Mr. and Mrs. Gianciotta, Tish and Guido. President and Vice President of the Withers Street Block Association, are partners in the life as well as advocacy. Lifetime Brooklyn residents, they were leaders of the Concerned Citizens of the Withers Street Block  Association which they formed in 1978. They protested the city’s intrusion into the neighborhood in 1983, when it converted the empty buildings of the Greenpoint Hospital into a homeless shelter without any consultation with neighborhood residents and bypassing plans already submitted for middle income and senior housing. For 140 nights after work the Withers Street Association and allies picketed the hospital for the release of the eight buildings. They followed up by going to City Hall and the courts to reverse the decision. They also martialed people to clean up a transfer station that had been on the property and had become a dump site. They called the Department of Health and got elected officials to advocate on their behalf. Volunteers, including the homeless, brought in equipment and the former dump was transformed in the GREC garden, also knows a the The Red Shed. Tish works as a community liaison to Assemblyman Joseph Lentol and Guido, a WWII veteran, was a union delegate of local 83 of the Sanitation Workers Union.