknown.

The State Department of Transportation is planning to reconstruct the triple-cantilever portion of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway under the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights the project is the first major rehabilitation of the roadway since its opening in 1954, and will seek to modernize the structure to meet the roadway realities it now faces - more than 145,000 cars and trucks rumbling along its surface each day. The highway was designed to last 50 years - in an age when it handled far fewer vehicles, King said. "The roadway's limitations - narrow lanes, inconsistent curves, lack of shoulders, short merge and weave distances - also makes it dangerous, the July 12 article said, maintaining that "From 2004 to 2007, a total of 674 accidents were reported between Tillary and Congress streets - a figure that is 10 times the statewide average."

"The irony," the article continued, "is that master builder Robert Moses created the existing triple cantilever underneath Brooklyn Heights after neighborhood activists defeated his initial plan for a highway right through the heart of the neighborhood....When the highway was constructed, a row of Columbia Heights brownstones - including the home of Brooklyn bridge designer John Roebling - was razed. And February House, a 'bohemian utopia' on Middagh shared by the poet W.H Auden, composer Benjamin Britten and writer Carson McCullers, was also doomed by the BQE."