The Brooklyn Paper: Full articles

DEVELOPMENT: BREAKING NEWS: City buys out Sitt (mostly) in Coney

By Gersh Kuntzman — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:51:01 EST

By Gersh Kuntzman

The Brooklyn Paper

Mayor Bloomberg has sealed his deal to buy Joe Sitt out of Coney Island, purchasing seven acres of the speculator’s 12.5-acre Coney holdings for a whopping $95.6 million.

City officials will formally announce the deal on Thursday, the New York Times reported. A spokesman for the Economic Development Corporation confirmed the deal, but said more details would be made available tomorrow.

Buying out Sitt is a key component of the Bloomberg administration’s plan to jumpstart the long-stalled renaissance of Coney Island. Sitt had his own vision of a $2-billion, 24-7-365 Xanadu with hotels, malls, new rides and indoor attractions, but city officials refused to talk to him about the zoning change Sitt would need.

Instead, Bloomberg sought his own rezoning and negotiated for more than a year to use taxpayer dollars to buy plots of land that Sitt acquired since 2005. The Times described the purchase price of $300 per square foot as “a huge amount in the current market.”

Until this week’s deal, the two sides remained at a standoff, with the future of Coney Island in the balance.

Like Sitt, Bloomberg’s plan calls for rezoning Coney Island’s derelict lots — some of them part of this week’s purchase — in hopes of creating a gleaming city-owned amusement park surrounded by enclosed attractions like movie theaters, shopping or a water park for year-round visitors and 4,500 units of housing.

In July, the City Council passed the Bloomberg rezoning, even though the city did not yet own the land that it hopes to see redeveloped.

A city source said that the land buy would enhance Coney Island’s historic amusement district because the city now owns more than 92 percent of the land it needs to create a 12-acre outdoor amusement park.

That said, the city still needs to spend more to acquire land for its full 27-acre amusement and entertainment district. Sitt will be able to develop his remaining lots under the new zoning.

For now, though, Sitt opponents were cautiously optimistic.

“The city’s purchase of land for a permanent open-air amusement area is a critical first step towards the revitalization of Coney Island — but it is not enough,” said Juan Rivero, the spokesman for Save Coney Island, an activist group.

“The city’s planned outdoor amusement area remains confined to a narrow 12-acre strip of land, squeezed in by a proposed multi-story entertainment mall and blocked off by a wall of proposed high-rise hotels rising up to 27 stories. Until the outdoor amusement area is expanded and the hotels are removed, the city’s plan would permanently compromise Coney Island’s potential to once again become a world-class amusement destination.”

Rivero called on the city to purchase the rest of Sitt’s land so that the amusement area is no longer “subject to the whims of real estate speculation.”

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DEVELOPMENT: City moving quickly to use its new Coney land

By Gersh Kuntzman — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:05:40 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Gersh Kuntzman

The Brooklyn Paper

The city is moving quickly to bring rides and other amusements this summer to seven acres of beach-front land that it bought on Thursday from landowner Joe Sitt — issuing a request for proposals from theme park operators this morning.

Mayor Bloomberg only announced the $95.6-million land buy on Thursday, but as he spoke, city printing presses were already churning out the official request for proposals, which seeks amusements on the three plots between the Cyclone rollercoaster and Keyspan Park that the city bought from Sitt.

The goal of having interim amusements that draw people to Coney Island in large numbers is one that eluded Sitt for several summers, an indication of why the city is moving so quickly to bring in outside bidders.

“We’re on a tight timeframe,” said one city source. “We know that.”

How tight? Economic Development Corporation officials will fly to Las Vegas next week to pitch their proposal at the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions exposition. And on Nov. 24, the same group will host would-be operators at an information session in Manhattan.

In both forums, EDC officials will no doubt herald the city’s land purchase as evidence that years of neglect at Coney Island are over. Mayor Bloomberg’s vision calls for a Coney Island amusement area reborn as a 24-7-365 destination featuring new hotels, restaurants, shopping, indoor attractions and, most important, a 12-acre open-air amusement park along the Boardwalk.

Most of the land in Coney Island has long been zoned for amusements, but not the kind that could generate enough income to make Coney Island thrive, said Sitt.

“It sounds strange, but the zoning didn’t allow some things like a restaurant or a hotel, or even allow for the new, high-tech rides,” he said.

This summer, the City Council rezoned a wide swath of the area to encourage a wider array of amusements and attractions, including those restaurants and retail, and also allow for the development of 4,500 units of housing to the north and west of the amusement zone.

Sitt could have taken advantage of that zoning, but Bloomberg made it clear that he wanted control of the neighborhood, even telling The Brooklyn Paper that he would deny Sitt the infrastructure improvements he’d need to build anything in Coney Island.

Such hardball forced Sitt’s hand. Indeed, at the press conference, Sitt likened the hard-bargaining Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber to the fictional gangster Luca Brasi from “The Godfather.” As the press laughed, Sitt apologized, but Lieber mumbled, “I take it as a compliment.”

Despite the “compliment” and Sitt’s talk of the “tough” negotiations, he did end up selling a little more than half of his Coney Island land for nearly $100 million — land that cost him significantly less when he started acquiring it in 2005.

And he now intends to profit richly from the land he still owns — mostly along Surf Avenue. He says he’ll build hotels, indoor amusements, restaurants and retail — though it all must wait until the city brings in modern electrical capacity and makes other infrastructure improvements that the mayor is now happy to provide.

But first, the interim uses. The request for proposals is fairly vague, saying only that the city wants amusements and “an enhanced visitor experience in keeping with Coney Island’s tradition of public access.”

The document also said that the winning bidder would likely have “a plan for the installation of a diverse mix of state-of-the-art rides and attractions, including thrill rides, adult rides, and family rides.”

Would-be bidders will have to present that plan in less than a month. Bids are due on Dec. 11.

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30 YEARS: Publisher looks back on ‘The Brooklyn Paper’ decades

By Ed Weintrob — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Ed Weintrob

for The Brooklyn Paper

We’ve come a long way in 30 years.

As Sinatra might say, we did what we had to do, faced it all and stood tall, and most of all … we did it our way.

As I sat with a cadre of believers in Minsky’s Bar on Remsen Street back in 1978, envisioning a new kind of Brooklyn newspaper with the simplest of monikers, we strategized for the future — but certainly not for 30 years. We were young and somewhat reckless, and 30 years was a lifetime.

Each of us was determined to stick it out through the storms to come, but we did not really know just how difficult those storms would be.

We’ve had a great staff over these 30 years, and most shared the vision. Our ability to stay afloat, our success, is their achievement.

• • •

The Brooklyn Paper was founded as a free newspaper at a time when the concept was at best a novelty, so it’s understandable that competitors might have been overly confident that our venture would be short-lived; instead, we outlived most of them along with numerous new entries, some of which were slick and well-financed.

The Brooklyn Paper began as a feature-driven bi-weekly covering Downtown and Brooklyn Heights — but as we stumbled upon story after story that no one else was covering, The Paper evolved into a hard-news weekly that would break countless big stories and report on its communities with integrity.

We established a high standard for quality community journalism in Brooklyn, and challenged our competitors to rise to our standard.

By popular demand, business necessity and ambition, we expanded from our original neighborhoods to cover all of Brownstone Brooklyn, then east to Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, for a time south to Midwood, and finally north to Williamsburg and Greenpoint. We packaged coverage of Brooklyn’s eclectic arts scene in our award-winning GO Brooklyn section, and published a smorgasbord of special editions.

As technology evolved, The Brooklyn Paper was among the early adopters and leaders of community newspapers nationally — both in print and online.

With all this in mind, please excuse us as we take a moment to pat ourselves on the back, and as we thank each of you — our readers, our advertisers and our friends of all stripes — who contributed to our success and who are joining us in our celebration.

• • •

The other day, Beverly Cheuvront, who edited The Brooklyn Paper in its earliest years, recalled the first time we spoke.

Before she applied for the editor’s job, I told her — I warned her, is the way she recalls it — that The Brooklyn Paper would be, in the parlance of 2009, a hyperlocal venture. I was all Brooklyn, all the time — born here, schooled here, lived here … leaving only to visit other towns named Brooklyn.

My spiel was somewhat of an exaggeration, but to useful effect. Beverly knew that she was signing on for an excursion in local journalism where, as I’d tell our police reporters, a purse-snatching from a Court Street office worker was more newsworthy than a multiple murder in a part of the precinct we didn’t cover. “Brownstone Brooklyn” was a new reality, and its geography was tight; Red Hook was as relevant to our Brooklyn Heights readers as Chicago’s South Side might be — not very. Think local.

• • •

While I might have been self-assured in my knowledge of Brooklyn and journalism at age 27, when The Paper was born, The Paper could not have launched or flowered on my energies alone.

Bernard Edelman, one of the best community newspaper editors ever, pitched in after leaving Courier-Life, a job that had followed his tour of duty in Vietnam. For us, he provided a steadying hand, great news judgement, and sage advice.

Beverly Cheuvront, who edited The Paper for four years, helped me establish the high editorial standards I sought, standards which carried on.

Laurie Sue Brockway, our first features editor, brought a light touch to The Paper in the earlier years and broadened our reach.

Ann V. Bollinger, following Beverly at the editor’s desk, left an indelible mark; she was at the helm during key challenges and expansions.

Every participant in the early years — our first photographers, artists, reporters, sales staff, production staff and office manager — set a very high bar.

Without exception the editors who followed — Paul Toomey, Margaret Daly, Tracy Connor, Karen O’Shea, Howard Altschiller, Diane Webber, Neil Sloane, Lisa Curtis, current Senior Editor Vince DiMiceli and current Editor Gersh Kuntzman — along with General Manager Alison Tocci and most of our staff, passed the test.

• • •

While today’s space doesn’t allow for an enumeration of everyone’s contribution, I’d like to acknowledge The Brooklyn Paper’s long-running employees who every day continue to make The Paper special:

• Lisa Malwitz: indispensable assistant, office manager, finance department, right hand and backbone of the operation since 1988.

• Vince DiMiceli: He came onboard as a Bay Ridge reporter in 1996 and emerged as the go-to guy for pretty much everything, exceeding even the broadest definitions of his two positions — production manager and senior editor. Today, he is a leading voice for innovation in our entire industry (though he still lays out our front page every week).

• Leah Mitch: The art director since 1999, she created the GO Brooklyn logo and section’s award-winning design, took our arts coverage online, and has steadily kept the creative juices flowing each week in design of all kinds.

• Gersh Kuntzman: The editor since 2005, Kuntzman is the only winner of the “Triple Crown” of community journalism — winning the Suburban Newspapers of America awards for editor of the year, columnist of the year, and newspaper of the year all in the same 12-month period; Kuntzman is a true believer in The Brooklyn Paper’s mission and in the value of promotion, re-energizing The Paper for a new era.

• Eric Ross: account executive since 2004, Ross has lent his humor and talent to his Brooklyn territory despite hailing from, and loving, New Jersey.

• Sylvan Migdal: Our Webmaster since joining us in 2006, Migdal rebuilt BrooklynPaper.com from the ground up, earning multiple awards for Best Web site in our class. His logos and sketches enhance our pages (a logo for our “Cleaning the Gowanus” series sets the standard — a guy in a Hazmat suit holding a toilet brush).

• And most importantly, The Brooklyn Paper’s publisher, Celia Weintrob, who joined The Paper in 1985. Celia’s shared not just The Paper, but my entire life; we married in 1989.

• • •

When I sold The Brooklyn Paper last March to a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, it was with the satisfaction of knowing that The Paper’s future was in the hands of a media company that understood the importance of community journalism and had a broad vision of its future possibilities — along with the means to get there.

The six months following the sale have been good ones for The Paper, and the future is promising.

With the obvious ferment in all media, only a fool would attempt to predict the future. Just as I didn’t try to predict it 30 years ago, I won’t try now.

But so long as our communities need a reliable source of information, and so long as businesses need a trustworthy avenue through which to communicate with their customers, there should be a place for The Brooklyn Paper — in whatever form technology may provide.

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TRANSIT: Another F’ing lie! Shuttle buses return on closed F line this weekend

By Gersh Kuntzman — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:29:24 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Gersh Kuntzman

The Brooklyn Paper

Shuttle busses replaced regular F train service again this weekend, despite a promise from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority just two weeks ago that the frustrating shuttles were done for the rest of the year.

Riders between Church Avenue in Kensington and Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn were forced to board buses all weekend, even though the MTA told The Brooklyn Paper last month that the kind of track work on the elevated portion between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens that requires line closures had been curtailed.

Check back at BrooklynPaper.com on Monday for a full report. In the meantime, avoid the F train.

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TRANSIT: The truth behind the F-ing lie: MTA ‘screwed’ up

By Ivan Pereira — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:03:44 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Ivan Pereira

The Brooklyn Paper

Shuttle busses replaced regular F train service again this weekend — and a “screw-up” by the Metropolitan Transit Agency left Brooklyn straphangers frustrated and confused.

As The Brooklyn Paper reported last month, riders between Church Avenue and Jay Street had been told that such shuttle service was done for the year.

So imagine the surprise of F riders to find the telltale yellow tape and “Shuttle Bus Stop” signs at every station between Kensington and Downtown Brooklyn. The snafu, it turns out, was the MTA’s fault.

“I screwed up,” the agency’s spokesman Charles Seaton told The Brooklyn Paper on Monday. Seaton was the official who had originally said that the ongoing track work on the elevated portion of the line between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens would no longer require the use of shuttle busses.

The humble admission of guilt did come with some caveat: Seaton said commuters could have learned about the service interruption on the MTA’s Web site, in stations or the popular MTA podcast “TransitTrax.”

Few Brooklynites got the memo — and they were furious at enduring another Saturday and Sunday on the shuttle bus.

“The trip takes too long. It sucks,” said Katisha Figueroa who was on the bus in Park Slope.

Another long-suffering rider said it took him and his kids one hour and 40 minutes to get from Bensonhurst to the Christmas spectacular at Radio City Music Hall, a popular venue in Manhattan, an outer borough.

The MTA never told me about the work the F train was having,” Marcello Ocello posted on BrooklynPaper.com after the Web site broke the news about the shuttle buses. “Indeed the MTA is a bunch of knuckeheads.”

Riders will have less to complain about this week, according to the MTA’s online service advisory schedule. There will be no shuttles this weekend, though Seaton could not say when the F line’s service interruptions would end.

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DEVELOPMENT: Astroland owner: I’ll be back (maybe)!

By Gersh Kuntzman — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:15:07 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Gersh Kuntzman

The Brooklyn Paper

The woman who kept Coney Island’s Astroland alive during the neighborhood’s long decline only to see it close down one season too soon says she wants back into the action.

Carol Albert, who sold her land to landowner Joe Sitt, who didn’t renew her last year, says she will make a pitch to reopen the space-themed amusement park now that the city has bought her land back from Sitt.

“Of course I’ll make a proposal,” Albert told The Brooklyn Paper days after the city issued a call for bids last week to run an amusement park on an interim basis until the city can bring in a permanent theme park operator and, if it all goes to plan, transform Coney Island into a 24-7-365 resort, entertainment, retail, and games destination.

Albert said she still has all the rides — except for the water flume — from the day Astroland closed for good last year after Sitt declined to offer her a third one-year lease extension. Such extensions were necessary because Albert sold her land to Sitt in 2006 for $30 million.

“I’d like to put a new amusement park there, with all the old rides and some new,” she said. “I’d bring in lots of new rides.”

Albert, who is attending an amusement park operators’ convention in Las Vegas, expects to face serious competition from some big-time theme park owners and ride manufacturers, who are beginning to get into the amusement park game.

Experts said that they expect bids from many companies, including the one that operates the Victorian Gardens amusement park in Central Park during the summertime. That company, Zamperla, did not return a call for comment.

Neither did Jim Seay, a well-known ride manufacturer who was on a city-commissioned Coney Island advisory panel earlier this year. Seay is expected to make a bid, too.

For now, city officials, who are drumming up business at the same Vegas convention are mum.

“We’ve received great feedback so far from a number of amusement operators,” was all that David Lombino, a spokesman for the Economic Development Corporation would say.

The city request for proposals seeks “the introduction of amusement rides and ancillary uses beginning for the upcoming 2010 season and extending for a term of up to 10 years.”

It said that the city would spend $2.2 million to ready the site for next summer — though not make significant infrastructure improvements.

“It is expected that the operator will use temporary toilets and generators,” the request for proposals stated.

It is unclear if Albert even has a shot at getting the Coney contract. Though many visitors think Astroland and Coney are one and the same, the city is now partnering with her foe, Joe Sitt, in uniting to rebuild the area, with the city taking the lead on the open-air amusement park and Sitt having a great deal of control over the construction of adjacent hotels, retail and indoor amusements.

In many ways, Coney watchers say, Sitt relieved the Bloomberg administration of a big headache: what to do with the underwhelming Astroland.

Still, Albert will fight to get back.

“My heart is in Coney Island,” she said. “Everybody knows that.

“Plus, the name ‘Astroland,’ which is synonymous with Coney Island, is trademarked,” she added.

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BROOKLYN HEIGHTS: It’s a neckdown showdown on Hicks Street!

By Stephen Brown — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:49:02 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Stephen Brown

The Brooklyn Paper

A new effort to make Brooklyn Heights more pedestrian-friendly may have taken a wrong turn, as new sidewalk extensions at Joralemon and Hicks streets will make the intersection a concrete obstacle course for fire trucks exiting the nearby firehouse.

Workers started installing traffic-calming curb expansions called “neckdowns” at three of the four corners this week — and when passers-by suggested that the wider sidewalks might pose a problem for turning firetrucks, a city inspector did the strangest thing: he agreed!

“Firetrucks are definitely going to be a problem,”

Ishwar Patel, an on-site inspector with the Department of Design and Construction told The Brooklyn Paper.

But he quickly backtracked — a bit.

“I’m just the inspector,” he added. “This is not my issue. The DOT [Department of Transportation] sends the designs, we implement them.”

But Patel did say that firetrucks would almost certainly have to go up onto the sidewalk to make a left turn from Hicks Street onto Joralemon Street.

Later in the day, after The Brooklyn Paper started making a federal case out of the inter-agency neckdown showdown, another Design and Construction engineer suggested that Patel may have exaggerated the concern.

But that engineer, Gerry Ambroise, also admitted that the Hicks-Joralemon crossing is “a tight corner.”

“I haven’t seen anything that says for certain that [a truck] cannot make it, but it’s tight,” he said.

Then, even later in the day, the Department of Transportation sent over a statement (on background, of course) that the agency and the Fire Department have been talking about the design and both are satisfied that everything will work out.

This curbside controversy has been a decade in the making. Believe it or not, but neckdowns and other traffic-calming measures began being implemented in 1999.

The measures have not always been popular. For one thing, some gadflies were muttering on Friday that the corner of Joralemon and Hicks is hardly a local speedway.

And more important (for some, that is), the new sidewalk material in the extensions appears to clash with the original walkway, which is in the Brooklyn Heights Historic District.

“Some people are often uncomfortable with change, and there may be an element of this,” said Rob Perris, District Manager of Community Board 2.

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PARK SLOPE: Subway suicide drama in Park Slope

By Will Yakowicz — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:16:26 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Will Yakowicz

The Brooklyn Paper

F and G train service in Brownstone Brooklyn was disrupted for two hours this morning after a man jumped in front of an incoming train at the Seventh Avenue station at around 7:35 am.

Police called it a suicide, but an investigation is ongoing. The man’s identity was withheld pending family notification, police said.

The unidentified man jumped in front of a Queens-bound G train. He died instantly, cops said, and service on both lines was suspended through 8:55 am.

The conductor was hospitalized for mental trauma.

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ATLANTIC YARDS: Dog pile on Ratner — another Yards suit is filed

By Stephen Brown — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:01:54 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Stephen Brown

The Brooklyn Paper

A welter of community groups and politicians joined the legal pile-on on Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project on Thursday, claiming in a lawsuit that the state shirked its duties by approving major modifications to the project over the summer without a review of the environmental consequences.

Brooklyn Speaks, a coalition of eight community groups that has taken a backseat to other opposition efforts, filed the suit in Manhattan Supreme Court on the grounds that the June modifications allow Ratner to take far longer to build the $4-billion, 16 tower arena, residential and office complex — and a longer build-out time only worsens the “blight” in and around the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic avenues that the project is supposed to remedy.

“The Empire State Development Corporation has ignored its statutory duty to act in the public interest,” said Assemblyman Jim Brennan (D-Park Slope), a member of the coalition. “By approving a modified Atlantic Yards project without so much as a new site plan, let alone a committed completion date, the agency has handed over to Forest City Ratner control of 22 acres of Brooklyn, no strings attached.

“The ESDC must address the likelihood that Atlantic Yards will continue to expand the kind of urban blight the agency now pretends the project will remove,” Brennan added.

The suit has some common ground with a suit filed in October by Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn and, as such, may be consolidated into one mega legal case.

“We are pleased that the opposition is getting bigger,” said DDDB spokesman Daniel Goldstein said. “It was big before and it’s only getting bigger.”

An ESDC spokeswoman did not seem too intimidated by the growing chorus of opposition to the project. “This new lawsuit is similar to the lawsuit filed one month ago,” she said. “Repeating this claim, however, does not make it any more valid.

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30 YEARS: 30 years, 30 stories: Our biggest news stories

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

for The Brooklyn Paper

Brooklyn has changed, and The Brooklyn Paper has been through it all the way. From urban renewal to the “brownstoners” to the young urban professionals, every newsmaker we covered had, in his or her small way, a role in creating “The New Brooklyn.”

Here’s our look back at some of the biggest stories of the past three decades (in no particular order!):

Business & commerce

1. Fulton mauled: The original vision called for a Minneapolis-style enclosed-walkway shopping experience linked to Modernist office towers on Flatbush Avenue, but by the 1980s, that had been scaled back to an attractively paved car-free mall paid for with federal mass transit funds. Planners hoped an attractive mall would bring back middle-class shoppers and also attract new residents of nearby neighborhoods — but it accomplished neither.

Three of the mall’s four department stores — E.J. Korvette, Martin’s and J.W. Mays — shuttered within a few years, and the lone survivor — A&S — shrank considerably and was rebranded a Macy’s; the venerable Gage & Tollner restaurant was eventually replaced by a TGI Fridays; even the mall’s brick walkways are now being replaced by conventional sidewalks.

The mall nevertheless remained a magnet for shoppers; its storefronts were in such demand that they commanded among the highest rents in the country. Yet the anchor-less indoor Albee Square Mall at Fulton Mall’s eastern end was a failure, in part because many of its stores were duplicates of what could be found outside on Fulton. Albee was eventually acquired by Bruce Ratner, who did an encouraging makeover (bringing in Toys R Us as an anchor tenant) and considered linking it to his nearby Metrotech office campus. Now it’s a hole in the ground.

2. Bank bust: Local savings banks and savings and loans — originally locally owned “mutual” institutions — first merged and then were taken over by distant entities. Among fabled Brooklyn names lost in translation: Independence Savings, Williamsburgh Savings, Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn (no relation to the Dime of Williamsburg that recently appropriated the old Dime of Brooklyn logo), Brooklyn Savings, Metropolitan Savings, Bay Ridge Federal, Hamilton Federal and The Greater.

3. Vacuum filled: There was a gradual corporate collapse in Brooklyn — accentuated by the loss of the borough’s locally owned banks and of the A&S corporate headquarters (which moved to Manhattan), as well as the decline, moving, closing or merging of such mega-sized businesses as Pfizer (founded in Williamsburg), Brooklyn Union Gas (a big player in the Brownstone revival, but now part of National Grid), New York Telephone, and other significant Brooklyn-based institutions. These losses created a civic and business leadership vacuum in Brooklyn now being filled by real-estate developers, back office operators, and entrepreneurs.

4. We’ll drink to that: Brooklyn Brewery resurrected, on a small scale, what was once a king-sized Brooklyn industry, and microbrewers followed; restaurant rows sprung up along strips long written off — the progenitors of Smith Street in Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens are so numerous that last week, Mayor Bloomberg said his buddies often prefer to eat in Brooklyn.

5. Storing the borough: Studies said it, Brooklynites knew it — the borough’s “under retailed.” Some retail developments — like Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Center and Atlantic Mall near Downtown, Gateway mall in southeast Brooklyn, and the Target-anchored Flatbush Junction near Brooklyn College — were welcomed. Others — like Charlie Katz’s foiled Brooklyn Junction on the edge eastern edge of Bay Ridge, and a scrapped shopping mall at the old postal center off Hamilton Avenue (now a Lowe’s) — were opposed as threats to nearby commercial strips, generators of traffic woes, and aesthetic offenses. Costco opened in Sunset Park to wide acclaim, and that neighborhood’s commercial strips continue to thrive; there are multiple Home Depots, and neighborhood hardware stores live on. Today, speculation persists — along with strong feelings on both sides — about the eventual placement of other big box stores, including a Walmart, in Brooklyn.

Sports & Culture

6. Baseball returns: The Dodgers left after the 1957 season — and with them went the borough’s proud (and long) tradition of professional sports. But thanks to the Mets — with an assist from baseball-mad Mayor Giuliani — a pro team (albeit a minor-league one) returned to Brooklyn in 2001 when the Cyclones took the field at the new Keyspan Park in Coney Island. Giuliani steamrolled local leaders’ hopes for a “Sportsplex” complex, pumped in lots of taxpayer bucks, and then illegally tore down the old Thunderbolt rollercoaster in the middle of the night, but he got Keyspan Park built. Though always competitive, the Clones haven’t won a New York–Penn League championship since their inaugural year, allowing Brooklynites to revive another tradition from the Dodger days: the annual cry of “Wait ’til next year!”

7. Rolling the ‘Dice’: The world knows him as Andrew Dice Clay, but for us, he’ll always be Andy Silverstein, the John Travolta lookalike who worked for his dad’s process-serving business on Court Street. Our intrepid reporter Laurie Sue Brockway spotted Andy doing his act one day — he was always doing his act! — and broke the biggest entertainment story to come out of Downtown Brooklyn since Woody Allen. Her first story ran in 1979, and it predicted the Dice Man’s coming greatness.

8. Winning the culture war: Perhaps it started with Spike Lee in Fort Greene. Perhaps it was Paul Auster or Steve Buscemi in Park Slope. Or maybe it was the publication of Jonathan Lethem’s “Fortress of Solitude” in 2003. But sometime within the last two decades, Brooklyn went from a backwater to being the cultural center of the world. The list of luminaries who’ve migrated (in some cases back) to Brooklyn is too long to run in our print edition, as is the list of institutions that fill New Yorkers’ cultural calendar. But it includes St. Ann’s Warehouse, Bargemusic, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and its relatively new Harvey Theater, and on and on and on.

9. Who’s a bum now?: This story was too crazy to be believed. The Brooklyn Dodgers abandoned the borough in 1957. Then, in 1988, three Bay Ridge guys opened a Third Avenue bar called “The Brooklyn Dodger,” filling the inside with baseball memorabilia. Everyone loved the joint — except the now Los Angeles Dodgers, who sued for copyright infringement. After an epic legal battle, the bar owners — the Davids against the baseball Goliaths — won. “The SOBs got what they deserved,” owner Kevin Boyle told us when the case was finally won in 1993.

10. Quite a ‘Sensation’: The most controversial story to come out of the arts community was the Brooklyn Museum’s decision to show off British art collector Charles Saatchi’s Modern art holdings in a 1999 show called “Sensation.” The show was controversial long before it hit the borough — thanks primarily to a single work: a Chris Ofili portrait of the Madonna enhanced with elephant dung and butterfly shapes cut out from porno mags. Then-Mayor Giuliani practically had an aneurysm from the piece and pulled $7-million in city funding. Free speech advocates manned the other side of the hustings, effectively demonizing the mayor as “anti-art” — not a position in which the man who liked to champion New York as the “capital of the world” wanted to find himself. The funding was restored, Giuliani was succeeded by Bloomberg and the museum got what it wanted: publicity.

Development

11. Brownstone Brooklyn: A movement by middle class New Yorkers to reclaim worn — very worn — historic neighborhoods around Downtown Brooklyn accelerated in the late 1970s and early ’80s. While properties could be gotten for a song, the work necessary to convert them into desirable habitats was both risky and considerable. The environment was often less than welcoming — many blocks were crime-ridden and it took a leap of faith to envision a bright future. Major Brooklyn institutions, including Brooklyn Union Gas (through its Cinderella program) and Con Edison (through Renaissance), encouraged the reclamation effort; banks began competing for business in neighborhoods that they had only recently been redlining; the Brooklyn Union Gas–hosted Brownstone Fair was a hub of creative energy. When the lights went out during the terrible 1977 blackout (just before The Paper started publishing), gas lamps — supplied by the Cinderella program — illuminated block parties on attractive Brownstone Brooklyn blocks, while nearby neighborhoods burned.

12. The new Brooklynites: Office and manufacturing buildings, schools and churches went residential, meeting an insatiable demand. After the Ex-Lax building on Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill became a co-op, many others followed, including St. John’s University on Schermerhorn Street, the Insurance Building on Clinton Street, 66 Court Street, the Eagle Warehouse at Fulton Ferry, and majestic churches. Even the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower lost its teeth, as dentists were evicted to make room for new residents.

13. ‘Witnesses’ to the future: The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, also known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, had begun their expansion before the Brownstone revolution, acquiring the massive Squibb Pharmaceutical buildings near Fulton Ferry. Their expansion continued through the 1970s and 1980s with hotel takeovers that included the Margaret, Bossert, Standish Arms and Towers, 360 Furman Street, and a “sliver” building on Livingston Street. Several of these structures have recently been sold to private or other institutional owners as the Watchtower continued expansion of an upstate campus.

14. The Eichner sanction: Developer Bruce Eichner rubbed the Brooklyn Heights establishment the wrong way. Eichner’s home at the Pierrepont Street entrance to the Promenade, which incorporated modern elements in a designed deemed sufficiently suitable for the historic district, was praised by architectural critics but opposed by Heights leaders. When his carefully restored Margaret Hotel was totalled by fire days before completion and Eichner sought a variance to rebuilt it to its pre-fire height, the Brooklyn Heights Association fought back. Eichner won, rebuilt the Margaret and, to the BHA’s angst, sold it to the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

At 360 Furman Street (the massive structure now known as One Brooklyn Bridge Park), Eichner devised a creative plan to save at least some of the building’s manufacturing jobs — by splitting the building, with high-end residential occupants on the water side, and manufacturers on the side facing the gritty Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. After facing BHA opposition, he sold it to the Watchtower, and all manufacturing jobs were lost.

15. Brooklyn Bridge Park: Shipping on the Brooklyn Heights waterfront declined as container ports in New Jersey and Red Hook thrived. The Port Authority, tired of the cost of maintaining a facility it no longer needed, sought in the mid-1980s to fill the site with low-rise housing and open space — enraging park advocates who favored a large and diverse greenspace, and Brooklyn Heights civics who saw their community’s viewplane threatened.

The plan was hooted down, and the concept of a Brooklyn Bridge Park, stretching from Atlantic Avenue to the Manhattan Bridge, emerged. The notion of a public park radically changed when the site became a state economic development project: recreational components would have to be paid for by revenue generated from housing or commercial development on site. Unable to start such development in the current recession, project administrators began some relatively simple open space construction this year.

16. New upscale enclaves: All it took was a simple rezoning for the Fourth Avenue corridor in Park Slope, the Williamsburg waterfront and Flatbush Avenue Extension to burst forward with new residential development. The real-estate bust has caused a temporary glut in units, but experts believe that they’ll all be filled — maybe not at the high-end prices developers were seeking — eventually. People want to live in Brooklyn — even if the buildings to which they move aren’t as attractive as some would like.

17. The fire this time: In The Paper’s early years, the St. George Hotel was a cancer in Brooklyn Heights. Rundown, with a decrepit subway arcade favored by homeless sleepers, there was little hope of redemption for the one-time biggest hotel in the city when a new owner failed to capitalize on a real-estate boom to convert his property to co-op or condo residences. Then, in 1995, a major arson fire destroyed a big part of the site, though eventually, the St. George was stabilized and became a residence for students from several New York City colleges.

18. The biggest project ever: Proposed in 2003 as the biggest development in Brooklyn’s history, Bruce Ratner’s $4-billion Atlantic Yards project — including housing and commercial components and an arena for the New Jersey Nets built around a superblock in Prospect Heights — met unexpectedly strong opposition and was stalled until the current recession forced at least a temporary cutback in its scope. As 2009 winds down, final lawsuits may be resolved to permit the start of some construction, providing financing can be had.

Politics

19. Oy!hara: There have been better scandals, but the saga of perennial candidate John Kennedy O’Hara is one of the greats. In the mid-1990s, O’Hara had been a thorn in the Brooklyn political establishment’s side. He backed rebel candidates. He campaigned against chosen party hacks. He made noise. And he railed against District Attorney Charles Hynes. Then he did something really wrong: He voted in an election. Problem was, O’Hara voted in a neighboring election district — and Hynes prosecuted him for it! The result was a long and drawn out legal battle that led to O’Hara’s conviction — the only person besides Susan B. Anthony to be prosecuted for the crime. He was disbarred and did his community service. Then fought to be reinstated as a lawyer — which happened this year.

20. Obama in Brooklyn: This was the greatest news story that we didn’t know about: When he was a law student at Columbia in the early 1980s, future President Barack Obama lived in both Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights. “I don’t remember the exact address,” he told The Brooklyn Paper in 2007, referring to his Park Slope home, where he is believed to have lived for about a year-and-a-half. “Then, I subletted for about three months in Brooklyn Heights, near the Promenade. On Sunday mornings, there was a bagel shop near the subway station, and I would go there and pick up a coffee and New York Times.” If we had only known. Who knows? We might be head of the FCC today!

21. Party Marty: While many people don’t know the names of their elected officials, in Brooklyn almost everyone knows Borough President Markowitz. He can walk down any street and elicit excited cries of, “Hey Marty!” and his boosterism for the borough is infectious; despite having virtually no power to do anything, he manages to get the name “Brooklyn” repeated all over the world. But the borough is split over Markowitz’s support for Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project, which required a subversion of the normal city planning process, a sweetheart land deal for the developer and large public subsidies. Whether it is ultimately great for Brooklyn or not, it’s Markowitz’s legacy.

22. Scandalous behavior: This may not be Chinatown, but it is Brooklyn, where the politics are rough and tumble. While most of our pols and judges are honorable folk, we’ve had more than a handful who wandered off the straight and narrow. To wit:

• Rep. Fred Richmond, reputedly the richest man in Congress at the time he was forced to resign in 1982, was investigated for allegedly committing, while in office, such crimes as harboring an escaped convict, possession of cocaine, “feigning” retirement from his company while continuing to exert control, and campaign financing regularities. Afterwards, an apparently distraught lover committed suicide in his apartment.

• Former Brooklyn Democratic Party boss and 11-term Assemblyman Clarence Norman was jailed in 2007 for soliciting a campaign contribution from a lobbyist above the legal limit and for pocketing a $5,000 campaign contribution. Small potatoes? The convictions were part of District Attorney Charles Hynes’s larger investigation of a “pay to play” judicial system that alleged that Norman sold judgeships in Brooklyn and forced judicial candidates to use his hand-picked campaign consultants.

• City Councilman Angel Rodriguez went to jail in 2002 for demanding a bribe worth more than $1.5 million from the developer of a Red Hook supermarket, in exchange for his support. “All I have to say is I’m extremely sorry,” he said when sentenced to four years and four months.

• Assembly Speaker Mel Miller automatically lost his seat because of his fraud and conspiracy in the theft of $200,000 from clients of his law firm. Referring to Miller and an aide who was also convicted, the sentencing judge said, “What makes this so serious is that they are men of prominence, educated men, officers of the court.”

• District Attorney Eugene Gold prosecuted Son of Sam and other notorious criminals during four terms. After leaving office, an incident at a prosecutor’s convention in Nashville in 1983 led to his admitting that he had “engaged in unlawful sexual conduct” and “unlawful sexual fondling” of a 10-year-old.

Crimes & misdemeanors

23. Day of infamy: No story over these 30 years matches the horror of 9-11 and its impact on The Brooklyn Paper’s readers. The relatives and friends and firemen and police who died; the terror seen, heard and smelled from the Brooklyn Heights promenade that morning; the shocked survivors streaming across the Brooklyn Bridge and through Downtown Brooklyn en route home; the debris from the Trade Center that settled on Brooklyn for days afterwards — all left indelible marks.

24. Homegrown terror: Terror plots in the years before and after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9–11 attack periodically put Brooklyn on edge. Trade Center bomb planners preached in mosques on Atlantic Avenue and in Kensington; on March 1, 1994, in the wake of the assassination of Arabs in Hebron by an Israeli from Brooklyn, a gunman open fire in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and killed rabbinical student Ari Halberstram; alleged terror plots were exposed in Park Slope, where bombs were being produced in an apartment for deployment in the Atlantic-Pacific subway complex. A long forgotten case of pre-Trade Center terror took the life of a resident above the Tripoli Restaurant on Atlantic Avenue in Cobble Hill in 1982. That arson case remains unsolved.

25. The ‘Burn Boy’: When Charles Rothenberg set fire to his 6-year-old son David, the Carroll Gardens community rallied to support David and his mother Marie. The horrific crime, committed during a custody dispute in 1983, left David with critical burns over 90 percent of his body and permanently disfigured. His mother remarried and resettled with David in California — and the story was the subject of the made-for-TV movie, “David,” starring Bernadette Peters and John Glover. Father Charles earned a maximum sentence — 13 years — but was paroled after less than seven.

26. Councilman slain: In one of the most shocking crimes to ever happen inside City Hall, a political rival to Councilman James E. Davis (D–Fort Greene) shot and killed his enemy from the gallery in the Council chamber before a security officer gunned him down. Davis’s own warmth and trusting nature indirectly led to his July 23, 2003 demise. On that day, Davis hoped to mend fences with Othniel Askew by inviting him to City Hall, where he planned to mention him from the gallery. Even in those post–9-11 days, councilmembers could spirit their guests through City Hall security screening by merely saying, “He’s with me.” Davis’s brother Geoffrey tried to succeed his sibling, but Letitia James, running on the Working Families Party line, won the election and remains the district’s councilwoman to this day.

27. Tense times: Racial tensions were rarely far from the surface through the 1990s. The Rev. Herbert Daughtry staged noisy Christmas-season rallies outside Fulton Mall department stores, demanding jobs under the threat of a boycott; Yusuf Hawkins, a black youth, was stabbed to death by a white mob in Bensonhurst — and when the Rev. Al Sharpton marched there in protest, he was stabbed; bitterness and justice followed the police torture (and coverup) of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima; Sharpton and Sonny Carson led nasty demonstrations against Korean merchants on Church Avenue, and Crown Heights erupted in days of anti-Jewish rioting following a traffic accident that claimed a black youngster’s life.

And the rest

28. One hundred and going strong: The Brooklyn Bridge Centennial was like no party before — except maybe the one for the span’s opening in 1883. The nation’s attention focused on New York Harbor as fireworks spilled from the bridge to commemorate what had been the world’s greatest engineering feat, and to cheer Brooklyn and New York as the epitome of American progress. Then in 1986, the world returned on the Fourth of July to view, from the then-grubby streets of Red Hook, past the chain-link fences into New York Harbor, an arresting display of fireworks encasing Lady Liberty on her 100th birthday.

29. For whom the toll tolls: For the entirety of The Brooklyn Paper’s history, the city has been talking about tolling the East River bridges — and borough leaders have been screaming about it. Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan — and a more limited version proposed by Gov. Paterson — have come close. The specter will be raised again soon enough.

30. Number’s up: Remember when the entire city had one area code? Few new Brooklynites do, but in 1983, New York Telephone (remember them?) proposed a new area code — 718 — for Brooklyn. Borough President Howard Golden protested vehemently, saying that a new area code would isolate Brooklyn. But others, most notably then–Chamber of Commerce President Joseph French, saw the new area code as a means to strengthening Brooklyn’s independent feel. In the end, French (who was a telecom executive, by the way) was right. Despite the temporary inconvenience, the new area code still feels hip today. No wonder people put it on T-shirts.

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This is ‘sick’: Bklyn councilmembers and boro biz group on opposite side of bill

By Ivan Pereira — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:10:40 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Ivan Pereira

The Brooklyn Paper

Brooklyn’s City Council delegation is pushing to give city’s workers more sick days, setting up a clash with the borough’s own Chamber of Commerce, which opposes the bill as too costly to Mom and Pop.

The debate burst into public view on Tuesday, when the Chamber and its allies squared off against 12 Brooklyn co-sponsors in consecutive press conferences at City Hall.

Chamber President Carl Hum said that bill is too strict for the small businesses in the borough that are struggling with tight staff.

“It’s just the wrong time to impose a mandate on the backs of small business,” he said.

The bill would require businesses with 10 or less workers to give their employees five paid sick days a year while larger businesses would have to provide nine days.

Hum added that the bill is unnecessary because roughly two-thirds of the Chamber’s 1,110 members already offer paid sick leave — albeit not always as generously.

“A lot of small businesses are more than 10 people, but they may offer five days. With this they would have to offer four more days,” he said.

Hum couldn’t be more wrong about the bill, its supporters said.

“We have more than a million workers who are now forced to choose between their own health, their family’s health, their co-workers’ health, their customers’ health and keeping their job,” said Councilman-elect Brad Lander (D-Park Slope), whose support for the issue helped him win the endorsement of the Working Families Party, which has made a paid sick day law a major initiative.

Lander, who was part of a rally for the bill later on Tuesday, is not the only Brooklyn elected to officially throw his support for more sick days.

Brownstone Brooklyn councilmembers Bill DeBlasio (D-Park Slope), Letitia James (D-Clinton Hill) and David Yassky (D-Brooklyn Heights) have co-sponsored the bill along with eight other borough lawmakers.

So which side is right? One independent group put out a study last month that claims the bill would cost businesses $332 million a year.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research study backs up some concerns that the bill is an economic plague to the borough’s businesses, citing a $320-million-plus cost to city companies — but the group also pointed out the financial benefits to businesses that offer more sick days.

And medical experts who testified before a Council committee on Tuesday backed up the group’s claim that the law helps overall productivity because healthy workers would no longer be catching bugs from their sick co-workers.

“The simplest, easiest, and most effective thing that can be done do to contain [illness] is to make sure that those who need it can take a day off work,” said Victor Sidel, a doctor representing an umbrella group of physicians.

Hum said that the Chamber has been lobbying members of the Council and has been pleased that they’re listening, he said.

But Working Families Party spokesman Dan Levitan argued that the bill should not be watered down.

“I think anyone can intuitively figure out that if it’s five work days out of 365 work days in the day it’s a relatively small cost,” he said.

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FORT GREENE: It’s lights out at Prison Ships memorial

By Will Yakowicz — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:09:41 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Will Yakowicz

The Brooklyn Paper

The eternal flame is not living up to its name — again.

The Prison Ships Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park, a tribute to the nearly 12,000 prisoners of war who died on British ships in the East River during the Revolutionary War, has dimmed — and residents’ tempers are burning bright.

“The monument is not getting the justice it deserves,” said Michael Molfetas, a Clinton Hill resident who was appalled that it had taken less than a year since the November, 2008 rededication ceremony for the supposedly eternal flame to go out. “It is here to show America’s strength and to give thanks to people who helped make America what it is today. It’s just not right.”

Last fall, more than 500 people gathered in the park to take part in a relighting ceremony to mark the memorial’s 100th anniversary. But this week, a fact-finding mission by The Brooklyn Paper revealed that three sides of the granite plinth, which sits atop the largest crypt of Revolutionary War remains in the US, are in darkness — and a fourth side is only dimly lit because one of its two spotlights is out.

The Parks Department said that the floodlights are working fine — they’re just a victim of modern technology.

“The lights work, but there is a programming issue with the timer,” said Phil Abramson, an agency spokesman. “We are working on correcting the condition.”

Of course, it’s not the first time that the 101-year-old Doric column and crypt — considered by many to be the most significant war memorial in the country — have been neglected. For decades after the eternal flame was darkened in 1921, the monument was allowed to fall into disrepair. In the 1930s, the elevator that took people to the top was dismantled, and the decay continued until just a few years ago, when the Fort Greene Park Conservancy demanded — and got — repairs.

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WILLIAMSBURG: Miss G train pageant is rolling ahead

By Thomas Garry — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:33:45 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Thomas Garry

for The Brooklyn Paper

Just like the train it celebrates, the Miss G Train pageant was an underdog itself.

The Nov. 19 competition is back on — and thriving — after being postponed last week for lack of interest.

Though the pageant was announced to great fanfare two weeks ago, no would-be Miss G Trains applied, organizers said. Last week, they actually canned the contest as a result.

But they reversed their decision and now applicants are trickling in like a G train chugging through Brooklyn.

So far, Erica Sackin is the front-runner. In the essay portion of her application, she praised the train for its newfound versatility now that it can take her to see her best friend in Greenpoint and her boyfriend in Park Slope (what, they’re not the same person?).

“The G train is a brave train, serving people who other subway lines have all but abandoned,” Sackin wrote. “Who else could attempt so much, trekking from the top of Queens to the depths of Brooklyn, with just a few short cars?”

She concluded her submission with a poem about waiting for the infamously tardy train.

“How many nights have I spent at your mercy, G train?/How many hours have I craned my neck, hoping to see that warm green light crack your tunnel’s abyss?”

Such essays capture the spirit of the competition said Dave Herman, president of City Reliquary, a civic museum on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg.

“We chose the G train because it’s the underdog of the transit system, yet many people still call it home,” Herman said. “New Yorkers have loyalty to the train that brings them home.”

The pageant is being held to promote the museum’s exhibit on “Miss Subways, Past and Present,” a collection of beauty pageant images that adorned subway cars from the 1940s until 1976. For the exhibit, photographer Fiona Gardner tracked down the former “Miss Subways” and compares them to their pageant photos.

Today’s contestants have much more room for interpretation than their predecessors, Herman said. Participants will be asked to wear whatever they think represents the typical G train rider, whether it’s “hipster vogue or commuter chic.”

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DOWNTOWN: From retail to residential

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

When we started covering Brooklyn, Downtown was holding on as a major hub for high-end retailers like the flagship location of Abraham & Strauss or the Martin’s on Fulton Street.

“There had been a lot of major chain stores” in the neighborhood, said Michael Weiss, executive director of the Metrotech Business Improvement District and member of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, an agency that works with the city to develop capital projects in the area.

During the 1970s, many of those chain stores started to go out of business and dragged down also retailers that fed off them. Crime overtook the neighborhood.

“It wasn’t until recently that things got better,” Weiss said. “For 20 years things were in decline.”

An urban renewal project on Fulton Street in the early 1980s, which created the Fulton Mall, ended up doing the area more harm than good when construction stalled, blocking shoppers from reaching merchants.

Weiss said that the construction of Metrotech, the $1-billion office and university complex, pulled the neighborhood out of that decline. Development on the project began in the 1980s, and by the mid-1990s, when Metrotech was completed, prominent Manhattan businesses such as the Chase Manhattan Bank and New York Stock Exchange back offices moved in.

That set the tone for steady change for the last 10 to 15 years, Weiss said. Crime dropped. The streets were cleaned up. Businesses returned.

The complex also kept Polytechnic University anchored in Downtown Brooklyn, which encouraged schools, such as Brooklyn Law School, St. Francis College, and the Pratt Institute to expand. The student population in Downtown Brooklyn is now roughly 35,000, Weiss said.

The crowning legacy of Metrotech, though, was the Mariott Hotel, the first hotel built in the borough in more than 50 years when construction started in 1996. It was so successful that demand forced the hotel to expand a few years later. Now, hotel projects are going up in several spots in the neighborhood.

What the neighborhood still lacks, however, are residents. After all, Metrotech only displaced roughly 250 people. The luxury condo towers that popped up like mushrooms after a 2005 upzoning along the Flatbush Avenue corridor will bring thousands of new residents, and there is always talk that others will renovate the spaces above the Fulton Mall storefronts into apartments.

“The newest trend is the advent of residents,” Weiss said. “That’s going to create a whole other sea change.”

His hope is that as more people move into Downtown Brooklyn, retail and restaurants will follow. Which, in turn, will attract residents from the surrounding areas, perhaps making it Brooklyn’s shopping hub once again.

“Now it is safe and it is clean,” Weiss said. “Retail doesn’t lead a neighborhood, it follows as residents go in.”

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DUMBO: A long journey from warehouse to hothouse

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

For 21 years, the St. Ann’s Warehouse performance space was in Brooklyn Heights before it moved to DUMBO in 2000.

Prior to the move, almost all that Artistic Director Susan Feldman knew about the then-wilderness between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges was that it was used in the Ferrari scene in “Scent of a Woman.”

She had never been there, despite the neighborhood’s rep for being an artists’ enclave amid the rundown warehouses and abandoned ferry slips. Even so, for years it had been largely desolate. After all, a blind guy supposedly could drive a sports car through there and not hit anybody.

When St. Ann’s moved to DUMBO, the neighborhood as we know it now had started to take shape. Grimaldi’s, of course, was there, as was Rice restaurant, but back then Jacques Torres was just starting his chocolate factory and David Walentas’s Two Trees Management was beginning to change the skyline.

“We felt, along with the developers, like we were building a neighborhood,” Feldman said. “Now it feels like it’s built.”

DUMBO is an ironic name. Walentas, who bought up most of the warehouses in the 1970s and ’80s, came up with the absurd acronym to give the neighborhood some panache. The name, though, didn’t come into common parlance until the last decade. Even into the late 1990s, the always-late-to-the-party New York Times still referred to the neighborhood as the (gag) “inter-bridge area.”

When St. Ann’s opened in 2001, “people had no idea where it was,” Feldman said. There wasn’t even an ATM back then — that didn’t come until Brooklyn’s Independence Bank opened there in 2003, she recalled. Feldman’s group had to put up signs to direct patrons to their events. “Safety was still a concern” as well, she said. Now, the theater draw up to 60,000 people a year.

In that time, many of the individual artists who lived and worked down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass have been pushed out by rising rents. Still, the neighborhood has retained its artistic character with major artistic spaces taking up residence there. Galapagos Art Space, for example, relocated there from Williamsburg. The DUMBO Arts Festival is a major draw.

Since 2001, the city has moved to reclaim its waterfront, perhaps most dramatically in DUMBO where down every street along the rivers edge is a spectacular view either of the bridges or the Manhattan skyline. In the last eight years, the city resolved decades-old differences about how to build Brooklyn Bridge Park from the bridges down to Atlantic Avenue and also rehabilitated Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, which attracted people to the neighborhood with outdoor movie showings and other events.

The ultimate sign that DUMBO had become a destination was when U2 performed there in 2006. A year later, Starbucks opened — the same year the neighborhood was named New York City’s 90th historic district.

— Michael P. Ventura

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DEVELOPMENT: ‘Shoot the Freak’ guy feels left out of the deal

By Gersh Kuntzman — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:05:41 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Gersh Kuntzman

The Brooklyn Paper

The owner of the Shoot the Freak booth — longtime Coney carny Andrew Berlingieri — crashed the Mike Bloomberg-Joe Sitt lovefest at City Hall yesterday to complain that the city’s billion-dollar dream for the amusement zone doesn’t include guys like him.

Though not an accredited member of the media, Berlingieri managed to asked a question during the Q&A that followed Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement of the city’s $95.6-million purchase of part of Sitt’s holdings to jumpstart a “comprehensive redevelopment” of the so-called People’s Playground into an all-year, modern amusement park run by a single outside theme park operator.

“Is there a place for us?” asked Berlingieri, referring to himself and other Boardwalk carnies who were, until Thursday, tenants of Sitt.

The mayor and economic development officials said that there would be a place for Berlingieri’s booth this summer, but beyond that, no one knows. Today, the city will formally seek bids from big-time amusement operators to do interim attractions in Coney Island — but eventually, the 12-acre city park will be operated as a single theme park run by one big company.

That kind of thing worries the man who turned a vacant Boardwalk lot into a great Coney attraction — a place where you can shoot paintballs at a live human target.

“It’s like anything else,” said Berlingieri, who also owns an open-air beer garden. “We were the ones who stayed with Coney Island through the bad times, and kept the spirit alive.

“And we’re the first to go when someone gets a big idea.”

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CLEANING THE GOWANUS: Feds: Navy and city could foot big bill for Gowanus clean-up

By Gary Buiso — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:10:36 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Gary Buiso

Community Newspaper Group

The federal government is now looking at charging the U.S. Navy and the city of New York for the clean-up of the fetid Gowanus Canal.

The Environmental Protection Agency notified the two entities last week, informing them that they potentially could be stuck with a bill if the federal government goes through with a proposal to designate the canal a Superfund site.

As The Brooklyn Paper has reported, the city’s contribution to centuries of pollution in the canal comes in the form of raw sewage that cascades into the waterway during heavy rainstorms — the result of a flawed and antiquated sewage system.

But this week, EPA spokesperson Elizabeth Totman said that the Navy may also bear some blame.

The service operated facilities adjacent to or near the Gowanus Canal and also oversaw government contractors that owned or operated facilities adjacent to the canal.

The EPA identified those sites as Navy piers at 33rd and 37th Streets; a Naval supply depot at Third Avenue near 33rd Street; the Bethlehem Shipbuilding yards at 19th and 27th Street; Sullivan Dry Dock at 23rd Street; and Todd Shipyards in Red Hook.

It is unclear how those sites — which are quite distant from the canal itself — had an affect on pollution in the Gowanus.

The Navy declined to comment.

“We are currently investigating the content of the letter and will respond to the EPA’s request for information as required by law,” said Navy spokeswoman Laura Stegherr.

The Bloomberg administration also said it was looking into the matter.

The city is on record of opposing the Superfund designation, partly because of the bill and partly because the mayor says his own clean-up plan will be faster and less expensive than a Superfund effort.

Federally overseen clean-ups tend to take decades, partly because alleged polluters and their successor companies tend to fire off lawsuits when the EPA charges them for decades-old pollution.

Con Ed, National Grid and the chemicals maker Chemtura have received prior notification from the EPA about possible charges for the clean-up. The agency has also sent letters to a variety of canal-side companies — such as Bayside Fuel Oil Corporation, Chevron, BP America, ConocoPhillips Co., Exxon Mobil, Kraft Foods, Honeywell International, and Unilever — to inquire about their practices in the canal zone.

The cost for the work on the Gowanus has not been finalized, but is expected to cost billions.

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ATLANTIC YARDS: Is the state playing lowball with Daniel Goldstein?

By Stephen Brown — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:15:09 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Stephen Brown

The Brooklyn Paper

State officials have finally put a price on Daniel Goldstein’s opposition to the Atlantic Yards project — it’s going to cost the activist $80,000.

Goldstein, the lone holdout in a Pacific Street condo building that is slated to be condemned to make way for Bruce Ratner’s basketball arena, has been offered just $510,000 for the three-bedroom unit that cost him $590,000 in 2003.

Goldstein, who runs the project’s principle opposition group, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, was miffed (to say the least) at the offer.

“I’m pissed off that the state is the low-balling me,” said Goldstein, whose last legal challenges to the project are on the verge of resolution. If those lawsuits fail, Goldstein said he’ll be forced to “go to court to get fair market value and just compensation.”

Goldstein’s lawyer, Mike Rikon, believes that the Empire State Development Corporation’s offer is lower than the market value of the apartment as a punishment for Goldstein’s opposition to the project.

“We saw the number and thought maybe they were being vindictive,” Rikon said.

Goldstein’s anger is not without irony. In 2005, Ratner offered him $1 million to pack up and leave — a bid that supporters of the mega-project sometimes cite as evidence of Goldstein’s obstinance.

But he drew a different conclusion.

“My home wasn’t for sale then,” Goldstein said. “Now [if the lawsuits fail] I’m being forced from it, and I want to be paid what’s fair.”

Fair is not what the ESDC is interested in right now, said a condemnation lawyer who is not involved in the Goldstein case.

“This is such an extreme lowball that it’s startling,” said the lawyer, William Ward. “You’re always going to get a low offer from the condemning authority, but not so extremely low. They’re being very punitive.”

State officials are required to pay “fair market value and just compensation” to landowners in condemnation proceedings. But the value of condemned units is subject to negotiations and appraisals.

Despite some downturn in the housing market, most experts agree that Goldstein’s renovated three bedroom has not fallen below its 2003 purchase price.

One local broker, Jesse Temple, said that such a unit — in a desirable area such as Prospect Heights — could fetch $825,000 to $900,000.

That’s nice green, but Goldstein said that his fight for fair treatment is not only a personal struggle, but an effort to bring attention to what he believes is mistreatment of all victims of the state’s “misuse” of its eminent domain power.

“All the eminent domain-loving pols — Paterson, Schumer, Bloomberg, Markowitz, DeBlasio and on and on — all blithely say, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get treated fairly,’” Goldstein said. “Well, the reality is: no, you do not. People understand that you will get screwed if you try to fight for your rights and fight for principles and fight for your home.”

In another irony, the state condemnation process also provides a “relocation firm” to help Goldstein find a new place. But the firm’s suggested apartment only rubbed salt in the opponents’ wound: For $510,000, all he could get was a two-bedroom apartment near Crown Heights that is two-thirds smaller than his current digs.

“This proves that what they’re offering [isn’t fair market value because it] can’t get me something similar in this neighborhood,” Goldstein said.

The ESDC did not want to comment beyond saying that the agency “used an outside appraiser” to calculate the value of Goldstein’s apartment.

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FORT GREENE: Crime is gone and all are welcome

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

Danny Simmons used to hang out in the clubs on DeKalb Avenue back in the 1980s, before he moved to the neighborhood in 1992.

“It was tough, it was gritty” back then, he said, but it “wasn’t a dangerous neighborhood as other were during the same period.” It was a working class black neighborhood of brownstones that also had a thriving artists community, based around the Pratt Institute, woven into it. That scene attracted Simmons, and he opened the Corridor Gallery on Grand Street in 1993.

Since then, “the most significant change I’ve seen is the amount of artists in the neighborhood.” Following the pattern of gentrification that has changed so many other artsy Brooklyn neighborhoods, Fort Greene’s artists, who made the neighborhood cool, were followed by young professionals who brought in higher rents.

“As the neighborhood got more services and got more appealing, it got more upper middle class people,” Simmons said. If you didn’t own your own space, “you got forced out.”

Back before gentrification, artists were able to find studio space in former manufacturing buildings practically abandoned as industry left Brooklyn. Many of those spaces are now loft apartments and condos.

Even so, Fort Greene hasn’t followed “that classic simplistic gentrification,” said Ursula Hegewisch, a local business owner, community activist and resident since 2001. “It’s not just upper middle class white people moving into the neighborhood. It’s all people. It’s not a homogenous neighborhood in any way.”

Back when he moved in, Simmons recalls that there were maybe five or six restaurants that had been serving the neighborhood for a long time. Now, the area is full of them. DeKalb Avenue and Myrtle (once known as “Murder”) Avenue have become virtual restaurant rows, he said, and the area around the Brooklyn Academy of Music has filled in with bars, eateries and other nightspots.

Along with food, the neighborhood is interested in preserving its history, whether it’s Fort Greene’s connection to Walt Whitman (who helped create Fort Greene Park) or to the Underground Railroad and abolition or to African-American artists who have lived there.

“People really do care about what’s going on in the neighborhood,” Hegewisch said. “In a good way, not in a busybody way.”

— Michael P. Ventura

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30 YEARS: Shots from the heart from our best photographer

By Sabrina Jaszi — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Sabrina Jaszi

for The Brooklyn Paper

Our photographer Tom Callan has been shooting Brooklyn for longer than a mob henchman. And he’s got the scars to prove it. Whether getting beaten up by Mike Tyson in 1998 or by thugs at the notorious Club Wildfyre in the late 1980s, Callan has been getting in people’s faces for years.

He’s quite simply the Avedon of community journalism.

As such, we invited him to share with you his favorite photos and stories from his 25 years with The Brooklyn Paper.

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BROOKLYN ANGLE: The tallest building in the borough is NOT the ugliest!

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:50:42 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

The Brooklyn Paper

Is the borough’s tallest building also its ugliest?

As much as I love the skyscraper, I have to admit that The Brooklyner, the narrow, 51-story on Lawrence Street in Downtown Brooklyn that is just a few inches taller than the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower, had apparently earned both titles.

Unlike that stately Art Deco edifice, with its unique design elements, I couldn’t help but feel let down by The Brooklyner, which will house luxury studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom rentals.

A tour of the inside of the building was certainly delightful, thanks to the drop-dead views, floor-to-ceiling glass, full services, a pool table, and decks on the rooftop and fourth-floor decks. But all that opulence only made me feel that residents are the lucky ones because once they get inside, they don’t have to look at the outside of the building — a monolithic bit of pre-Glasnost coldness that catches the eye and then punishes it for stopping, ever so briefly, on its patchwork metal exterior.

Or so I thought!

I called the building’s architect to ask him what the hell he was thinking when he designed such a repulsive residence — but guess what? I was dead wrong. The Brooklyner is not ugly at all.

It’s beautiful.

“It’s a handsome building that relates nicely to the cityscape,” said its architect, Randy Gerner, a partner in the firm of Gerner Kronick and Valcarel. “If you look closely, you’ll notice that the building gets lighter in color as it rises from the street. It gives the sense that the sun is shining, like looking at a mountain from far away.”

I wasn’t fully convinced. So I asked about the patchwork of red and silver metal panels on the facade that resembled the exterior trim on a 1960s-era baseball stadium. Again, I had misjudged them.

“We did a pattern of different colors so that the facade would feel as if it was woven together,” Gerner said. “It’s a tall building, so if the entire facade was, say, brick, it would just look like a wall. I did not want to have a wall. And the woven texture reduces the bulk of the building” in a viewer’s mind.

Bulk was not my issue. This is Downtown Brooklyn — if you’re going to build, build big, I say. My issue with The Brooklyner is that my obviously untrained eye found it so boring.

Fortunately, Gerner set me straight again.

“We did not use common materials on the facade,” he said. “Some others new buildings nearby use common materials. But we wanted ours to not only stand out as a skyscraper, but relate to Brooklyn.”

He dismissed the critics, like Christopher Henrickson, who wrote on his blog, Architectural Lamentations, that the Brooklyner “is so boring and unoriginal that it would almost appear to have no architectural design at all. The massing is slab-like and is essentially devoid of any positive aesthetic character whatsoever.”

Clearly, Henrickson had never picked up the phone and let Randy Gerner explain it all to him.

But not me. I’m man enough to admit it when my opinion is just dead wrong. The Brooklyner is the tallest building in the borough, but it is definitely not the ugliest.

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PARK SLOPE: The epicenter of the brownstoners

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

When Clem Labine, one of the first so-called “brownstoners,” moved to Park Slope, it was vastly different from the way that the neighborhood is commonly conceived these days. There was “nary a stroller to be seen,” he said,

“I had three kids when I moved in and there was nobody for them to play with,” he said. “Now Park Slope is nationally famous for its double-wide strollers.”

Labine, who is not related to the famous Brooklyn Dodger pitcher, wasn’t in the market for a brownstone before he bought one on Berkeley Place for $25,000.

He met Evelyn and Everett Ortner, the couple credited for starting the brownstone movement, and they talked up the neighborhood and provided him — as well as many other prospective buyers from Manhattan and Long Island — with two pages worth of homes for sale.

“Brownstone living wasn’t as fashionable back then,” Labine said. “And not as expensive.”

Much of the housing stock back in 1967 was run down and neglected. Many homes had been converted to Single Room Occupancy dwellings for workers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and at manufacturing jobs down in the Gowanus. Many had absentee landlords. Seventh Avenue back then only had two places to eat: Purity Diner (still there, but in a different location) and Michelle’s Restaurant on Flatbush Avenue.

The borders of the neighborhood also were far tighter than they are now. Sixth Avenue was basically the border then — past that and you were asking for gang trouble. And “Ninth Street was the end of the world,” Labine said. One had to worry about the “presence of dragons beyond Ninth Street.”

Urban pioneers looking to move into Park Slope found homeowners eager to sell. They were primarily Irish and Italian families who felt they had nearly missed out on the great move to the suburbs and were looking to avoid being trapped in the neighborhood.

The pioneers would work 10–15 years to spruce up the neighborhood and make it safer and more interesting and then the New York Times would write about it and attract more economically advantaged people.

Over time, it builds and churns until you have a neighborhood the way it is now, with strollers and housing costing 100 times what it used to.

Yes, some of the small places that made the neighborhood worth visiting and living in are being driven out, and some say that Park Slope might be in its cultural death throes.

Jane Jacobs wrote that the two businesses that can afford to stay in a neighborhood once rents are jacked up too high are banks and real estate offices, Labine said.

“The Slope is filled with bank outlets and real estate offices,” Labine said.

But change brings new life, too. Fourth Avenue — once the farthest western frontier of the neighborhood — is now booming with luxury development, a boutique hotel and trendy bars that attract Williamsburg hipsters (ain’t that a change?).

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30 YEARS: Our first two editors roast some old chestnuts

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

for The Brooklyn Paper

Our first editor, Beverly Cheuvront, and our first features editor, Laurie Sue Brockway, sat down with our current editor, Gersh Kuntzman, and founding pubisher, Ed Weintrob, to share some memories, a few laughs, and expense account pizza. Cheuvront is now director of communications for NYC Habitat for Humanity, and Brockway is Family and Inspiration Editor at Beliefnet, a spirituality Web site.

The Brooklyn Paper: Do you have any favorite memories from The Paper’s first year?

Beverly Cheuvront: Brooklyn was very “wild west” then. Politically and in terms of development, things were just out in the open. People didn’t hide a lot — they didn’t seem to think they’d get caught doing anything wrong, so the stories were there for the picking. You didn’t have to work too hard to find corruption.

BP: What was one of your favorite stories?

Laurie Sue Brockway: I remember the Times and the News had written these glowing stories about this developer at 66 Court Street. And Beverly had done some digging to find out that this guy had been convicted previously of swindles of this type.

BC: I decided to check out the guy’s background. This is what I’m talking out about with stories being out there for the taking. It was not that hard to find out that he was a convicted felon.

LSB: But [before the Internet], it wasn’t such a simple thing finding those physical documents in other states.

BC: We sat together when we decided to call him and get his statement. And the high-tech system we had was an answering machine with a tape recorder. We recorded his response so we had a record of what he said to me, and he came clean.

BP: It’s hard, even in this Internet age, to get stories like this exclusively. So both of you are responsible for setting the tone with some really amazing work.

BC: I think we were able to set the tone because Ed believed in it. I can’t think of a lot of people who would invest their life savings in a newspaper with the goal of trying to earn a living and encourage this kind of reporting. It’s not typical for community papers. It just isn’t.

BP: I understand that in the early days, the establishment in Brooklyn didn’t exactly love you, Ed.

Ed Weintrob: I had to meet with the Chamber of Commerce because they had actually discussed a formal boycott. One of the members of the board who was a lawyer said it’s really not a good idea for the Chamber of Commerce to officially boycott a newspaper. Then I had to go see the Citibank vice president and explain to her what a newspaper was about, that a newspaper just doesn’t print press releases. They were upset about the coverage of the police, they thought we shouldn’t print crime news.

BP: What other big stories might people remember?

LSB: Before I was a reporter, I was just an office manager. I swear I was sweeping the floors and I remember Beverly calling, “Oh Brockway. We have an assignment for you!” She sent me over to Episode 2, the brothel on Remsen Street, to see if I could get an interview with the prostitutes who were busted that week. They were back at work, so I said OK. I went and it looked like my dentist’s office, except the woman behind the door was wearing hot pants. I said “I’m Laurie Brockway and I’m here to get your side of the story. Can I just talk to the prostitutes that were busted?” So she says, “No.” And she goes and gets the madam. I think they let me in because they thought I was looking for a job. I said, “I’m here, I’m on your side, I just want to talk to the three women, really, we’re on your side.” And the madam says, “Get out of here.” She actually pushed me. So I remember for a half hour I walked around Brooklyn Heights, just circling and crying and thinking, “Oh my god my career is over, I blew it. My first assignment and I couldn’t get it.” So I went back and wrote a story about getting kicked out of a cathouse. I think it was my first story ever published. After that, I became a crime reporter and about a year later we got a call from one of the cops in the neighborhood, saying they were taking beds out of Episode 2 — and this time, the madam gave me an exclusive.

EW: The headline was, “Episode 2 closes, ending service to community.“

BP: The story of these last 30 years is the story of the revival of Brooklyn. The brownstoners moving in, renovating those homes, getting rid of some of this political corruption, etc. When you look back on those years, what do you think have been the significant changes?

LSB: I think we all wish we’d bought brownstones.

BC: Covering affordable housing got me interested in housing issues. The incident that really got me involved was in the heart of Brooklyn Heights. The landlord wanted to renovate it. He wanted to empty it out. He’d turned off all the utilities while people were living there. I found out about it from knowing the neighborhood. When I went there I met a very elderly woman who was living on one of the top floors, and she was carrying water upstairs to her apartment. She had no other option. So she was taking this bottle of water and carrying it up the stairs, and climbing up after it. All the way up to her top floor. Another story was about the absolute worst of the once-notorious homeless hotels, right across from BAM. To walk in there and see what was happening to the families there and the conditions they were living in was beyond belief. It was a city-run homeless shelter in a hotel. The city would pay the landlord astronomical amounts of money to house homeless families there. There was one family that had no bathroom on the whole floor. They had buckets. That’s how they lived. And the city was paying the market rate for these rooms. These were the kinds of stories about housing that set me on fire. We were not very popular for reporting those. BAM was very unhappy that we highlighted what was going on there.

BP: Any other enemies?

BC: One time, a liquor store was planning to open up across the street from an existing liquor store. The state liquor authority was just deluged with letters opposed to the new store. Then we looked at it closely and realized all the letters came from the owner of the existing liquor store! He generated them! We raised this with the liquor authority and the guy almost lost his license.

BP: You got the letters from the liquor authority and then went to the addresses to confirm that the letters were real? What gave you that idea?

BC: That’s what reporters do.

BP: Not anymore they don’t.

BC: Yeah, now you take the letter, write something off the top of your head, post it on your blog and it becomes gospel. But good reporters who do dig — they’re the ones who get the stories.

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FORT GREENE: Shooting ends chicken wing gravy train at Buffalo Wild Wings

By Stephen Brown — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Stephen Brown

The Brooklyn Paper

Buffalo Wild Wings has plucked the feathers off its weekly cheap wings promotion after hordes of rowdy students descended on the sports bar, resulting in two separate shooting incidents on Tuesday night.

The three teens caught in the crossfire were not seriously injured, but that did not stop some local leaders from calling for a crackdown on the spicy appetizer emporium inside the Atlantic Terminal Mall.

Councilwoman Letitia James (D–Fort Greene) pointed the finger at the management of the sports bar for recklessly promoting its 50-cent “Wing Tuesdays” to students.

“I want this Tuesday restaurant promotion stopped, or the lease of this business revoked,” James said.

Within hours, the wingery responded by announcing the indefinite suspension of the promotion, which was long popular with students and even the ever-economical sluggers from the Brooklyn Cyclones.

As such, the joint was packed on Tuesday evening with students — many from outside Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, police said — swarmed the mall.

Most of the students did not actually make it into the packed restaurant, and instead congregated at the mall, where things quickly became out of hand. The restaurant closed its doors early, and the cops were called to restore order.

Outside the mall, gunfire erupted, though details are sketchy. One shooting was at Hanson Place and Flatbush Avenue, and the other was near the bow-tie intersection of Fulton Street and Lafayette Avenue.

“Although there was a huge police presence at the mall to address the condition and turn the thousands of students away and send them back home, apparently a few rogue groups managed to cause trouble while heading home,” Capt. Anthony Tasso of the 88th Precinct said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for the sports bar, which has 635 locations nationwide, said that the “Wing Tuesdays” promotion was not directed solely at students.

More likely, the crowds were driven by circumstance: this week’s 50-cent wing night fell on the day before Veteran’s Day — when schools were closed.

“It’s an unfortunate situation, but we weren’t enticing kids to come,” Liz Brady, the spokeswoman said.

Then again, it’s not the first time a buffalo wing binge has gone haywire at that location. James said that other promotions at the eatery have required police intervention.

She added that cops had approached her after the incident and said, “We got to do something about Wild Wings.” Of course, crime at the Atlantic Terminal Mall doesn’t only occur at the wing joint. Just last week, a man entered a candy store, brandished a gun and made off with the cash in the register — and the money in the tip jar, too.

Perhaps that’s why Capt. Tasso declined to characterize the three-year-old restaurant, which actually serves other things than wings, as a troublespot.

If there is any good news to come of the suspension of the cheap Tuesday wing promotion, it is this: a recorded phone message at Buffalo Wild Wings still says that the 60-cent “Boneless Thursdays” will go on as scheduled.

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WILLIAMSBURG: Have a beer and hear a great story

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

Brooklyn Brewery beer is now a premier Friday night lubricant for hipsters and other young people who flood the bars and clubs that glut the major avenues of Greenpoint and Williamsburg.

But when the brewery opened more than 20 years ago on Meserole Street in nearby Bushwick, things were different.

“The trucks delivering beer to the warehouse would not come after dark,” said Steve Hindy, co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery. “They were afraid.”

Crime was crippling in the late 1980s, and it was still lurking in 1991 when Hindy and his company moved to N. 11th Street and Berry Street in Williamsburg. He remembers the junkies. He remembers being robbed at gunpoint at the brewery when a bandit made off with $30,000 in 1995.

Gradually, things improved, following a course of gentrification that has since become nearly cliché. Artists and creative people pushed out of SoHo were taking up residence among the established black, Latino, Italian, Polish and Orthodox Jewish communities in the northernmost Brooklyn neighborhoods by the early 1980s. They made the neighborhood cool and, after a decade or so, the artists were pushed aside by the trustifarians, or hipsters with a wealthy background. They made the neighborhood hot for bars and clubs and restaurants and Starbucks and luxury condos.

But the hipsters’ disposable income, along with that of the yuppies and professionals who followed them, also inspired reclamation of the area’s decaying waterfront, bringing the prospect of new parks and open space, along with luxury dwellings that popped up like mushrooms after the 2005 upzoning of the waterfront.

“It’s been a revolution here,” Hindy said.

When Brooklyn Brewery started, in an area of the borough once known 100 years ago as brewers row, Hindy delivered to five customers. The only one in Williamsburg was Teddy’s Bar and Grill, which is still open and is one of the oldest continuously operated bars in the city. Now there must be more than 300 bars, restaurants and clubs in the area, Hindy said.

Despite the “tremendous influx of young people” into the neighborhoods, many of the traditional communities survive. The Orthodox Jewish community is going strong, and Polish is still the dominant language of Manhattan Avenue. Italians can still be found along Union Avenue, though that population is aging.

With the influx of young people and the high rents they brought with them, Hindy worried he, too, might be pushed out of the neighborhood. But the economic downturn was a blessing in disguise as Brooklyn Brewery not only renewed its lease, but has plans to expand.

“We’re glad to stay here,” Hindy said. “In the gold rush, it looked like we might not be able to.”

— Michael P. Ventura

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BROOKLYN HEIGHTS: The story of Brooklyn Heights? Stability

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

To see Brooklyn Heights now is practically to see it as it was 30 years ago, if not more.

With a landmark designation and a height restriction of 50 feet imposed in the mid-1960s, development of luxury high rises that have come to dominate neighborhoods from Williamsburg to Downtown Brooklyn to DUMBO have been impossible in Brooklyn Heights.

But that doesn’t mean that Brooklyn Heights hasn’t participated in the borough’s growth.

The neighborhood’s resurgence began with One Pierrepont Plaza. That project, Forest City Ratner’s first in the borough, kicked off not only the development of Downtown Brooklyn, but also provided a cautionary tale for the neighborhood. For years, the borough president’s office had promised that the parking lot on which the development was built would become a hotel, not the home for Morgan Stanley that it would eventually become.

From that battle, the Brooklyn Heights Association learned that it was important to dictate some of the terms of neighborhood debate with government officials, not simply react to what was imposed on them. Therefore, when ideas were kicked around for revitalizing the neighborhood’s waterfront, the BHA already had commissioned a plan calling for a park — instead of, say, housing.

That park was much smaller then — just piers 1–5. Eventually Pier 6 was added, along with park space to the north, making Brooklyn Bridge Park.

The restrictions on construction have not only maintained the architectural integrity of the neighborhood, but the upscale nature of it as well. The price of real estate has catapulted — whether it’s rent or property taxes for small businesses in the neighborhood.

As prices have gone up, small merchants have been forced out. Butcher shops and five and dimes have given way to the Gap, Starbucks and Brown Harris Stevens.

“We didn’t have Banana Republic 30 years ago,” said Judy Stanton, executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association.

Jennifer Convertibles was the first national chain in the neighborhood, Stanton recalled. That inspired others to follow, but given the relatively small storefronts, only chains of a certain size can find suitable space.

“Residents are supportive and want independent retailers and unique boutiques,” in the neighborhood, but with the high cost of rent and taxes, it’s hard for businesses other than chains to support themselves there, Stanton said.

Time was, Brooklyn Heights families would stash their children in private school before shuffling off to the suburbs. Now, “families are staying around and banding together,” Stanton said. PS 8, for example, is crowded now and parents, who had largely overlooked the public school, are now more involved in it.

Those families are also excited about the opening of the first phases of Brooklyn Bridge Park, scheduled for early 2010. They’re thrilled about having access to the waterfront and a place to bring their children.

“What’s not to like about that?” Stanton said.

— Michael P. Ventura

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CARROLL GARDENS: An enclave holds on

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

Buddy Scotto, a local funeral home director and community activist, once considered leaving Carroll Gardens and moving to Long Island. But his father didn’t want to move to the suburbs, as many New Yorkers did as the city was heading downhill in the 1960s. So Scotto stayed, too.

Like so many other neighborhoods in Brooklyn at the time, the Italian enclave of Carroll Gardens was in a gradual decline. A plan to bring a container shipping facility to Red Hook meant big changes to the community that had always been tied closely to Brooklyn’s waterfront.

“Everyone I grew up with was the son or daughter of a longshoreman, stevedore, or trucker,” said Scotto.

“Everything on the waterfront was to be demolished to make way” for the container port, Scotto said. People would have to be relocated. The little mom and pop shops on Union Street and Columbia Street — like Cioffi’s, where people would line up to buy Italian pastries during the holidays — what would become of them?”

The plans led to panic.

“A cloud of condemnation fell over the place,” Scotto said. “It got so bad, it felt like a bombed-out area.”

Thus spawned Scotto’s activism in the community. Over the next several years, he would form various organizations, work with politicians (regardless of party affiliation), and even rub elbows with Rockefellers and Astors to get money for improvements to the area. Through the Carroll Gardens Association, he helped create housing in abandoned buildings on Columbia Street.

In the end, of course, the massive container port never came to Brooklyn, opting for New Jersey, but Scotto remained active.

Through the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corp., he helped reactivate a 1911 flushing canal system that pumps fresh water into the highly polluted canal, and got funding to create a sewage treatment plant in Red Hook.

His belief was, if you help the depressed areas surrounding Carroll Gardens, you end up actually helping the neighborhood.

That belief holds true today as much of what’s left of the neighborhood’s Italian flavor gets diluted by a steady influx of young professionals that began decades ago.

Scotto calls them “Beatniks” because they were “doing counter to what was going on, which was you move to the suburbs as you move up the economic ladder.”

The “beatniks” moving in now, though, are making it very hard for the original community to stay. That’s why Scotto is against the current plan to designate the Gowanus Canal zone a Superfund site — it would block hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, he said, some of which will be spent on affordable housing that will help stabilize home prices in Carroll Gardens.

“We’re a so-called ‘in’ neighborhood and they’re pushing the Italians out,” Scotto said. “They are people that can afford the neighborhood, that’s why we want affordable housing in the Gowanus.”

— Michael P. Ventura

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RED HOOK: On the waterfront, but not ‘On the Waterfront’

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

Red Hook was hit hard by the failed containerization plan of the 1960s. In many ways, it’s still struggling to recover.

Zoning changes were made to the area and buildings were condemned for the port that never materialized. Most of the shipping jobs that had come to define the neighborhood workforce had moved over to New Jersey, where a large container port with direct rail access to the continental United States was eventually built. Industrial and manufacturing jobs bled out of the neighborhood. Crime and arson jumped. All that drove many residents away — since then, the population has been cut in half, according to John McGettrick, co-chair of the Red Hook Civic Association.

By the 1980s, when McGettrick moved to the neighborhood, Red Hook had become the city’s dumping ground. There were up to 20 waste transfer stations in the neighborhood. Two sludge processing facilities were planned. The community fought back and those plans were scrapped, McGettrick said. They were able to close most of the garbage stations — only one remains. A cement plant was closed.

“For the most part, it’s changed for the better in the 21 years I’ve been here,” McGettrick said. For example, Louis Valentino Jr. Park and Pier opened in 1996, adding needed green space to the area. But there is still plenty of more to do to get the neighborhood to thrive.

“We need more housing, obviously,” McGettrick said. That would involve rezoning the neighborhood for more residential uses, which the city hasn’t yet done — some say in a misguided belief that the longshoreman economy will return. It isn’t, but if another industry moved into Red Hook, it could coexist around any new residential space, which is needed to attract other types of small businesses to the neighborhood.

For the time being, though, it seems Red Hook is being eyed for big box stores. Fairway supermarket opened in 2006, followed by Ikea in 2008, and McGettrick said he is “apprehensive about the possibility” of more similar stores coming in to the area. Those attract auto traffic for the most part, despite Ikea’s ferry service. The B61 bus is the only way into and out of Red Hook and walking is not ideal in the winter, when harsh, cold winds punch in from the harbor.

Improvements on the B61 are in the works, McGettrick said, but he’d like to see a bus that goes straight to lower Manhattan (it was talked about, but scrapped, in the last round of cuts), or a light rail set up along the waterfront to connect to the under-construction Brooklyn Bridge Park. Anything to alleviate Red Hook’s isolation.

Still, there’s a “very strong artistic community in Red Hook and many of them own their own properties and galleries,” McGettrick said. That means that Red Hook, unlike other parts of Brooklyn such as Williamsburg, Fort Greene or DUMBO won’t lose its artists if the neighborhood ever fully bounces back.

— Michael P. Ventura

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30 YEARS: Here’s the story of our first front page

By Ed Weintrob — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Ed Weintrob

for The Brooklyn Paper

I spoke this week for the first time in 30 years with Tom Bongiorno. Unbeknownst to him, his family played important roles in The Brooklyn Paper’s conception.

In the mid-1960s, Tom’s father Ralph, who had been the Brooklyn Eagle’s production manager and sports editor when it closed in 1963, founded and edited the weekly Brooklyn Times. He provided me with an exceptional opportunity, allowing me to write, edit and design a weekly multi-page teen section. This was heady stuff for a kid.

The germination of the business that would evolve into The Brooklyn Paper began through a fortuitous meeting with Ralph, and his son Tom, at 26 Court St. a decade later.

That’s how Tom’s picture ended up appearing on the front page of our very first edition (which is reprinted at the top of today’s front page), illustrating a story about rebellious secretaries. That’s Tom’s secretary in the picture about to pour a pot of coffee over his head.

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WILLIAMSBURG: Huge bust at hipster drug den

By Ivan Pereira — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:51:49 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Ivan Pereira

The Brooklyn Paper

Cops busted a Williamsburg super and two others on Wednesday for running a massive drug warehouse out of defunct bar and hiding their stash in a sauna.

Narcotics investigators seized more than $800,000 and 18 kilos of cocaine from the second-floor apartment above the former site of the Laila Lounge on N. Seventh Street between Wythe and Berry streets, according to the office of the city’s special narcotics prosecutor.

Three suspects — Ronald Lugo, 44, Christina Ladeveze, 48, and Johanny Olmedo, 51 — were arraigned on drug possession charges on Thursday night. Authorities believe that the trio stored the dope in the their apartment for distribution all over the city.

The men were held, but Ladeveze was set to be released on $10,000 bail on Friday — and her lawyer says she was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“She had absolutely nothing to do with those charges,” said the attorney, Bettina Schein.

Authorities claim otherwise since the state police had the trio under surveillance for months before the raid on Wednesday.

Maybe it was their uncouth living style that tipped off investigators.

David Weinstein, 55, a musician who has lived on the block for a decade, said the suspects were not that social, but left a lot of trash out on the street every week.

The litter never included any contraband, just cardboard packaging for things like baby cribs, televisions and do–it-yourself furniture, according to the neighbor.

“I was like, man, these people generate a lot of garbage,” he said.

The suspects also gave Weinstein a weird vibe when they moved in sometime last year. He said that they didn’t fit the usual block demographic of young, affluent artists who used to dwell in the building.

“They looked like rock world hipsters, but older,” Weinstein recalled.

State police also thought something was out of the norm.

The big break came when investigators allegedly spotted Lugo exiting the apartment carrying two boxes to his car.

State troopers stopped him on the Bronx side of Triboro Bridge, and allegedly found 10 kilos of dope.

Once he was was arrested, investigators back to the apartment later in the day with a search warrant and found the money and the additional kilos of the pure, uncut coke in a sauna, authorities said.

The drug has a street value of approximately $3 million.

Lugo’s court-appointed attorney refused to comment, and the private attorney for Olmedo, who allegedly told investigators he was the building’s super, could not be reached.

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BAY RIDGE: The new ethnic mix

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

Robert Moses executed a one-two punch on Bay Ridge. With a right, he crossed the Gowanus Expressway through the neighborhood, parting it from Sunset Park. With the left, he hit Bay Ridge with an uppercut in the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

When the bridge, the longest suspension span in the United States at 9,865 feet, opened in 1964, it had forced the relocation of roughly 7,000 Brooklynites. Since then, it’s brought traffic to the area as people from New Jersey use the free ride across the bridge to take the expressway up to Manhattan to take advantage of the free crossings at the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges.

The Verrazano’s towers have loomed high over Bay Ridge since then as well and have served as a symbol of the city’s callous disdain for its neighborhoods before eventually become a source of pride as many local businesses have named themselves after it.

But back in the 1960s, many people across the city and south Brooklyn were leaving, with or without help from Moses. A promised container port never materialized and ended up devastating much of the Brooklyn waterfront, driving away residents and driving up crime. Bay Ridge, where many dockworkers had lived, was not immune to the sharp downturn, but many residents decided to stick by the neighborhood and ride out the bad times, which made for a more closely knit community.

Bay Ridge is often thought of as an Italian neighborhood because of movies like “Saturday Night Fever,” said Victoria Hofmo of the Bay Ridge Conservency. But many more people of diverse backgrounds live there as well, including, traditionally, Irish, Greeks, and Scandinavians and, more recently, Latinos, Middle Easterners and Chinese.

The neighborhood is “welcoming to new people,” Hofmo said, while it retains a sense of community that has always been strong there. “The common culture is here, very much alive,” she said, adding that she still recognizes many faces around the neighborhood and many people who have left also come back to visit.

Hofmo notes that the texture of the neighborhood reveals its Scandinavian roots and gives the lie to those who ascribe to Italian dominance of Bay Ridge. The protestant churches go back more than 100 years and were built in a Scandinavian style. Norwegians also started the local medical center, and built an old-folks home, too. She remembers a time, also, when Norwegian was taught in the local high school.

Time was that a new immigrant group would come to Bay Ridge every 15 years or so. “Now they’re coming quicker,” Hofmo said. “That doesn’t mean it won’t change again.”

When it does, the new folks will be welcomed too, while expected also to “respect what already exists,” she said.

— Michael P. Ventura

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30 YEARS: Atlantic Yards nears its climax

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

It seems like there’s always been an Atlantic Yards project at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues. It’s where Walter O’Malley wanted to move his Dodgers, but Robert Moses had other ideas. Moses wanted to build a baseball stadium in Queens and have the Dodgers go there. But, as everyone knows, instead of Flushing, O’Malley chose Los Angeles (and ignominy).

The Atlantic Yards site remained an under-developed rail yard for decades after that, though developer Bruce Ratner had his eye on it since at least the 1980s.

He had just built Metrotech, but shifted his attention to the Vanderbilt Yards. First he built the much-reviled Atlantic Center Mall across the street. Then he built the slightly better Atlantic Terminal Mall, with its busiest Target in the country.

In 2003, Ratner finally unveiled his plan for Atlantic Yards — a 16-skyscraper residential, hotel, office and commercial complex with a basketball arena at the core. His goal was to move his just-purchased New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn — a goal that earned him the uncritical support of most of the local elected officials even though some of the people they represent (especially some who were slated to be evicted) opposed it.

The project was approved in 2006, and for a few minutes, it looked like Ratner might actually meet his goal of having a Nets tip-off in Brooklyn by 2009.

Lawsuits followed, but whatever damage they did towards undermining Ratner’s ability to raise money to finance the project, the economy has done most of that job.

To cut costs, Ratner fired the project’s main calling card — architect Frank Gehry. Then, citing his own economic woes, the developer wrested more concessions from the state, allowing him more time to build — and more time to pay for the land on which he intends to do it. Earlier this year, he even sold 80 percent of the team to Russia’s wealthiest man, Mikhail Prokhorov.

It remains to be seen whether Ratner will get shovels in the ground before Dec. 31, his last chance to qualify for tax-exempt bonds to fund the project.

If he misses that deadline, the project could be dead.

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30 YEARS: At Brooklyn Bridge Park, lots of fits, but few starts

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

Why not blame New Jersey for the Brooklyn Bridge Park saga that’s engulfed Brooklyn’s waterfront neighborhoods for the better part of three decades? After all, it was cheap land in Elizabeth and Newark that tempted the container shipping industry to drift across the harbor after World War II, causing the slow disintegration of piers and warehouses from DUMBO to Red Hook.

The 1.3-mile-long, 85-acre park is scheduled to be completed in 2012, according to the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation, the state agency overseeing it. Roughly 8.2 acres will be occupied by a hotel and condo units that officials say will generate enough revenue to cover $15.2-million annual operations and maintenance costs. (They’re both on hold, of course, pending an upturn in the economy.)

The idea for a park from Old Fulton Street to Atlantic Avenue has been talked about since the early 1980s, and it was included in a waterfront development study by the Department of City Planning in 1990.

By 1994, 13 guiding principles were established for park development. One such principle? “The site shall have only so much commercial development in a park-like setting as is necessary to enliven the area, to provide security and to finance ongoing operations.”

By the late 1990s, developer David Walentas already had projects underway to overhaul DUMBO and he put forward a waterfront redevelopment plan that some worried would compete with the proposed park. That $300-million proposal included a multiplex theater, retail space and a hotel designed by architect Jean Nouvel. Public disapproval killed that plan.

A waterfront park, with or without retail, didn’t sit well in Brooklyn Heights. Many worried a new park would attract traffic, litter and crime, a position that park backers said smacked of (at best) elitism. As the New York Times put it, “Park boosters do not understand how people could oppose building a park on a fallow strip of land with such extraordinary views, especially when the alternative could be luxury housing or a mall.”

Brooklynites ended up with both, thanks to a state takeover of the project.

By 2001, the $150-million park plan had commitments of $65 million from the city, and $87 million from the state. Of course, the final pricetag has ballooned to more than $350 million, making it unlikely that the entire park will get built any time soon, but passive recreation areas at the foot of Old Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue are slated to open by the end of this year or in January, 2010.

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30 YEARS: Still looking up Downtown

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

Downtown Brooklyn was the center of the borough’s shopping universe. The flagship store of Abraham & Strauss department store was there. And so was Martin’s, another high-end retailer.

But the economic crisis of the 1970s forced many of those businesses to close, and crime and blight settled in. A plan in the early 1980s to spruce up the area hit construction snags that hindered customers from shopping at the few retailers who were left.

Now, it’s a schizophrenic neighborhood. The Fulton Mall — as it became known — is the busiest shopping street in the borough, albeit mostly with low-end merchandise. And at night, it’s dark, lonely and ominous.

That was supposed to change with the construction of Bruce Ratner’s Metrotech. After nearly a decade of planning, ground broke in June 1989 on the $1-billion “Metropolitan Technology Center,” an office complex that displaced 250 residents and 100 business owners to comprise eight new buildings and three renovated ones on a 16-acre site in the heart of Downtown.

At the time of the groundbreaking, the complex already had as anchor tenants a subsidiary of the New York Stock Exchange and the Brooklyn Union Gas Company, as well as an expansion of Polytechnic University, which was a developer of the site along with Ratner.

City officials then also touted two new buildings to be built by Chase Manhattan Bank that would house roughly 5,000 clerical and support personnel. The city persuaded Chase to come to Brooklyn by offering $235 million in tax breaks and other incentives, which was, at the time, the costliest incentive package the city had given to a firm to stay in New York. By one estimate, the city lost $47,000 revenue to incentives per job saved. The previous high had been $25,000 through a 1986 plan to keep NBC at Rockefeller Center.

Metrotech inspired other construction projects, including, in 1996, the construction of the Marriott, the first hotel built in Brooklyn in 50 years. And Lawrence Street is home to the borough’s tallest building (for now), the 51-story all-rental Brooklyner.

And a subsequent rezoning of the Flatbush Avenue corridor in 2005 has already resulted in a residential housing boom — with several apartment towers and plans for a park at the center.

The economy has stalled the boom — for now — but thousands of units are already built and thousands more are on the drawing board.

Will Fulton Mall ever realize the planners’ vision of a shopping capital for all of Brooklyn? That’ll take some doing.

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30 YEARS: Along the Gowaus, a sense that past is prologue

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

When the city launched its plan to clean up the Gowanus Canal, Brooklynites rejoiced. A flotilla of party barges processed up the two-mile tidal creek-turned-canal passing factories adorned in bunting. The party-goers then marched up to Fourth Avenue. At last, the New York Times reported, south Brooklyn’s “emancipation from the evil smells given forth by murky waters of Gowanus Canal” was at hand.

It was 1911.

Nearly 100 years after the city celebrated the opening of a flushing tunnel to bring cleaner New York Harbor water into the canal, the greenish slick that seems to have served as a catch basin for everything foul — from untreated sewage to heavy metals to slag to PCBs — still stinks.

But now a new odor is wafting over the canal — the smell of money. Real-estate speculators have followed artists into the canal zone looking to trade what little cache there is for condos and housing and even a Whole Foods.

Back in 1911, the mayor opened the flushing tunnel, despite his skepticism about the health affects of the canal’s contaminants.

“I never heard of anyone dying from the smell,” Mayor William Jay Gaynor said at the ceremony.

He was assassinated two years later.

Like Gaynor, Mayor Bloomberg believes that the canal is a key to redeveloping the area. But his clean-up plan is controversial — given that he only unveiled it after the Environmental Protection Agency moved to have the area designated a Superfund site. Such a designation allows the federal government to sue polluters and, eventually, get their money to clean the canal.

The mayor has said that such a plan would stigmatize the area, driving out would-be housing developers. Plus, Bloomberg says his clean-up will be faster.

That said, the city is one of the biggest polluters in the canal zone. Whenever there’s a strong rain, raw sewage — 300 million gallons of it a year, people — spills into the corpse of water. And the canal’s tidal flow makes the water brackish and incapable of supporting life.

The flushing tunnel was supposed to change all that by drawing water from the East River through a 12-foot tunnel along Degraw and Douglass streets.

The propeller that pulls in the water broke in 1960 and then nearly faded into memory before Buddy Scotto, a funeral home proprietor and community activist from Carroll Gardens, lobbied the White House and secured money in the 1970s. The propeller was finally fixed and turned on in 1999.

Two months after the fresh water returned, crabs were seen in the canal for the first time in years.

Other life has been spotted, too. In recent years, the canal has become an artists haven — with even a houseboat.

But the real future of the Gowanus Canal has not been written.

Until the feds or Mike Bloomberg clean up the water, the area will remain the way it has been since the last time city officials said that a clean-up was imminent.

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COBBLE HILL: Swish! Cobble Hill School may get new gym

By Stephen Brown — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:09:40 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Stephen Brown

The Brooklyn Paper

The same non-profit that builds parks in Afghanistan and basketball courts in Kenya is now looking at a Cobble Hill public high school, whose gymnasium is so tiny that the cheerleaders train in the cafeteria, dance classes take place in the hallways, and basketball teams practice on a floor with four massive columns that make a full-court game impossible.

Now, after over 10 years of sub-standard physical education, the Cobble Hill School of American Studies is close to building a top-notch multi-purpose gymnasium — with the help of Gamechangers, a sports fund that typically works in places a lot more impoverished than Brownstone Brooklyn.

Principal Kenneth Cuthbert has line up some initial design support from the group, plus $500,000 from Borough Hall, but there are still some hurdles before the $5-million dream can be realized for the school’s 727 students.

First, the school would need approval for an enclosed gym that would be built atop a concrete play area that is no use during the winter.

Then, the school is hoping that its final plans will be selected for construction by Gamechangers, which is run by Architects for Humanity and Nike Shoes, and would cover half the costs.

Architects for Humanity’s expertise appears necessary: The wretched current gym seems more appropriate for the developing world than a high school on Baltic Street between Smith and Hoyt streets.

Last Friday, teenage basketball players played on a pitiful miniature court that had a concrete wall where the three-point line should be and low-hanging pipes that forced the kids to throw bricks, lest the ball hit the ceiling.

The new environmentally friendly gym would have a full-size basketball court, tennis court and maybe even a track.

Tim Rice, the varsity basketball coach at the school, could barely contain himself when imagining the possibilities of a new facility.

“If we had a better court, we could be contenders for the city championship,” said Rice, adding that his team struggles to get used to full-court games in tournaments.

When Rice’s squad does want a proper practice, they make a long trip to a facility in Brownsville. And the junior varsity team has it even worse: During the season, it is always the “away team” because it has no home court.

But the gym’s potential would not only affect students with hoop dreams.

The new facility would expand the locker room — built for 25 students, but accommodating 140.

The push for a new gym started last year, when a student presented Cuthbert with a petition demanding a volleyball team. Cuthbert liked the idea except for one thing: the ceiling is simply too low for volleyball.

“The students want it. And if they have the desire, that’s half the battle,” Cuthbert said, adding, “If we want children off the streets and involved in the community in a positive way, we need this gym.”

The students aren’t the only ones. If the addition is built, it will be available to members of the community, too. Locals cheered.

“An indoor space is needed here — winter is coming and

our options are limited,” said Alexis Broben, who was playing with her 2-year-old son on the cement playground the other day.

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DINING: Thanksgiving? It all starts with a great turkey

By Melissa Murphy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:16:32 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Melissa Murphy

for The Brooklyn Paper

No matter how much effort we put into our side dishes, the turkey is the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving table. Yes, there are some people who don’t like turkey, feeling like they’re wasting valuable plate space with a balsa-wood bird. But you can turn those critics into carnivores by brining your turkey overnight.

Brining ensures that the finished product will be moist and flavorful — and stuffing the fowl with aromatics like apples, onions, clementines, sage, rosemary and cinnamon helps add a lovely flavor.

And in the never-ending debate over high-heat or medium-heat cooking, I prefer to stand in the fire. I start my turkey in a 500-degree oven to develop a beautiful golden color and crisp skin, then cover the breast with an aluminum foil “shield” and continue cooking at a lower temperature for about two hours. This method ensures that the breast meat is done at the same time as the dark meat, so the whole turkey is nice and moist.

Bottom line: This is a turkey that everyone will enjoy.

Cider Brined Roasted Organic Turkey with Giblet Gravy

Makes a 15-pound turkey for 12 people with some leftovers

For the brine

1 tablespoon black peppercorns

2 tablespoons chopped fresh ginger, unpeeled

1-1/2 teaspoons allspice berries

1-1/2 teaspoons juniper berries

1 teaspoon whole cloves

5 pieces whole star anise

5 cinnamon sticks

2 sprigs fresh rosemary

1 cup Kosher salt

1/2 cup light brown sugar

2 quarts apple cider

2 quarts chicken stock

Cold water to cover

2 trays ice cubes

For the aromatics

1 apple, quartered

1 small onion, quartered

1 clementine, halved

2 sprigs fresh sage

2 sprigs rosemary

2 cinnamon sticks

Cut a piece of cheesecloth eight inches square. Place the peppercorns, ginger, allspice, juniper, cloves, star anise, cinnamon, and rosemary in the center of the cloth and tie together with kitchen twine. In a large pot, combine the salt, brown sugar, apple cider and spice bag. Bring to a simmer over medium heat for five minutes, cover and set aside to steep for 30 minutes. Uncover and allow to cool. Remove the spice bag and discard. (The brining liquid can be made to this point and refrigerated up to five days ahead).

In a pot large enough to hold the turkey, combine the brining liquid and chicken stock. Remove the giblet bag inside and rinse the turkey. Submerge the turkey, breast side down, in the brining liquid and add enough cold water to cover. Place the ice cubes — which tighten the skin — on top, cover and refrigerate for at least eight hours, or up to 18 hours.

At least one hour before roasting, remove the turkey from the brine, rinse and drain well. Allow to air dry in the refrigerator for at least one hour.

Stuff the turkey with the aromatics. Tie the legs closed with kitchen twine.

Set a rack in the center of the oven, have ready a roasting pan and rack large enough to hold the turkey. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Rub the turkey all over with vegetable oil. Make a foil triangle that is large enough to cover the entire topside of the breast. Fit it to the turkey, to form a shield, and then carefully remove the shield and set aside for later (place it down carefully so the foil shield keeps its shape). Sprinkle the entire bird lightly with salt. Insert a meat thermometer into the thickest part of the breast, being careful not to hit the bone. Place the turkey on the rack in the pan and roast to develop a beautiful golden brown color.

After one-half hour, decrease the temperature to 350 degrees, place the foil shield over the breast, and cook for an additional two to two-and-a-half hours until the thermometer reads 165 degrees. Remove from oven, cover entirely with foil and let rest for 20 minutes before carving.

For the gravy

1-1/2 tablespoons butter

1-1/2 tablespoons olive oil

1 carrot, sliced into 1/4-inch rounds

1 rib of celery, sliced into 1/4-inch rounds

1 small onion, thinly sliced

Contents of giblet bag, rinsed, neck cut into two-inch pieces.

2 tablespoons flour

4 cups chicken stock

2 bay leaves

1 teaspoon brown sugar

Juice of 1/2 lemon

Kosher salt and pepper

In a heavy bottomed soup pot, melt the butter with the oil over medium high heat. Add the carrots, celery, onion, one teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon black pepper and cook until slightly softened, about eight minutes.

Add the giblets, increase the heat to high and brown the pieces, stirring occasionally, 10-15 minutes. Add the flour and stir well to combine. Keep stirring for an additional two minutes.

Meanwhile, heat the stock in a medium pot until hot. Slowly whisk the stock into the browned giblet mixture. Add the bay leaves and brown sugar and stir to combine. Bring the gravy to a simmer and reduce until the desired consistency. Add the lemon juice and season to taste with salt and pepper. Strain the gravy, discarding the solids, and keep warm until serving.

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DINING: Who says bacon can’t get dates?

By Melissa Murphy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:16:31 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Melissa Murphy

for The Brooklyn Paper

These are a great appetizer to serve while you are waiting for everyone to arrive. They can be prepped up to two weeks ahead and frozen. Pop them in the oven 20 minutes before your guests are expected. Early arrivals will hope the other guests get stuck in traffic.

Bacon Wrapped Medjool Dates

Makes three dozen hors d’oeuvres

18 Medjool dates, pitted, cut lengthwise in half

36 whole blanched almonds

12 strips center cut bacon

Line a four-sided cookie sheet with aluminum foil. Lightly grease with non-stick cooking spray. Place one almond into the center of each date half. Pinch and roll the date around the almond.

Cut the bacon into thirds, lengthwise. Wrap each date in a piece of bacon and place cut side down on the greased foil.

When ready to bake, center a rack in the middle of your oven and preheat to 350 degrees. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until the bacon is cooked. Serve warm.

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DINING: Stuffing with a difference!

By Melissa Murphy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:16:32 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Melissa Murphy

for The Brooklyn Paper

I love to use different types of sausage for this bread pudding. I recently discovered some wild boar and red wine sausage at our local Los Paisanos family owned butcher on Smith Street. It was an incredible substitution for the pork sausage here.

Savory Bread Pudding with Sausage and Escarole

Makes 12 servings

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 large onion, peeled, cut in half, and thinly sliced crosswise (roughly one and one-half cups sliced)

2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

1 pound fresh mild Italian sausage (about four links), casings removed

1/2 of a large head of escarole, thinly sliced and washed thoroughly (about two quarts sliced)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

2 tablespoons water

6 large eggs

1-1/2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1-1/2 teaspoons salt

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

1/8 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon paprika

1-1/2 cups whole milk

1-1/2 cups heavy cream

1-1/2 cups shredded Gruyère or Swiss cheese

10 cups (one-inch cubed) French or country-style day- (or two-) old bread

Pour oil into a large saute pan over medium heat. Add onion and stir often until soft and lightly blonde, about 10-12 minutes. Stir in garlic and crumble sausage into pan. Stir often until meat is no longer pink, eight to 10 minutes, using a wooden spoon to break up the meat if necessary.

Add escarole to sausage mixture in pan and reduce heat to low. Season with salt and pepper and add the two tablespoons of water. Stir until escarole is wilted, about four minutes. Remove pan from heat.

In a large bowl, whisk the eggs, Dijon, salt, pepper, nutmeg and paprika until combined. Whisk in the milk and heavy cream. Stir in one cup Gruyère (reserve the remaining half cup for sprinkling over the top).

When ready to bake, combine the custard and the sausage mixture in a very large mixing bowl. Add the bread cubes and combine well. Let the mixture soak for at least 30 minutes, and up to two hours, depending on how dry your bread is. (There should be no “crispy” pieces of bread in the mixture after soaking)

Set a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees. Scrape mixture into a buttered nine-inch by 13-inch baking dish and spread evenly. Sprinkle the bread pudding with the remaining cheese.

Bake until top is golden and pudding is slightly “pouffed,” about 35 to 45 minutes or until a knife inserted in the middle comes out mostly clean. If top is brown after 30 minutes, cover loosely with foil and continue to bake. Serve warm.

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BROOKLYN HEIGHTS: Horrifying kidnapping near Bklyn Bridge

By Will Yakowicz — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:10:45 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Will Yakowicz

The Brooklyn Paper

Ticket to ride

A 37-year-old man was arrested after he dragged a woman into his van and held her for almost an hour until she escaped under the Brooklyn Bridge on Nov. 11.

The 30-year-old woman told police that she wasat Adams and Tillary streets at around 5 pm when the criminal snatched her cellphone out of her hand. He and started to walk away yet beckoned her toward his parked van and told her to take the cellphone if she wanted it back. When she reached into the van, he dragged her into the vehicle and drove off under the Brooklyn Bridge.

She screamed and repeatedly hit him — and was eventually able to leap out of the van. She ran to a nearby police officer, who arrested the thug.

Gimme that bling!

A gun-toting gold snatcher ripped the chain right off a man’s neck on Nov. 11.

The 28-year-old victim said he was on York Street between Gold and Hudson streets at around 5:25 pm when the thug asked him for change. When the victim said he didn’t have any money, the perp pulled out a gun, placed it on the man’s neck, took the bling and ran off.

Power tooled

A glass-shattering perp broke into a man’s car and stole a navigation system and expensive tools on Nov. 4.

The 60-year-old victim told police that he parked on Nevins Street near Flatbush Avenue at around 10:50 pm and returned early the next morning to find the back window shattered.

The crook got a digital map system, power tools and a set of screwdrivers.

No salvation

A sneaky thief snatched a woman’s purse while she was trying on a coat at the Salvation Army store on Atlantic Avenue on Nov. 11.

The 46-year-old victim told police that she was inside the store, which is between Nevins and Bond streets, at around 1:30 pm when she put down her purse to try on a coat. When she turned around, the billfold was gone — though she found the empty purse two blocks away.

No cojones

A would-be bank robber got scared in mid-heist, running out of a Fulton Street bank after slipping the teller a note on Nov. 13

The teller at the Bank of America branch between Adams and Jay streets said that the thug passed her a note at around 2:40 pm that demanded $10,000.

But the teller took her sweet time about it, so the wuss cursed and ran out of the bank.

No competition

Two thugs approached a teenager at Schermerhorn and Clinton streets and mugged him just after sunset on Nov. 13.

“Give me all you got!” said one of the thugs while the other told the 14-year-old victim not to run. The kid handed over $8 and cellphone and then ran away .

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DINING: A killer mushroom soup

By Melissa Murphy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:16:34 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Melissa Murphy

for The Brooklyn Paper

This is a great soup, full of wonderful earthy mushrooms. Roasting the mushrooms concentrates their flavor. It is an elegant first course that acts as a preview of the delicious meal to come.

Roasted Wild Mushroom Soup with Sherry

Makes 12 servings

2-1/2 pounds assorted mushrooms (cremini, portobello, shiitake and white button), cut into one-inch pieces

3/4 cup olive oil

1 large onion

3 carrots, peeled, halved, and cut into 1/4-inch slices

3 celery ribs, halved and cut into 1/4-inch slices

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1 tablespoon fresh thyme, chopped coarsely

2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped coarsely

5 cups Vegetable Stock

1-1/2 cups heavy cream

1/2 cup dry sherry

Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

Position the oven racks in the top and bottom thirds of the oven. Preheat to 350 degrees. Spray two cookie sheets lightly with non-stick cooking spray.

In a large bowl, combine the mushrooms with 1/2 cup of olive oil, two teaspoons salt, and 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper. Divide amongst the two cookie sheets and spread out evenly. Roast for 25 minutes, stirring once after 15 minutes, until tender.

In a large heavy bottomed pot set over medium heat, combine onion, carrots, celery, cumin, remaining olive oil, one teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper. Cover and cook while stirring occasionally until softened, about 20 minutes.

Add the roasted mushrooms and cover with the vegetable stock. Bring to a simmer, and cook for 15 minutes. Add the fresh parsley and thyme and cook for an additional five minutes.

Puree the soup with an immersion blender or in a standard blender (in batches) until desired consistency. Return to soup pot, and stir in heavy cream and sherry. Add additional vegetable stock if the soup is too thick. Season with additional salt and pepper to taste. Serve with a drizzle of warmed heavy cream and chopped parsley for garnish.

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CARROLL GARDENS: Mugged near the tunnel

By Gersh Kuntzman — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:10:39 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Gersh Kuntzman

The Brooklyn Paper

Gun mug

A woman was mugged at gunpoint — and even had her boots stolen — by a perp on Hamilton Avenue early on Nov. 14.

The woman was near Mill Street at around 3:45 am when someone stuck a gun in her back and said, “Give me your money.”

Once she complied, he ordered her to surrender her footware, too. She walked away barefooted from the 3:45 am attack while the gunman left with the boots and $50.

Teen scream

A teenager had his cellphone stolen by another youngster inside a Court Street candy shop on Nov. 6 — but he was quickly collared.

Cops say that the youths were both inside the store, which is between Amity and Congress streets, at around 6 pm when the older boy simulated having a gun and demanded the 16-year-old’s cellphone.

It’s unclear what happened next, but the end result is clear: Officers Theresa McCourt and Rosemary Gomez slapped on the cuffs the next day after the victim picked his perp out of a lineup at the Union Street stationhouse.

Sour ‘Milk’

A thief broke into the Buttermilk Channel restaurant on Nov. 9, breaking into the register — though it’s unclear what he got.

Cops have surveillance footage of the perp breaking into the window of the Court Street eatery at around 9:40 pm. In the video, the thug can be seen rifling through the cash register and carrying a cardboard box.

But that’s all that can be seen.

Jean genies

Three perps rushed into the Urban Outfitters on Atlantic Avenue on Nov. 9 and swiped 40 pairs of jeans.

The trio — two men and one woman — entered the shop, which is between Clinton and Court streets, at around 5 pm and grabbed the clothing. They rushed out and hopped into a waiting car.

Cops put the value of the haul at $2,160.

Court beating

A woman was mugged for her cellphone on W. Ninth Street on Nov. 15.

Cops say the 22-year-old victim was near Court Street at around 9:30 am when a 5-foot-6 bearded man rushed past and grabbed her purse, which contained $60 and a black-and-white Mickey Mouse wallet.

“Give me back my cellphone,” she yelled to no avail as the man fled.

Game playing

A burglar stole thousands of dollars in video games — plus hardware on which to enjoy it — from a Dwight Street apartment on Nov. 12.

Cops say that the thug entered the apartment, which is between King and Verona streets in Red Hook, sometime between 8:30 am and 2:30 pm when the resident was not home.

When he returned, he discovered the missing playthings, including 100 video games, plus a watch and a cellphone.

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PARK SLOPE: Man on man crime

By Stephen Brown — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:10:42 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Stephen Brown

The Brooklyn Paper

Social blunder

A 40-year-old man’s friendship with a man he met at a bar in Manhattan ended abruptly after his new buddy made off with his wallet on Nov. 11.

The whirlwind affair began in the early afternoon when the pair met at a Chinatown bar. At some point, the new friend offer the victim a ride back to his Fifth Avenue apartment, and, once there, invited himself in by asking to use the bathroom.

After a brief stay, the perp left. He promised to call — though when he did so, it not for another date. Instead, he revealed that he had taken the victim’s wallet and credit card.

Gamer gamed

A gun-toting thief made like a video game bandit, pulling a pistol on an employee at a Seventh Avenue video store on Nov. 13 and robbing him of equipment and the hottest game.

The employee told cops that he was inside the store, which is between Carroll Street and Garfield Place, at around 11 am when a thug entered, followed the worker to the storage room, pulled the gun and demanded an Xbox system and the games that make it so much fun.

The employee complied, handing over several gaming machines, plus a portable player and the hot new game, “Call of Duty.”

He also tossed in $600 before the thief fled with one more warning, “Don’t come out for 15 minutes or I will kill you.”

Police are hunting a 5-foot-5, 180-pound man.

Target-ed

A Fourth Avenue woman had her wallet swiped off her baby stroller during a shopping expedition that started in the notorious Atlantic Terminal Mall on Oct. 30, cops said.

The woman, who, as fate would have it, works for the district attorney’s office, did not notice the crime for several days — until she checked her account and discovered that someone had made more than $1,000 in charges on her cards.

The thief might have taken the wallet off the stroller at Target, Party City, a nearby Key Food or the Associated Supermarket on Fifth Avenue — all stops on the 38-year-old victim’s itinerary that fateful day.

Burg report

At least two joints were busted into last week. Here are the details:

• A popular Ninth Street Latino restaurant was broken into early on Nov. 8 — and the thief got away with $500. Cops say that the burglar broke in through the back of El Viejo Yayo, which is between Fifth and Sixth avenues, sometime after 2:30 am. The burglar may have been involved in an earlier break-in at the Atomic Wings next door.

• A thief made off with lots of fancy electronic gizmos after breaking into a Fifth Avenue apartment on Nov. 11. The tenant of the unit, which is at Sixth Street, told cops that he was not there between 9:30 am and 11:30 pm, when he returned to discover that two laptops, a camera, a camcorder and a DVD player were gone.

Pilfered!

A pair of thieves were caught red-handed in a Fifth Avenue building — thanks to eagle-eyed cops who shadowed the perps as they cased the block.

The crime gone awry occurred at around 4:30 pm on Nov. 11, after cops trailed the duo on foot while the brigands scoped out a place to rob.

Eventually, the pair duped their way into a building near Degraw Street and then snatched two packages of clothes. That’s when Officer Michael Furia moved in and slapped on the cuffs.

De-lapped

A thief snatched the portable computer right off of a woman’s lap as she was typing away on it in Grand Army Plaza on Nov. 9

The 24-year-old woman told police that she was working at around 9:30 pm near the entrance to Prospect Park when the thug ran up, swiped the Mac computer right off her lap and kept on running.

Cops turned up nada in a sweep of the area.

Medical injustice

A thief swiped a hospital worker’s wallet from the bag that she’d placed under her desk when she went out for lunch on Nov. 10.

It’s the latest crime against an employee at New York Methodist Hospital on Seventh Avenue.

It is unclear what she lost in the mid-day theft.

heTook iPhone

A knife-wielding thug forced a 22-year-old man to hand over his much-desired iPhone on Fourth Avenue on Nov. 15 — but he didn’t even get to make a call before a cop nabbed him.

The thief approached the victim near 14th Street at around 9 pm, showed the blade and said, “Give me your s–t; Give me your iPhone.”

The victim complied and the thief fled — but he was soon collared by cops, who reunited the victim with his fancy app-filled calling device.

Style snatch

A gunman robbed a Garfield Place jeans store of cash, clothes and an employee’s phone on Nov. 12.

Cops said that the pistol-packing clotheshorse initially seemed to be only browsing inside the store, which is near Seventh Avenue, at around 4:30 pm, but quickly revealed his true purpose by pulling the gun and demanding, “Open the register, give me the money and don’t push any buttons or I will kill you.”

On his way out, he added a chilling warning: “If I see you come out of the store, I will shoot you.”

He got away with $1,000 in gear.

Grand thefts auto

At least three motorcycles and one car were swiped last week in the car thieving capital of Brownstone Brooklyn. Here’s a roundup:

• A bandit made off with a Harley Davidson that had been parked on Baltic Street between Fourth and Fifth avenues at around 7 pm on Nov. 11.

• Later that night, a blue moped was snatched from Union Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues after its owner had left it unlocked and behind his fence.

• The next day, a Ducati crotch-rocket valued at over $13,000 was pilfered from Butler Street between Fourth and Fifth avenues by a thief who broke the wheel lock.

• And in the only reported car theft, a thief grabbed a 19-year-old Chevy that had been parked on Second Street between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West late on Nov. 11.

— Stephen Brown

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WILLIAMSBURG: Eighth rape of the year

By Simon McCormack — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:10:43 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Simon McCormack

The Brooklyn Paper

Ugly rape

A woman was raped inside a bathroom at a cafe on Metropolitan Avenue on Nov. 7.

Cops said that the victim was having drinks with friends around 10 pm inside the bar, which is between Wythe Avenue and Berry Street, when she excused herself to use the restroom.

She told police that she accidentally went into the men’s restroom where a thug forced her to have sex with him.

No more details were provided by police on what was the eighth reported rape of the year.

Meserole madness

Two women ducked being mugged by a bad guy on Meserole Street on Nov. 14 by simply running away from their would-be attacker — but the thief finally got his cash from a third victim.

The first unsuccessful mugging was at around 7:40 pm when a thief put a gun to a woman’s torso between Graham Avenue and Humboldt Street. When the woman kept walking, the would-be-robber grabbed her arm, but she yanked it away and ran away yelling for help. The perp decided not to chase her.

Five minutes later and one block away, a woman ran into a bodega at Bushwick Avenue to avoid giving the armed mugger her possessions. The robber fled into the night.

But about an hour later, he was at work again, this time near Manhattan Avenue when he held up a woman with a simple question: “How much money you got, miss?”

The handed over $80 and a Blackberry.

One day later, another thief — possibly the same man — mugged a woman for $22 at around 1:20 am on the block between Humboldt Street and Graham Avenue.

Grocery smackdown

A Wythe Avenue supermarket manager was beaten by two robbers who made off with $350 and 15 cases of beer on Nov. 12.

The manager told police that he was minding the store between South Eighth Street and Broadway at 5 pm when two men came in and started punching him.

The assault left the manager with three chipped teeth.

Masked offenders

Two masked gunman forced their way into a Devoe Street apartment — and tied up the tenant with video game power cords before stealing the games themselves on Nov. 11.

The robbers tied the man’s feet and hands after finding him there when they broke into the apartment, which is between Olive and Judge streets, at 3 pm.

They later made off with two laptops, an Xbox 360, a Wii machine, an iPhone, and $200.

Burgs in the burg

At least four homes were burglarized this week. Here are the details:

• A thief forced open a door of a woman’s apartment on Grand Street between Graham Avenue and Humboldt Street at around 3:15 pm on Nov. 11 and got a Wii and several pieces of jewelry.

• A man returned to his Thames Street apartment at 2:30 am on Nov. 13 to discover that his bedroom window open and two laptops missing from his apartment, which is between Varick and Porter avenues.

• A man returned from work at 6 pm on Nov. 13 to find his Xbox, digital camera and iPod missing from his apartment on Moore Street between Humboldt Street and Bushwick Avenue.

An open kitchen window was all the inspiration a crook needed to break into an apartment on Devoe Street between Catherine Street and Morgan Avenue on Nov. 14. The culprit took $180 and a laptop sometime between 3 and 8 pm.

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DINING: Mashed potatoes with a parsnip twist

By Melissa Murphy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:16:35 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Melissa Murphy

for The Brooklyn Paper

Everyone loves roasted garlic mashed potatoes, and the parsnips add a subtle sweetness that I adore. The toasted breadcrumbs sprinkled on just before serving may be gilding the lily, but I love the buttery crunch it lends to the creamy mash.

Parsnip and Potato Mash with Roasted Garlic and Toasted Breadcrumbs

Makes 12 servings

For the roasted garlic cream

24 cloves garlic, peeled

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

Salt and pepper

1 cup heavy cream

1/2 cup milk

6 tablespoons unsalted butter

For the breadcrumbs

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1/2 cup best quality breadcrumbs, unseasoned

1 clove of peeled garlic, minced

2 pound Yukon gold potatoes, unpeeled, cut into two-inch pieces

1 pound parsnips, peeled and cut into one-inch pieces

1 tablespoon kosher salt

Center a rack in the oven. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place the 24 garlic cloves in a small baking dish. Drizzle one tablespoon of the extra virgin olive oil over the garlic, and season with 1/8 teaspoon salt and a pinch of black pepper. Cover tightly with aluminum foil and bake for 45 minutes to one hour, or until the garlic is soft and golden. Set aside.

In a medium saucepan, combine the cream, milk, butter, one teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper and heat until the mixture is hot and the butter is melted. Add the roasted garlic cloves and puree with an immersion blender until smooth (alternatively, you can puree the mixture in a blender until smooth). Allow to cool and store in the refrigerator up to five days or until ready to use.

Heat the remaining olive oil and one tablespoon of butter in a small skillet over medium heat. Add the breadcrumbs, minced garlic, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper. Toast while stirring until golden, about three minutes. Remove from pan and set aside to cool. Store in an airtight container at room temperature until just before serving.

On the day of serving, place the potatoes and parsnips in a medium-large pot. Cover with cold water and add one tablespoon salt. Bring the potatoes to a boil, over high heat, and then reduce to a simmer and cook until very tender, about 15-20 minutes. Drain well and return to pot (keep very warm).

Meanwhile, reheat the garlic cream until hot over medium heat, but do not boil. Pour the hot garlic cream over the still warm potatoes and mash to desired consistency. Taste and season with additional salt and pepper if desired.

Sprinkle the toasted garlic breadcrumbs over the top just before serving.

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GREENPOINT: Dial ‘R’ for robbery

By Simon McCormack — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:10:44 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Simon McCormack

The Brooklyn Paper

Phone robbers

Robbers who need to call their sweethearts have been snatching people’s phones this week in Greenpoint:

• A thief nabbed a cell from a woman near the corner of Roebling and North Eighth streets at around 10:40 p.m. on Nov. 8.

• A thief tricked a man into dropping his defenses by asking him for directions at around 9:30 am on Nov. 10 and then pulling a gun on him. The man gave up his cell and $2, and the mugger fled up Humboldt Street toward Frost Street.

• Two muggers approached a man on North Seventh Street on Nov. 11 and one pulled out a gun and commanded him to give them his wallet and phone. The perps made off with the cell and two credit cards in the 10:30 pm attack, then fled.

Beer beating

An argument got violent after an ornery fellow cracked a beer bottle over a man’s head on Manhattan Avenue on Nov. 8 — but the bottle basher was later arrested.

The victim, who suffered swelling and lacerations, told cops the beating happened at around 1:30 am near Kent Street.

Police caught up with the assailant.

House burg

At least two homes were burglarized this week in Greenpoint. Here’s how it all happened:

• A woman returned to her Lorimer Street home at around 7 pm on Nov. 12 and discovered the bathroom window was open and her laptop was gone from the unit, which is between Skillman Avenue and Conselyea Street.

• A woman was awoken by the sound of shattering glass in her Bedford Avenue home at around 6:30 am on Nov. 13 and walked into her kitchen to find that her laptop, iPhone, purse and credit cards had been taken from her apartment, which is between North Eighth and North Ninth streets.

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DINING: These baked pairs are one great dish

By Melissa Murphy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:16:31 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Melissa Murphy

for The Brooklyn Paper

I love something sweet next to all these savory dishes, and these baked pears are perfect. As an added bonus, they smell like absolute heaven in the oven. This is a great “signature” dish for you or your kids to make. It’s so easy and delicious, it’ll become a new tradition for sure.

Baked Forelli Pears with Salty Pistachios

Makes 12 servings

Juice of 1 lemon

1 cup of water

6 Forelli Pears

1/2 cup dry sherry

1/2 cup vegetable stock

Kosher salt and pepper

For the spice butter

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

3 tablespoons dark brown sugar

1-1/2 tablespoons minced candied ginger

1/2 teaspoon Chinese five spice powder

2 tablespoons dark rum or brandy

1/4 teaspoon salt

For the Salty Pistachios

1/3 cup unsalted pistachios, shelled

1 teaspoon water

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1/8 teaspoon kosher salt

Center a rack in your oven. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly spray a pie plate or cookie sheet with non stick cooking spray. Combine all the spice butter ingredients and mix until well blended. Chill before using. In a small bowl, combine all pistachio ingredients, spread out on baking pan in an even layer. Bake for 8-10 minutes. Let cool to room temperature before chopping roughly into pieces.

When ready to bake on day of serving, preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a medium bowl, combine the lemon juice and water. Slice the pears in half lengthwise, and remove the core with a melon baller.

Lightly grease a 9-inch by 13-inch baking dish with nonstick cooking spray. Dip the pears in the lemon water (to prevent browning) and place them cut side up in the baking dish. Evenly divide the spiced butter between the pears, filling the hole from the core in each one. Pour the sherry and vegetable stock into the baking dish and sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper. Bake, uncovered for 30-45 minutes, or until knife tender. Place the baked pears on a serving dish and spoon some of the cooking liquid over each. Sprinkle with salty pistachios and serve warm with the meal.

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DINING: And of course you need cranberry sauce

By Melissa Murphy — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:16:34 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Melissa Murphy

for The Brooklyn Paper

This recipe will help use up that box of clementines! The cranberry sauce can be made up to one week ahead and stored tightly wrapped in the refrigerator.

Jellied Cranberries with Clementine

Makes eight servings

1 12-ounce bag fresh cranberries

Zest and juice of three clementines

1 cup sugar

3 cinnamon sticks

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup water

Combine ingredients in a medium heavy bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a simmer and cook for 15 to 20 minutes or until the mixture is reduced by half. Pull out the cinnamon sticks and spoon the cranberries into a 12-ounce mold which has been lightly sprayed with cooking spray. Cool to room temp before wrapping in plastic and refrigerating until cold (at least three hours). Gently loosen the sides of the jelly with a small sharp knife before inverting onto a serving dish.

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FORT GREENE: Woman shot in head

By Sabrina Jaszi — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:15:11 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Sabrina Jaszi

for The Brooklyn Paper

Head wounded

A middle-aged woman was shot in the head on Nov. 15.

Details are sketchy, but cops say they received a call at 12:10 pm that the woman was lying in a parking lot on St. Edwards Street near Myrtle Avenue. She was taken to the hospital in serious condition.

Center entered

Another ghoul, like the one that struck on Halloween, haunted the Ronald Edmonds Learning Center on Adelphi Street on Nov. 11.

The intruder broke a window and entered the school, which is between DeKalb and Lafayette avenues, between 2 am and 4 am, though it’s unclear if he stole anything.

Cobalt blues

A man’s Chevy Cobalt was stolen from Willoughby Avenue on Nov. 11.

The victim left his new car near the corner of Hall Street at 6 pm. Shortly after, however, he realized he’d lost his keys. And when he returned to his parking spot three hours later, he saw that he’d lost his car as well.

Jaws

A pack of thugs gave a mother a reason to worry about her son early on Nov. 13.

The 20-year old victim was walking with his mom in front of Long Island University near Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue at just after midnight. Mother and son were approached by a gang of four thugs, one of whom confronted the victim and smashed his chin with his elbow, breaking his jaw.

Gray day

A thief scooted off with a scooter parked on Greene Avenue near Waverly Avenue on Nov. 15.

The owner left it there at 6:30 pm, but did not return to it for four days. By the time he returned, it was gone.

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SMARTMOM: Smartmom wins! She gets her couch!

By Louise Crawford — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:15:11 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Louise Crawford

for The Brooklyn Paper

Smartmom sat on the Townsend couch in Room & Board’s second-floor showroom waiting for Hepcat to arrive.

She had to laugh. How had this couch thing gotten so out of hand? Was it really worth fighting about? For that matter, what was it really about? Were they fighting about a piece of furniture or the state of their lives?

Hepcat was late as usual. But no matter, Smartmom was determined to enjoy what she hoped would be their final couch-shopping expedition.

While she waited, she wondered whether their couch drama had been a power struggle or an aesthetic disagreement. Was it really about form and function or the dysfunctionality of their 20-year marriage?

Good questions. Smartmom felt a pang of sadness. If the two long marrieds had such a hard time agreeing on a new piece of furniture, was there any hope for peace in the Middle East or the health care bill?

Sitting on the soft chenille of the Townsend, she realized what a turbulent river she and Hepcat had crossed to get to the point where they could agree to pay the $1,399, plus tax and shipping, for a new couch to replace the 18-year-old Ikea divan that Hepcat loves.

When her hubby finally arrived, he and Smartmom walked around the store and revisited some of the other couches they had considered: there was the Andre, the Anson, the Metro and the York.

It didn’t take long for them both to agree that the Townsend was the one. It was comfortable, soft and easy on the eyes.

Then they got a phone call from the Oh So Feisty One saying that she was locked out of the apartment.

“We’ll be home in a half hour,” Smartmom told her. Sadly their shopping trip was cut short.

“So should we buy it?” Smartmom asked nervously.

“Let’s pay for it,” Hepcat said.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yup, yup, yup,” Hepcat said — it’s what he always says when he wants to sound agreeable.

Smartmom knew it was time to make a decision. She knew it was time to let go of this disagreement and move on. Hand in hand (or was it only Smartmom’s imagination?), they walked over to a sales associate, paid for the couch and scheduled its delivery for exactly one week from that day.

What a strange feeling to have finally made a decision. The couch dilemma was over. What an accomplishment: PROGRESS.

When they got home, they told OSFO and Teen Spirit the good news.

“So these are the last days of the couch?” Teen Spirit said dispiritedly.

“Why do we have to get a new couch?” OSFO whined.

“I protest the removal of our couch,” Teen Spirit said and walked into his room.

Smartmom hoped they’d eventually adjust to the new couch. But there was an even more pressing matter to attend to. Smartmom e-mailed her friend Brooke Dramer — who had earlier expressed an interest in buying (believe it or not) the ratty old couch — and asked what she’d be willing to pay.

“What’s it worth to us?” she wrote back in an e-mail. “Well, let’s get together soon so we can look at (and measure) the Green Couch. It would be especially fun if Dave and I could sit on it with Hepcat and discuss how proud we are to be part of the .81 percent that voted for the Rev. Billy for mayor.”

“We’re thinking $300,” Smartmom replied. But Brooke wanted a measurement before committing.

“It’s 88 inches wide and 37 inches deep. Can you come see it before Saturday?”

“Oh, no! Eighty-eight inches is too big to fit with our furniture!” she wrote back. “Alas, the Saga of the Couch ends not with a bang, but a whimper. I would never stoop so low as to throw you a headline like ‘Size does matter.’ But in this case, I need eight inches. Before you say, ‘Who doesn’t?’ let me explain. The couch has to fit between an end table and an antique trunk — a space of less than 80 inches.”

So for the first time, a woman was complaining about something being eight inches longer than she wanted.

Smartmom didn’t understand why they couldn’t just move the end table and the antique trunk. But who was she to question the strange calculus of any relationship?

Smartmom was glum. It wasn’t going to be quite so easy to sell their green leather couch. Maybe they’d have to give it away. Or leave it on the street. In less than 24 hours, their new couch would arrive from Room & Board.

Smartmom was stressing. How would it look? Would it be comfortable? At 92 inches, would it be too big for their own truncated living room?

And what would Teen Spirit and OSFO think?

Tune in next week …

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VOX POP: What do you hear at a GOP health care rally?

By Will Yakowicz — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:15:12 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Will Yakowicz

The Brooklyn Paper

Our reporter went to a Republican anti-health care reform rally in Bay Ridge on Sunday. Here’s what he heard from the locals:

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30 YEARS: The rise and fall and rise of a great public pool

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

McCarren Park Pool

The death and rebirth of the McCarren Park Pool both had something to do with kids from outside the neighborhood.

Back in 1983, Greenpoint residents forced the city to close the public pool, citing a bad element (read blacks and Latinos) coming to the neighborhood from Williamsburg. Locals claimed that these youths were bringing crime, drugs and prostitution to the decrepit bathhouses.

Fast-forward 22 years. That now very decrepit pool was adopted by histpers and turned into one of the city’s most popular summertime concert venues. Now back on the radar screen for the right reasons, nearby residents demanded that the city restore the pool to its original purpose: swimming. That project is actually underway.

When it opened in 1936, the pool, one of 10 built by Robert Moses through the Works Progress Administration, was as an oasis for working-class Brooklynites who couldn’t afford an out-of-town vacation. At 330-feet-by-165-feet, it was the largest public pool in the city, inspired in part by the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. It could hold roughly 6,800 people, and was roughly the equivalent of four Olympic-sized swimming pools.

By 1983, vandalism, neglect and general decay had degraded the space to such a degree that when the Parks Department came to fix a piece of broken equipment that had forced the pool’s closure, residents barricaded the arched entrance and forced them off.

Shortly thereafter, Greenpoint split about the pool: Some residents wanted it torn down, others wanted it renovated. By 1989, the Independent Friends of McCarren Park, founded by Phyllis Yampolsky, hired architect Robert A.M. Stern to conceive a plan to preserve the pool’s red brick arch, and to make additions consistent with that style. Another group, the McCarren Park Pool Task Force, said that most of the facility was so far gone that the whole thing, minus the iconic arch, should be razed.

The Independent Friends’ plan also called for a statue of Mae West, a Greenpoint native, along with an outdoor amphitheater, skating rink, indoor movie theater, retail space and a restaurant.

The pool sat empty until 2005, when Noémie Lafrance, a choreographer living in the area, staged a site-specific dance performance called “Agora.” She got permission from the city to mount the performance — provided she came up with $250,000 for work needed to reopen the space.

Lafrance raised $50,000 and the rest came from Live Nation, the concert promotion company. The following year, the pool was turned into one of the hottest concert spaces in the city. Live Nation teamed up with promoters JellyNYC to host free Sunday concerts there that kicked off on July 6, 2006 with a performance by Les Savy Fav. Two years later, Sonic Youth played the final concert.

Now the city has begun a $50-million renovation that will reduce the size of the pool itself, but add in a skating rink and performance space to keep the good times rollling, year-round.

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DINING: The meal is useless without this pie

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:16:30 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

for The Brooklyn Paper

There’s only one way to punctuate the perfect meal — and that’s with Melissa Murphy’s perfect apple pie. We ran this recipe last year and offer it again as a tribute to its lasting greatness.

Apple Pie with Buttery Cinnamon Crumble

Serves one Murphy family

For the filling:

8 Granny Smith apples, peeled and sliced to 1/4-inch slices

Zest of 1/2 lemon, finely grated

Juice of one lemon

1 cup sugar

1-1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1/8 teaspoon kosher salt

For the Crumble Topping:

1 cup all-purpose flour

3/4 cup light brown sugar

1-1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

3/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted, cooled slightly

Center a rack in the bottom-third of your oven. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or aluminum foil (to catch drips), and set aside.

In a large bowl, combine the apples with lemon zest and juice. Sprinkle the sugar, flour and salt over the apples and combine well. Pour the apples into a nine- or 10-inch unbaked pie shell, and spread evenly.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, brown sugar, cinnamon and salt with your fingers, rubbing the mixture between your hands so that there are no lumps. Add the melted butter and mix with your fingers until combined. Crumble the topping over the apples.

Place the pie on the lined cookie sheet and place in the preheated oven. Bake for 55–60 minutes or until the juices are bubbling thick and a toothpick inserted into the apples offers little resistance. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.

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DINING: Finally, real British football with real British food

By Will Yakowicz — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:10:03 EST

See this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Will Yakowicz

The Brooklyn Paper

Plenty of bars show European football matches, but at the long-awaited Black Horse Pub in Park Slope, you can watch Manchester United live while eating fried eggs, Irish bacon, black pudding, sausage, baked beans, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, and fried toast — and wash it down with a spot of tea or a pint of Guinness.

“To get a man out here and watch football at 10 in the morning, you need the full English breakfast,” said Brian McNally, the co-owner of the Black Horse Pub. “This isn’t just for Brits, but for the entire neighborhood.”

And if you miss the morning football, there’s also a Sunday afternoon roast — a big beef seasoned with thyme, rosemary, and sage, and surrounded with brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, and Yorkshire pudding.

“It makes us feel like we’re at home eating Ma’s roast on a Sunday,” said David Sheeran, president of the Barnstonworth Rovers, a Manhattan football club, who was drinking and eating with his teammates on a recent Sunday.

Mick Baldwin, co-owner and head chef, said that Sheeran had perfectly captured the goal of this Cockney castle.

“We are a neighborhood bar, serving residents some good comfort food, and everyone’s a winner, you know what I mean, mate?” he said.

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ART: Got something to say? Stick it in this artwork

By Will Yakowicz — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:51:01 EST

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By Will Yakowicz

The Brooklyn Paper

Art is supposed to be honest — but is it supposed to be this honest?

“The best decision I ever made was divorcing you.”

That’s one message that a viewer left inside “Last Words,” an interactive piece of sculpture now on display at the Pratt Institute that takes people’s inner-most secrets and turns it into art.

Artists Michael McDevitt and Otis Kriegel constructed a large cardboard cluster of honeycombs and invited the public to fill the holes with their thoughts — whether from the heart or a different organ.

“It could be a note to a loved one or [a] zinger you didn’t say in your last argument,” said McDevitt, a Pratt professor who co-founded with Kriegel the seminal eight-year-old group Illegal Artists, which always involves viewers in the making of the project.

This piece is about self-reflection, thought, and human connection and using an interactive public space as a forum to create art — a worldly take on the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, where the faithful write down their prayers.

Illegal Artists has done this kind of thing before. Previous projects included a DUMBO storefront covered entirely in Post-it notes two year ago. Another piece, called “The God Project,” featured a large poster of the word “God” with a comma that urged people to complete the sentence.

McDevitt says that such interactive art “is a way to read a passersby’s mind.

“Our spaces in public allow people to contribute and become part of the art itself,” he said.

It certainly does that. One note in “Last Words” read, “Dad, I love you. I hope you’re pain is free from you, and you are happy.”

Then again, not ever message makes artistic sense, such as “If you’re so against tourism, why did you sign up for this tour?”

Then again, maybe it does.

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SHOPPING: Finally, Tom Mylan is on our meat hook!

By Andy Campbell — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:43:26 EST

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By Andy Campbell

for The Brooklyn Paper

Celebrity butcher Tom Mylan has broken his silence!

On Wednesday night, The Brooklyn Paper cornered the camouflage-, Buddy Holly glasses- and cigarette-wearing Mylan outside his newest venture, The Meat Hook, and got the legend of lard to talk about the butcher shop he’ll open on Monday.

It wasn’t easy to get Mylan to open up anything but a pig carcass, alas. With the chop shop set to open in three days, the former house butcher for a restaurant group that includes Marlowe and Daughters, was in no mood to chat.

“It’s basically three dudes with sharp knives, and the sky’s the limit,” said Mylan, 33, referring to his buddies and co-butchers Brent Young and Ben Turley. “We like cutting ourselves, you know, lots of pain and blood — so it works.”

Along with a variety of previously grass-fed whole animals for sale, Mylan will join and Brooklyn Kitchen owner Harry Rosenblum to offer courses and demos for aspiring cooks — everything from beer brewing to pig butchering to bread making.

For now, of course, the three butchers are focussing their masochistic energy on Thanksgiving and refurbishing their 7,000-square-foot warehouse into what Young called “the kitchen of our dreams.”

“It’s also a forum to put a lot of weird and awesome stuff in front of the public,” he said.

Beef cheeks are only the beginning. Though the meat isn’t organic certified, Young said it’ll come from small nearby farms that the three will visit themselves. The business will set itself apart by catering to the average Joe who wants a cut for dinner, he said, rather than providing for expensive restaurants.

Two laboratories upstairs will eventually have experts on call every day to help locals conquer any kitchen problem they’re facing at home.

“It’s recession-proof,” Mylan said. “People tend to cook at home, so we might as well have better meat for less money and give them a little help on the side.”

When asked why he fancied blades and hanging carcasses, Mylan shrugged and yawned. Turley added that the three fell into their line of work, and happen to play well as a team.

The first step to success? Opening day.

“We’re gonna have to go balls to the walls on Monday,” Turley said.

It was unclear whether he was talking about the butchers or the meat.

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NIGHTLIFE: Comedy comes to the Knitting Factory

By Meredith Deliso — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:06:02 EST

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By Meredith Deliso

Community Newspaper Group

Comedy is coming to the Knitting Factory.

On Nov. 15, “Saturday Night Live” writer Hannibal Buress started hosting a weekly stand-up show at the Williamsburg venue, inviting friends and doing his own routine.

“We’re trying to diversify our programming,” said Chris White, a talent buyer for the venue, which has broadened from music to include a sewing party called “Yarn Dolls” on Sunday afternoons and “Largehearted Lit,” a monthly reading series hosted by author Jami Attenburg.

Buress was a natural fit “because he’s a neighborhood guy,” said White.

For his part, Buress said he was jazzed to be honing his craft on stage with fellow comics Kumail Nanjiani and Baron Vaughn. “It’s great to just to be able to have my own place to try new material and not have to take the train anywhere,” he said.

Living in Brooklyn has helped the Chicago native’s material.

“I saw two Hasidic Jews walk past each other without speaking,” goes one of Buress’s new jokes. “I thought that was weird. If I saw someone with the exact same outfit as me from head to toe, I’d at least stop and say. ‘That’s a nice hat.’”

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BROOKLYN HEIGHTS: Check out the wheels off this Lexus!

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

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The Brooklyn Paper

Thieves were in such a rush to get the tires off this Lexus that they even left their jack behind! This was the scene on the block between Henry and Hicks streets last Friday, a few hours after thugs stripped off the fancy wheels — which cops say have a street value in the thousands.

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NIGHTLIFE: Bar owner defies tarot reading and opens anyway

By Shane Kite — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:16:58 EST

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By Shane Kite

for The Brooklyn Paper

The tarot reading made it clear: “It’s not in the cards!” But bar owner Jesse Levitt ignored the cautious divinations and took inspiration from a different occult omen: He’s steered his destiny to bustling Washington Avenue, where on Nov. 20 he’ll open a new Americana-laden drinkspot filled with Coney Island-style ambience called the Minor Arcana.

Levitt (pictured) says he turned a dismal New Year’s Day reading at a Brighton Beach tarot den — a larkish test of the cosmos which foretold of “bad times” for his new venture — into canny manna: The will to carry on with launching a bar amid the worst recession ever.

But instead of listening to the reading, Levitt, who also owns Kings County in Bushwick, merley renamed his bar from the Flying Monkey to the Minor Arcana, a tarot term that refers to the set of prescribed destinies that one can actually change.

To play up the occult angle, the arty saloon will feature a cabinet of curiosities; a custom-built tempered glass bar that will feature three-dimensional work from local artists; and 1930s-style adverts with modern takes on freak show icons like the strongman and the bearded lady on the walls.

And the vibe? Chill, not shrill.

“It’s a neighborhood spot that’s a fun place to raise a glass; a drinker’s bar,” Levitt said. The artworks are “conversation starters.”

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BAY RIDGE: Botched robbery with bullet

By Thomas Tracy — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:10:44 EST

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By Thomas Tracy

Community Newspaper Group

Bullets over 80th Street

A gunman was arrested on Monday for his alleged role in a botched robbery on 80th Street that nearly killed a 52-year-old neighborhood businessman.

Police said that their 24-year-old suspect is the first of a handful of people expected to be arrested in the failed heist near Narrows Avenue.

The victim, 52, told cops that he was approaching his home at 6:50 pm when a van lurched into his path, blocking his way.

Two men jumped out, ran up to his car and bashed in the window before jumping inside. They tried to pull the victim into the back seat, but the victim fought off the men as his vehicle rolled down the street an additional 30 feet.

After the man finally shook loose, one of the men pulled a gun and fired a round, which slammed into a brick wall.

The suspects fled, but responding officers found their van on 88th Street between Ridge Boulevard and Narrows Avenue.

Investigators tracked down the van, and arrested their man.

Trading up

A burglar swiped cash, jewelry and a host of personal information from a Sixth Avenue home on Nov. 10, but left something behind — his music.

The tenant returned to her apartment, which is at Bay Ridge Parkway, that afternoon to find that someone had removed $5,000, a few gold rings and her birth certificate, passport and marriage license.

Then she found something that the burglar must have dropped — an iPod. Cops are going through the thief’s playlists now hoping for clues.

82nd burg

Cops are investigating two burglaries which took place on 82nd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues last week.

Officials said that someone broke into a 26-year-old man’s home between 8 am and 6:30 pm on Nov. 10, taking $50 and a gold chain valued at $300.

One day earlier, someone broke into a 23-year-old woman’s apartment, taking an assortment of jewelry, including a necklace with a butterfly on it.

6G swindle

A neighborhood senior was bilked of $6,000 after falling prey to a classic “found money” scam on Nov. 7.

The 73-year-old victim told police that she was walking her dog past the corner of Ridge Boulevard and 77th Street at just before noon when two men asked her if she had dropped a black case found lying in the street.

One of the men opened the case, revealing a pile of money inside.

Without missing a beat, one of the men hatched a plan to split the money.

After “consulting” with a lawyer on Fifth Avenue between 75th and 76th streets — the charlatan went inside a building, but left the senior in his car with his accomplice — the man came back saying that they can split the cash, but only if the woman put up $6,000 first as a “good faith” gesture.

The senior agreed, but once she forked over her money the thieves scattered, leaving her $6,000 in the hole.

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FORT GREENE: Ruth West, founder of Ruthie’s restaurant, is dead at 76

By Stephen Brown — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

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By Stephen Brown

The Brooklyn Paper

Ruth West, known as much for her delicious pineapple layer cake and barbecued ribs as for her love of Fort Greene and the exacting standards she upheld at her two “Ruthie’s” restaurants, has died from pancreatic cancer. She was 76.

West opened her popular restaurant on DeKalb Avenue in 1997 after 30 years in the food industry. Her soul food dishes, like fried chicken and smothered pork chops bore the influence of her southern roots in Bayboro, N.C., a coastal town with a population of less than 1,000.

West moved to New York in 1954 and, after a brief stay in Harlem, settled in Fort Greene. She opened her first restaurant in 1967.

West’s first Ruthie’s, which remains between Ashland and Rockwell places, gained a devout following, and it — along with the other location on Myrtle Avenue between Classon Avenue and Emerson Place — is often pointed to as a critical player in the revitalization of the area.

West’s son-in-law Howard Foster, who works at Ruthie’s, said that his hard-working mother-in-law made sure the kitchen remained at the top of its game.

“She was like Chef Ramsay, the ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ guy,” said Foster. “When it came to the restaurant, she didn’t play. But she always made sure to say ‘It’s nothing personal.’”

West still manned the stoves until her battle with cancer overcame her. She died on Nov. 12.

Aside from her food, West is remembered for her dedication to the Friendship Baptist Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where she served as a trustee for many years.

West’s generosity went beyond big servings. She also had an ongoing tradition of giving leftover food to the homeless, who came by at closing time. A note posted this week at the Myrtle Avenue location by one such customer reads, “Thank you, from someone who is homeless.”

West is survived by six children, 22 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. Her son John will be taking over the Myrtle Avenue location, and her daughter, Yanya, will be in charge of the DeKalb location.

Foster promised: “The food will taste exactly the same.”

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30 YEARS: At Coney, is the past prologue?

By Michael P. Ventura — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Note: More media content is available for this story at BrooklynPaper.com.

By Michael P. Ventura

for The Brooklyn Paper

Not everything that looks bombed out is necessarily bad — particularly out on Coney Island.

Thirty years ago, when Dick Zigun, founder of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow and erstwhile “Mayor of Coney Island,” came to the neighborhood, there were still vestiges of what it looked like when it was the city’s playground.

“There was so much infrastructure and architecture and personality from its heydey,” Zigun said. And some of the personalities of that era were still living there, among the vestigial tridents and mermaids. “You got a real sense of the historic Coney Island.”

Now, 75 percent of that is gone, he said, replaced by vacant lots as decrepit history has been torn down. For example, there was the Thunderbolt rollercoaster that had a house underneath it. Both were torn out, illegally, Zigun added, by the Giuliani administration.

“[Before that], the Lindsay Adminstration and [Robert] Moses dumped a lot of housing projects here without a job base,” he said. Since then, investment in the area has helped provide jobs and the growing Russian community out there has helped revitalize the entire area from Brighton Beach to Bensonhurst.

Despite the empty lots, a lot of the old Coney Island is still visible. The Cyclone, of course, is there, as is the Wonder Wheel and the Parachute Drop. Joining them soon should be restored B & B Carousell, a historic ride that the city saved from the scrap heap.

And what about the personalities that make Coney Island so unique?

They’re still “alive in terms of eccentric nutjobs like me,” Zigun said. “My job is to preserve artifacts and behave in an ostentatious way.”

— Michael P. Ventura

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BOERUM HILL: Now Boerum Hill has caught downzone fever

By Will Yakowicz — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:56:43 EST

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By Will Yakowicz

The Brooklyn Paper

The push to downzone Boerum Hill has begun!

Now that other architecturally rich Brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods have moved to bar tall and bulky new development, the Boerum Hill Association is calling on the city to begin the lengthy processes of capping new building heights in a 25-block area of the neighborhood just south of Downtown.

The first hurdle was passed on Tuesday night, when Community Board 2 voted overwhelmingly to ask the city to start the formal rezoning process with a study of the area.

The proposed study blocks are the last part of the Brownstone Belt — Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO, Cobble Hill, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Park Slope, and Carroll Gardens — that is still unprotected by height restrictions, said Boerum Hill Association Vice President Dwight Smith.

“Because of how close Boerum Hill is to Downtown and its lack of height restrictions like the other neighborhoods, we are a target for new developers.” Smith said. “When the economy picks up, we are just sitting here, ripe for new development.”

His group favors a 50-foot cap on new building heights on the side streets and a 70-foot ceiling on main roads in the area bounded by Fourth Avenue, Pacific, Court, and Wyckoff streets, plus Smith Street between Warren Street and Atlantic Avenue.

The group’s president, Howard Kolins, added that a rezoning would preserve the quiet neighborhood and beautiful Greek revival and Italianate brownstones that were built in the 1860s and provide peace of mind today.

“This is why people live in Brooklyn, away from big city development,” said Kolins. “It’s urban but, in a very relaxed way. It’s the only sane way to live in the city.”

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CYCLONES: Cyclones go ‘Backman’ the future

By Ivan Pereira — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:15:08 EST

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By Ivan Pereira

The Brooklyn Paper

The Cyclones newest manager may have had one of the shortest stints as a major league skipper, but team brass said that former Mets infielder Wally Backman has the right stuff to take the team all the way next season.

Backman will officially be named the eighth skipper for the Cyclones on Tuesday, joining a long line of former Amazins who have led the team. Backman, 50, will succeed Pedro Lopez, who led the team to a 45-30 regular-season record, but lost in the first round of the playoffs.

In his first public pronouncement, Backman suggested he’d do better.

“Brooklyn is a major minor-league team, and I know the borough’s fans are — like me — intensely passionate about baseball and about winning,” he said in a statement.

Met fans certainly remember that about the second baseman during the team’s brief glory day in the mid-1980s. He joined the franchise in 1980, and was an instrumental part of those division-winning teams in 1986 and 1988.

Oh, and he also batted .333 for the Mets as they beat the then-cursed Red Sox in the ’86 Series.

He ended his Gold Glove-less career in 1997 with the Seattle Mariners. To this day, he’s still ninth on the Mets all-time stolen base list with 106 swipes — and it’s those experiences that he cherishes the most.

“The greatest days of my professional career were spent here in New York, and I have always felt a special connection to the city,” Backman said.

Success and Backman have been on-and-off friends.

In 2002, he led the AA Birmingham Barons to a 79-61 record and a Southern League title. Two years later, Backman was the manager of the year after Class A Lancaster posted an 86-54 regular season record.

That success led to Backman being named manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks in November, 2004. Four days after he was signed, Backman was fired when the team learned that he had two DWI arrests, an assault and a bankruptcy filing in his recent past.

But Backman went right back to coaching. He last managed the Joilet Jackhammers in Illinois in 2008, leading them to a 43-53 season. He was fired midway through the 2009 season — with a bizarre farewell:

“Wally has done everything we’ve asked him to do — except for in the win-loss column,” said team’s General Manager Kelly Sufka.

Cyclones General Manager Steve Cohen says he doesn’t expect that to happen here.

“Brooklyn and Backman were made for each other,” he said in a statement.

The Cyclones have not won a championship since 2001, when fan favorite Edgar Alfonzo was the manager.

If Backman succeeds, he’ll be going where his former Met teammates have not been able to go. Met greats Howard Johnson, Tim Teufel and Mookie Wilson all managed the Cyclones.

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