Posted on January 8, 2016 by Joel Berg in City Limits City Limits, By Joel Berg St. Joseph’s Church, in Prospect Heights, was full of angry Brooklynites. It was 2002, and a significant portion of the neighborhood was still industrial, including empty lots filled with barrels of chemical waste. But the outraged crowd was there to protest what they perceived to be a much greater risk than toxic poisoning: a proposed small homeless shelter for women and children, to be located between Pacific and Dean Streets. The signs advertising the meeting included a map with concentric circles drawn around the proposed shelter, showing the distance each block would be from it, as if charting fallout from a nuclear blast.
