A vacant lot on Fourth Avenue that will be renovated in the coming months. Maane Khatchatourian/The Brooklyn Ink

If all plans are finalized by the borough president, one of Brooklyn’s major thoroughfares will become unrecognizable in the coming years as it evolves from an accident-prone access road to a pedestrian-friendly commercial district.

A vision plan announced this summer calls for safety, beautification and commercial efforts to make Fourth Avenue more inviting. Long denigrated as the borough’s eye-sore and one of its most dangerous and congested traffic zones, the plan is intended to make the area comparable to Park Slope’s thriving Fifth and Seventh Avenues.

Josh Levy, chair of Park Slope Civic Council’s FORTH onFourth subcommittee, said the projects are also intended to correct problems arising from a 2003 rezoning law that resulted in residential buildings without ground-floor retail space.

“In 2003, there was a rezoning of a large swath of Fourth Avenue,” Levy said. “It allowed for large developments to occur. Starting in 2004, 2005, a lot of buildings went up … with disregard, reckless abandonment for the streets. Instead of getting retail at street level, interesting boutiques, cafes, stores, even professional offices — anything really — all we got were parking lots, empty walls, not anything that would grow the thoroughfare, encourage patronage.”

Carlo Scissura, the project task force chair for the borough president’s office, said the Fourth Avenue facelift will revive the district’s unique flare and unify the borough’s differing communities.

“It’s really such an important thoroughfare in Brooklyn,” Scissura said. “It brings [together] a group of diverse neighborhoods from downtown Brooklyn — from Park Slope, Sunset Park, Bushwick and Bay Ridge.”

Elected officials, community groups and task force committees are currently brainstorming potential courses of action. The ideas will be pooled together and passed on to Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who will compose a more concrete development strategy by this summer then seek funding for the project from city agencies.

P.S. 133 is under construction, one of the many development projects part of a Fourth Avenue facelift. Maane Khatchatourian/The Brooklyn Ink

According to Levy, the development efforts will consist of planting trees, creating street-level retail space, addressing community-wide traffic and safety concerns and enhancing subway lines.

“It’s going to be a long-term project — eight to 12 years,” Levy said. “It’s not a quick fix to transform a boulevard.”

The first step is to plant a few thousand trees and planters up and down the street, especially from 39th to 15th Streets, Joan Botti, chair of Community Board Seven’s Fourth Avenue Task Force, said.

One Fourth Avenue beautification project, the reconstruction of the Ninth Street subway station, is already underway.

For the first time in 40 years, Levy said the subway’s east station house is being opened for retail space.

“It will become the nicest and most renovated subway station outside of Manhattan, with the exception of [the station on] Atlantic Avenue,” Levy said.

Botti said the Fourth Avenue venture was born out of an older Ninth Street station rehabilitation effort. Markowitz allocated $2 million to refurbish the shopping area in the subway station, prompting Park Slope’s Civic Council to conceive the idea of the beautification of Fourth Avenue.

Other measures include installing elevators and security cameras in the R subway stops lining the avenue as well as improving the train schedule, Botti said.

“One of the items that has been coming up constantly is the lack of service or the tardiness, I should put it that way, of the N and the R train,” she said. “That’s one of the goals of the transportation committee, this committee and the task force itself to [decrease] the time between the R train and the N. What do they say, ‘rarely for the R and never for the N’?”

While plant life will make the street more environmentally friendly and aesthetically pleasing, the remodeled subway station with elevators will increase access for the elderly and handicapped and commercial businesses will promote economic growth, safety measures are developers’ primary concern. Proposals include increasing street signage, expanding medians between cross lights and alternating traffic patterns. Countdown timers were recently installed and traffic lanes reduced on Fourth Avenue.

Lifelong resident Duane Jackson attributed the increased development efforts to the other major construction initiative near Fourth Avenue — the Atlantic Yards project.

“The [Barclays Center] stadium has a lot to do with what’s happening,” Jackson said. “[The city] wants to make sure the area’s nicer to promote the stadium. That’s why I don’t understand the complaints, aside from being displaced. … I’m all for beautification.”

As Brooklyn neighborhoods become increasingly gentrified, concerns over displacement surround new development projects.

Local organizers said they would ensure that the area doesn’t turn into a sea of luxury high-rises that drive out lower income and rental tenants from the neighborhood.

Despite the cold wind and rain on this dreary off-season day in Coney Island, Peter Agrapides, Jr., owner of Williams Candy shop on Surf Avenue, was in high spirits this morning. Like other small business owners in the area, he was thrilled to learn that the city yesterday had finally won the bid to purchase seven acres of land in the neighborhood’s amusement district.

“Bloomberg is better for the amusement,” said Agrapides of the $95.6 million purchase from Thor Equities, a real estate development firm run by Joseph J. Sitt. “Thor wanted to change everything and remake [the amusement district] with condos,” he said, explaining that Sitt’s housing development plan for the boardwalk area could have caused his business to go under by reducing the influx of tourists.

Agrapides, whose family has owned Williams Candy since 1982, says he was pleased with the Mayor for reassuring local merchants that their businesses would remain intact. The mayor has visited the candy shop many times in the last year.

“He said, ‘Don’t worry Peter,’” recalled Agrapides of Bloomberg’s last visit to the shop. To show his gratitude, Agrapides made a special batch of candy apples that he delivered to the mayor’s reelection campaign.

Construction at Coney Island. Photo: Alessi/The Brooklyn Ink

Around the corner, Maya Haddad, the owner of the Coney Island Beach Shop on Stillwell Avenue, was equally pleased. “I think the city will be a really good landlord because they will take into consideration the needs of the community,” she said. Although the city will not be purchasing Haddad’s storefront “many more people will come here,” she said, “which will be good for business.”

Along the boardwalk, most long-time residents of the neighborhood expressed their satisfaction with the deal. “This is a great thing because it is like garbage now,” said Elizabeth, a Russian immigrant and 16-year veteran of Coney Island, as she strolled along the deteriorating, trash-laden boardwalk with her husband.

But others remained skeptical of the city’s motives. “They’re trying to get us to move, they’re trying to get rid of the old people,” said Catherine Pride, who has lived in Coney Island for the past 30 years. Pride, though, acknowledged that the city’s project would benefit the neighborhood in the long run. “I’m just trying to keep my apartment,” she said as she boarded a northbound bus on Stillwell Avenue.

The proposed apartment complex. Photo courtesy of Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects.

A developer’s plan to build a twin-towered apartment complex in Greenpoint is raising some eyebrows.

Several small business and property owners are challenging the constitutionality of using eminent domain for the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, because they say the taking of their land would be for a private, as opposed to a public, use. Photo courtesy of AP/Kathy Willens