Built 20-some years ago when the city first started planning to develop what is now Gateway Estates, this stretch of Vandalia Avenue and its associated infrastructure have been lying dormant ever since, just waiting for their chance to shine.

A freshly minted row of town houses at Nehemiah Spring Creek looks to be almost ready for its new occupants.

With the intention of encouraging interactions among neighbors, all the driveways at Nehemiah Spring Creek are placed behind the houses, allowing the front doors to open directly onto the sidewalk.

This variegated row of rectangles is part of Nehemiah Spring Creek, a development within Gateway Estates, which itself is a new neighborhood of affordable housing, decades in the making, that is finally being built on a formerly empty expanse of landfill in East New York. Designed by the renowned architect Alexander Gorlin, these homes consist of prefabricated modules that are assembled in a factory at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and then trucked across the borough to Spring Creek.

The non-profit group putting up these houses, Nehemiah, is named after the biblical leader who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. It is backed by East Brooklyn Congregations, a consortium of local churches that banded together in 1980 to revitalize the blighted neighborhoods of Brownsville and East New York, places where other developers wouldn't even think about building. Nehemiah's focus has always been on keeping costs as low as possible by erecting large batches of houses at once, in the hope that a concentrated influx of new homeowners could provide stability to a formerly deteriorated area. They have been largely successful in this approach, but, as a result, their architecture typically lacks much in the way of character.

Spring Creek, however, offers a striking departure from the blandness of previous Nehemiah projects. The facades are still quite minimalistic, but their irregularly alternating patterns and colors are anything but boring. Walking around here on a foggy Sunday afternoon was a surreal experience; I felt at times like I was stuck inside an endless alien suburb, but I was simultaneously captivated by the arresting visual landscape. It's unlike any other place I've seen in NYC. Adding to the strange vibe was the fact that there weren't any stores or restaurants to be found — there is a gigantic mall on the south side of the Gateway development, but it's not accessible to pedestrians in the residential area — but apparently that's going to change soon.

of Find That Kitty!

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We know this guy, too!

by another couple of old friends: How and Nosm

This park, a rare green (and blue — Rocking the Boat is headquartered here) space in Hunts Point, was completed in September 2006, but was subsequently kept under lock and key after the city decided it was too dangerous for people to cross both the street that runs in front of the park and the single-track rail line (traveled by two extremely slow trains per day) that runs parallel to the street.

Why hadn't they thought of this before? Understandably, the community was upset that all they could do was stare longingly through locked gates at this beautiful new park. Finally, in May 2007, after a traffic light had been installed, crosswalks had been painted, and the Parks Department had stationed extra staff on site to watch for approaching trains, Hunts Point Riverside Park opened to the public.

Meanwhile, the city still needed to install automatic gates at the railroad crossing to replace the people monitoring it. As it happens, I ended up working on this project at my old engineering firm. On our site visits, it seemed as though the Parks Department track watchers literally just sat in their truck all day until the rare occasion when a train would come ambling down the line, at which point they would spring into action and make sure no one tried to cross until the iron stallion had passed on its way.

At any rate, it's good to see that the gates have not collapsed onto any children or anything. My favorite of the four was always the hilariously short one visible above, designed to block pedestrians on the sidewalk. That'll stop 'em!