We’ve been running historic photos of Gowanus, and in the process of tracking them down, have come across other fascinating Brooklyn images, which we’ll be running as part of our “Back in the Day” series from time to time. This one, from the Brooklyn Public Library’s superb collection of vintage photos, show downtown Brooklyn from the air in 1953.

It’s been a while since we’ve posted a “Coney Island Death Watch,” but developer Joe Sitt and his firm Thor Equities are clearing some of the land they own in Coney Island. Tenants got the boot from properties at the end of last year, and now, there are reports that a number of the Sitt-owned parcels are being prepared for demolition or will soon see demolition activity, including the Go-Kart track, batting cages and mini-golf course near the Coney boardwalk. According to reports on the Coney Island Message Board, copper wire is being stripped, light poles have been taken down and some fences have been cut. The area will reportedly be cleared so that it can be “activated” quickly if the firm gets the rezoning it is seeking from the city that will allow the construction of luxury housing and retailing on the Coney Island properties that it owns. Meanwhile, the New York Post reports that Thor has start to “clear some of the land where its planned construction would occur. Bulldozers have begun removing longtime attractions on Thor property along Stillwell Avenue.”

There has been widespread speculation in Coney Island circles that Thor would move quickly to level buildings and attractions on property that it owns in Coney Island in order to increase pressure on the city to act on the zoning changes that it desires. It is thought that creating even more empty land in Coney Island, and the way it would make it appear vacant and unsafe, is a tactic to ensure quick approval of redevelopment plans. If the redevelopment somehow falls through, because Thor doesn’t get the zoning changes it desires or because it can’t line up financing, Coney would be left with blocks more empty, overgrown lots than it already has.

Related Post:
Mail from Mr. Sitt: Deliberately “Grassroots” Look?
Here’s “Coney Island Park”
Coney Island Death Watch: Is Eviction and Demolition a Bargaining Chip?

Developer Joe Sitt is turning up the heat on the city in his attempt to have Coney Island rezoned to allow luxury highrise housing on the boardwalk. While Mr. Sitt’s publicly-released plans have stressed retail development and amusements such as a new roller coaster, the New York Post reports that Mr. Sitt is suggesting he might pull out of Coney Island if he can’t build housing. A story quotes Thor Equities spokesman Lee Silberstein as saying the planned $1.5 billion Coney development “isn’t a financially feasible investment” without luxury highrises. Says Mr. Silberstein: “Everybody wants Coney Island to be revitalized, and housing has got to be part of it.” The story continues that “the city faces losing its biggest private investment in Coney Island’s future if it doesn’t meet Thor’s request.”

It looks like some in Coney aren’t taking the bait, however, or pushing the panic button in response to Mr. Sitt’s ultimatum. The story continues:

Chuck Reichental, a member of the agency that will determine how Coney Island is rezoned, said a majority of residents opposes housing in the amusement district as well as any new development exceeding the height of the 262-foot landmark Parachute Jump.

Sources familiar with informal talks between the city and Thor say these are the two biggest obstacles to the developer’s plan.

A city Economic Development Corporation spokesman said, “Our priorities remain to preserve and enhance Coney Island’s historic amusement area, make sure it stays open to the public and create economic opportunities for local residents – and we have serious concerns that a predominance of residential towers . . . would work against those goals.”

Clearly, Mr. Sitt and Thor have begun the process of trying to create pressure for the significant zoning changes they want, partly through calculated public statements.

If you’re not a New Republic reader you might miss this next item, so we figured it’s worth passing along. It’s actually a story about Senator and Presidential candidate Barack Obama and his appeal across racial lines. The story, however, dwells quite a bit on some research that sociologists did in the 1990s in Red Hook:

In 1994, two sociologists went to Red Hook, Brooklyn, to solve a mystery. Red Hook abutted the East River, and along the waterfront sat shipping companies and warehouses — all in need of low-skilled labor. Next door sat a housing project teeming with exactly that. But the locals — primarily African Americans — didn’t get hired. Instead, the jobs went to workers from outside the neighborhood, often Caribbean immigrants. Employers, wrote The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell in summarizing the sociologists’ findings, “had developed an elaborate mechanism for distinguishing between those who they felt were ‘good’ blacks and those they felt were ‘bad’ blacks.” Were the employers racist? Yes and no. They clearly held anti-black stereotypes. And they discriminated against those who conformed to them, even by association. But they discriminated in favor of blacks who defied those stereotypes. A man named Bruce Llewellyn described the phenomenon this way: “White people love to believe they’re fair.”

As it happens, Llewellyn wasn’t talking about Red Hook. He was talking about his cousin, Colin Powell — whose prospective presidential bid enjoyed mass white support roughly a decade ago. Like the employers in Red Hook, whites discriminated in Powell’s favor because he challenged their negative stereotypes of blacks. First, he had succeeded in a respected white institution: the military. Second, he was the child of immigrants, a man whose family history highlighted America’s opportunities, not its racism. Third, he wasn’t ideologically radical. And, fourth, he didn’t look or sound stereotypically black. No one was blunter about this than Powell himself. Asked in 1995 to explain his appeal to whites, he volunteered that “I speak reasonably well, like a white person,” and, visually, “I ain’t that black.”

Barack Obama would never put it that way. But he surely understands the uncomfortable subtext behind the adoration being showered upon him by white America.

You can read the entire story over at cbsnews.com, which is where we found it, or over at the New Republic, but you’ve got to register at the latter.

Brooklinks is a daily selection of Brooklyn-related information and images.

• In 1938, Blight Was a Simpler Thing [AYR]
• Brooklyn Matters Documentary Hits the Screen [NYDN]
• More Money for Atlantic Yards on the QT? [No Land Grab]
• Checking in on the Third Place Horror Show [Brownstoner]
• Another Brooklyn Construction Worker Dies in a Fall [NYT]
• How to Save Brooklyn Trees From Developers [I’m Seeing Green]
• Winter One-derland from Impact Theater [Dope on the Slope]
• Donate Computers to the Gowanus Community Project [Fusion PR Forum]
• Cookin’ in Brooklyn: Lorimer Street Style [Brooklyn Record]
• BAM Cultural District: Another Day, Another Plan [Gothamist]
• Check Out a 1930s Coney Island Film [Kinetic Carnival]
• Coney Island is Best Brooklyn Spot for Public Sex [Gridskipper]
• Couplings at Issue Project Room [OTBKB]

What you’re looking at above is a map of the Atlantic Yards site, color-coded to show who owns what. While the entire thing makes a pretty, multi-colored map and diagram of the project, what’s of particular interest here are the areas in red. Those, according to Develop Don’t Destroy, are properties that are still privately owned. In total, more than five acres of the proposed site are still privately owned or controlled. “Unless the developer can gain the deeds and leases to these properties, the arena cannot be built,” the group writes. “In addition, much of the rest of the project, including the de-mapping (removal) of City streets required to construct superblocks, cannot be built as proposed.” There is a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of using eminent domain to seize property for the project. There are 12 plaintiffs in the suit (representing 2 businesses and 26 residents) and the parties are in court next week.

We caught a virtual symphony of construction work going on over at what we call Karl Fischer Row on Bayard Street next to McCarren Park on Sunday and have been so overwhelmed with posts this week that we’re only now getting around to posting a couple of pics. There was the sound of banging and drilling. The construction elevators were going up and down. And, there were workers inside the building that will become The Ikon tossing a lot of stuff out the windows, a bit of which we caught in mid flight as it made its way out the window near Lorimer Street.

A special North Brooklyn correspondent who saw our post yesterday featuring two Williamsburg development sites that are pretty much open to those that wish to romp through the rubble and play demolition contractor or construction worker hit us off with the photo above of another fun site. This one is on Green Street in Greenpoint. Quality workmanship on the fence, no?

These Brooklyn coffee maps, which are simply zoomed in versions of NYC coffee maps came to our attention via the Google Maps Mania blog. The top one–which shows independent coffee places–comes from cupofnyc’s New York City coffee map. The bottom one shows the location of Starbucks (the paucity of which in certain parts of Brooklyn with either lead one to rejoice or to wonder when more will come, depending on one’s orientation on this hot button issue). It comes from the findbyclick coffee map (no way to link to the NYC map directly. You have to type in New York in the search bar). We’re pretty sure the “indie” coffee map is missing some spots, but the Starbucks map looks fairly complete. You can also search the “indie” map by neighborhood.

If demolition and construction in Brooklyn were a genre of literature or drama, it would be Theater of the Absurd. How else to explain day-to-day, week-to-week spectacle of flagrant violations by developers and contractors, slow response by municipal officials and blatant disregard of any orders that are eventually issued?

We present without further explanation the following letter sent by Concerned Citizens of Greenwood Heights to the Commissioner of the Department of Buildings:

Despite your efforts; the illegal Demolition at 574 Fourth Ave. has continued. Last Friday there were 2 floors of a building. As I passed the site, this Morning, I noticed that the building was gone. At 1PM, when I returned to see what was going, on I found an 8 ton (probably more) Backhoe was busy taking down what was left of the building. There were 2 men [one Asian and one Hispanic] standing outside as lookouts, and one Polish (I think) man operating the Back-Hoe. I started to take some Pictures and was immediately descended upon. I asked if they had any permits. The operator of the Back Hoe (who happened to be the only one who could speak English) said that they were doing what there “BOSS” told them. I explained that their “BOSS” told them to break the law. Then I asked if they had a permit for the Machine and they looked at me like I had 3 heads. When I asked if the operator had a license to operate the machine and he immediately said “NO.”…I am attaching 2 video, 2 Pictures and a short audio recording of the Operator admitting to not having a license.
Thank You and Enjoy!

All we need is a Commissioner or Inspectors with names like Pirandello or Kafka, and we’re set.

Our little trip to see PortSide New York’s Mary A. Whalen in the graving dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was, to us, pretty damned cool. Yesterday, we posted a large flickr photoset from the visit. Today, we’re putting up a Brookvid. It gives a little bit of the feeling of what it’s like to be under a boat, several stories down in a drydock with a bulkhead holding back the waters of the East River. You don’t get the damp cold or the kind of fish store smell, but it conveys some of the flavor. Watch the embed or click here.

Related Post:
Underneath a 613-Ton Ship: Visting the Mary Whalen in Drydock

After years of discussion and planning, the BAM Cultural District may be moving forward. The $650 million project would be built around the Brooklyn Academy of Music and in the words of today’s Post create “a new Left Bank – Brooklyn-style.” It will include a theater and arts library, dance studio, public park, museum & gallery, underground parking and residential housing. Plans, according to the Post, include:

* The Theater for a New Audience, to be built early next year. The 299-seat theater is modeled after London’s Royal National Theater.

* A dance studio in a 20-story residential tower with 150 apartments, half of which will be affordable housing.

* The Visual and Performing Arts Library, currently on hold until a new executive director is named for the Brooklyn Public Library.

* A public plaza, which will be built with an underground parking garage by landscape architect Ken Smith, who designed the outdoor space at the new 7 World Trade Center building.

A request for bids on the project goes out next month.

We don’t usually do posts on street art, except to feature it as a “Photo Du Jour” sometimes, but the recent outbreak of splashing, and the beauty of the two works here, merited a stand-alone post. In any case, we won’t publicize the location of these two other than to say they’re in Williamsburg somewhere between the BQE and the East River.

[Photo courtesdy of Harvenyc/flickr]

Ever wonder about that sunken lightship in Red Hook by the Revere Sugar Plant whose masts were poking out of the water? The ship was reportedly removed from the water on Sunday by a massive crane floated into the Erie Basin by Thor Equities. We came across this flickr set of the lightship’s actual sinking in the mid-1990s and thought we’d share in case you were curious and (like us) had never seen pics of the ship that had sat at the bottom. You can check out the entire set here or the slideshow of the set here. Below is one of our pics of how the lighship appeared until a few days ago.

Way back when, the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods was promised $100,000 to report on the Environmental Impact Statement for Atlantic Yards. The group did a good job of coordinating the “community expert review” of a terribly complex document and was vigilant in monitoring what some would say was a deeply flawed process. It turns out they were never paid. (Norman Oder digs into the issue on his Atlantic Yards Report here and there is an item on No Land Grab as well.)

The Council includes cornerstones of the Brooklyn civic and neighborhood world: the Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association, Boerum Hill Association, Boerum Hill For Organic Development, Brooklyn Bears Community Garden, Brooklyn Vision Foundation Inc., Cambridge Place Action Coalition, Clermont/Greene Ave Block Association, Dean Street Block Association, Develop Don’t Destroy-Brooklyn, East Pacific Block Association, Fans For Fair Play, Fifth Avenue Committee, Fort Greene Association, New York Preservation Alliance, North Flatbush Business Improvement District, Park Slope Civic Council, Park Slope Greens, Park Slope Neighbors, Pratt Area Community Council, Prospect Heights Action Coalition, Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, Sierra Club-Atlantic Chapter, Society for Clinton Hill, South Portland Avenue Block Association and the Warren Street St. Marks Community Garden

Now, the group has started a campaign among each of its members to contact elected officials in Albany to find and turn over the money that has “disappeared” or that was made to vanish by political opponents such as former Assem. and Atlantic Yards supporter Roger Green. The letter reads in part:

CBN needs your help immediately. As you have read in the local papers and as we have discussed at our meetings, CBN was promised $100,000 from the New York State Assembly last year to fund our report on the Environmental Impact Statement of the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards project. The report is finished and being used by many officials, including the State Assembly but the promised funds have not been forthcoming…

Some of the sample text:

The Assembly appreciated that the scope and complexity of this analysis would require the use of environmental experts working on the community’s behalf when it originally approved the CBN funding. Based on these assurances CBN contracted a team of consultants who produced an excellent series of reports in a completely transparent manner. The work has been done and is being used by the Legislature. It is unconscionable that the funding has not yet been made available.

Hopefully, a public airing of what would seem to be a hardball political payback will help resolve the situation so that everyone that did good faith and top-notch work analyzing the Atlantic Yards document will be paid.

Brooklinks is a daily selection of Brooklyn-related information and images.

Weather & Idiotarod

• Prospect Park: Snow Capital of New York City [Gothamist]
• Van Brunt Street with Snow [A Sad Day for Birds II]
• Trying , and Failing, to Find the Idiotarod [Brooklyn Record]
• Idiotaroders Outsmart Cops, Media & Pull Off Race [Daily Intel]
• Idiotarod [newyorkshitty]

Doubling Atlantic Yards Subsidy

• City Really Doubles Public Subsidy to Ratner & Nets [No Land Grab]
• City Admits Doubling Atlantic Yards Funding to $205M [AYR]
• City Subsidy to Ratner Doubles [NYP]

Everything Else

• Time’s Almost Up on New Police Parade Regs [streetsblog]
• Robbers Really, Really Like Fifth Avenue Commerce Bank [Park Slope Courier]
• City Cancels Marine Park Golf Course Deal [NYT]
• Carroll Gardens Hell Update [Brownstoner]
• Willoughby Block in Disrepair [Clinton Hill Blog]
• The Grim Reaper & the Gowanus Canal [Moths & Anvils]
• First N. 6th Street Banksy Painted, Now London Wall Stolen [INSIJS]
• Brooklyn Arts Council Announces Art as Anecdote Show [Dumbo NYC]

Leave it to the flickr photographer who goes by f.trainer to get a wonderful perspective on the Revere demolition in Red Hook. Don’t stop at this photo. Check out his entire Revere photoset, shot over time, and definitely make a stop at his Gowanus Batcave photoset.

It’s not like we walk around Williamsburg looking for messed up construction sites–you know, downed fences or poorly secured doors. But, sometimes, we practically trip across them. The specimen above is at N. 10th and Berry on the site of an old zipper factory that was recently demolished and that will become condos. The one below is from the corner of N. 8th and Driggs where the Wonder Foods factory was recently demolished and has offered excellen opportunities to romp through both the demolition site and, now, construction rubble.

There is something that is both frightening and uplifting about standing under a 613-ton fuel tanker several stories beneath ground level. You look up and the mass of the ship, with a fresh black coat of paint, rises several stories above your head into the pale Brooklyn winter sky. The the left and right are the steep, stair-stepped walls of a drydock. Amazingly, she sits about nine or ten feet off the bottom of the drydock on more than a dozen massive blocks. Water rushes through a massive bulkhead in the Brooklyn Navy Yard graving dock, dropping in a little waterfall into a trough before being pumped out again. Underfoot there is a gritty black gunk left over from sandblasting, spotted with fuel oil from work equipment, the smell of which is fairly strong. The ship itself–which is a large vessel–seems oddly dwarfed by the 285-foot-long graving dock, which is one of the smaller ones at the historic Navy Yard.

Welcome to the Mary A. Whalen, an old tanker that is in the process of being converted into a floating museum and headquarters for PortSide New York. Gowanus Lounge visited the Whalen–a 172-foot tanker that delivered to ships around New York City and to ports as far away as Maine before she retired from active duty in 1993–on Sunday, having been invited by PortSide’s Director Carolina Salguero. Ms. Salguero has been documenting the repairs on the PortSide Tanker Blog, which she is somehow managing to keep up, despite living on a ship in dryock. Ms. Salguero notes that the ship hadn’t been in drydock for repairs in about 16 years and that the TLC she is getting is vital. The Whalen had been docked since fall at one of American Stevedoring Piers in Red Hook, and PortSide must raise capital in order to do the interior renovations that will turn her into a floating maritime museum, office space, cafe and community facility, but the stay at the Navy Yard is vital to ensuring that the Whalen has a long and healthy new life of service.The Whalen will leave the drydock late this week or early next week, and we’ll write more about her, but for now, it’s time to let our pictures say more than our words. We’ve got a small slideshow embed below, but you can click over to our flickr photoset or directly over to our flickr slideshow (which we’d embed here, except for the persistent glitches) for a whole lot of images of the Mary Whalen in drydock.

How do you hide the fact that you’re connected to the well-heeled developer proposing at $1.5 billiion project? You produce a flyer from an independent group that looks like it came off an underground printing press. On Friday, we noted that the a group calling itself The Future of Coney Island that is connected to Coney Island developer Joe Sitt’s PR firm, the Marino Organization, was sending out flyers touting the redevelopment of Coney Island to Brooklyn residents. (The URL thefutureofconeyisland.com, which is a “parked” web page, is registered to the Marino Organization.) Over the weekend, someone posted a scan of the flyer on the Coney Island Message Board. The results are below. All we will say is that given what the players here are capable of producing, one can only assume the faux grassroots community group look is deliberate. The mailer looks like it’s coming from local residents doing DIY organizing–against Mr. Sitt’s project, for that matter–rather than from an organization sponsored by or with very close ties to Thor Equities.

The Front

The Back

The Response Card

Related Post:
Coney Island PR Material from Thor Hitting Mail Boxes

The Revere Sugar Plant in Red Hook is on its last legs. Demolition workers tearing the iconic structure down on behalf of developer Joe Sitt and his firm Thor Equities were back hacking away at the metal structure this week and also made more headway demolishing brick structures on the site. In addition, a huge crane on a barge has been floated up the site. When we were there, one of the masts from a sunken light ship that had long poked out of the water, had been lifted out. We’re told that on Sunday, the entire light ship was lifted from the water and that a big hole was visible in the raised ship. Presumably, it’s all in preparation for tearing down a conveyor structure jutting into the water, which raises interesting questions as to why clearing debris from the water is a priority during the demolition of the factory.

Score one for the Faile crew. A check of the state of street art on N. 6th Street, which was one of the spots struck by the destructive Splasher, finds that the Faile crew has replaced destroyed street art. The art war was noted in the Sunday New York Times, and quoted a Faile member as saying they would incorporate the Splasher’s splashing and “Excrement of Action” manifesto into their work, which they have done. Here’s hoping they stay that way, but even if they don’t we have faith that street artists will trump the pseudo-intellectual twaddle of the reviled Splasher.

Brooklinks is a daily selection of Brooklyn-related information and images.

• 2,159 Idiotarod 2007 Flickr Tagged Photos!!! [flickr]
• More Idiotarod Goodness [Gothamist]
• Why Isn’t the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods Getting Its $100K? [AYR]
• Brooklyn Heights, 1982 [Brooklyn Heights Blog]
• NYT is Very Interested in Correct Spelling of Cannellini Beans [DDDB]
• Chance to Get Things Right in Gowanus? [Jeff Strabone]
• TV Repair Shops Still Exist [Lost City]
• Bumper Badger is a Brooklyn Invention! [NYDN]
• Pfizer’s Long History in Brooklyn [Gothamist]
• Park Sloper Discovers She Made the Park Slope 100 [OTBKB]
• Sheepshead Bay Bulkhead Fight [Courier Life]
• More About 94-Year-Old Dominick Diomede’s New Home in Boerum Hill [NYDN]
• Yvette Clarke Endorses Mathieu Eugene for Her Vacated City Council Seat [NYT]
• After Work Party at PowerHouse Books in Dumbo on February 1 [Dumbo NYC]

The documentary Brooklyn Matters now has its own webite, brooklymatters.com, which is a good spot to watch a trailer and to get updated listings of where producer/director Isabel Hill’s Atlantic Yards documentary is being screened. The website itself says:

No single event will have a more drastic and long-lasting impact on Brooklyn than the proposed Atlantic Yards development. This uncommon proposal, however, is mostly misunderstood. Brooklyn Matters is an insightful documentary that reveals the fuller truth about the Atlantic Yards proposal and highlights how a few powerful men are circumventing community participation and planning principles to try to push their own interests forward.

You can check out a partial calendar of upcoming screenings here as well as info about a comedy fundraiser for Develop Don’t Destroy.

It’s always interesting to see how Brooklyn is viewed, especially in light of its inclusion over the last year or so in a ton of travel section stories. In any case, here’s a little something from yesterday’s LA Times that we’re including for fun:

The [Brooklyn Cruise] terminal, at Pier 12 off Bowne Street in the Red Hook area, isn’t a neighborhood you want to stroll around after dark.

The best bet for staying overnight near the terminal is the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge, which has big, comfortable rooms and a good restaurant, Archives. The other feasible (but less enticing) option is the Holiday Inn Express, farther away in Park Slope. It’s no great shakes, but a good, inexpensive choice.

One of the best things to do is the most obvious: Take a walk on the historic Brooklyn Bridge for classic views of the Manhattan skyline from the pedestrian walkway above traffic. It takes 30 to 40 minutes to cross, or you can cheat and walk halfway and back. From the Marriott, turn right on Adams and continue to the waterfront, about a 15-minute walk. There’s no public transportation available to the port terminal.

The Brooklyn Historical Society, in an 1881 Queen Anne building, and historic Montague Street are both a short walk from the Marriott. The historical society holds the papers of abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, who preached at Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, and memorabilia about the long-gone Brooklyn Dodgers. At the end of Montague Street is a knockout view of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. Gardeners may want to check out the 52-acre Brooklyn Botanic Garden at 1000 Washington Ave., which has a bonsai museum and an outstanding orchid collection.

For a little local color, I ate one night at Frankie’s 457 Spuntino in Carroll Gardens. It’s a friendly brick-walled neighborhood place with good salads and pastas.

Another night I stayed at the Holiday Inn Express and found the delightful Moutarde a few blocks away. The menu is very French — onion soup, mussels, pot au feu, beef Burgundy — as is the bistro ambience.

Nearby Park Slope has delightful boutiques, such as Nest, for cutting-edge jewelry, tableware and toys. Bird sells high-end fashion for women.

We could point out that the writer says the Holiday Inn Express on Union Street is in Park Slope, but that would be wrong.