The year is only a few days old, but we already have our first Brooklyn Blog Debate of 2007 in the form of a discussion about whether Brooklyn–and specifically Park Slope–is less safe than Manhattan and, say, the Upper West Side. This all started when writer Douglas Rushkoff was mugged on Christmas Eve in Park Slope while taking out the garbage. He blogged about it, including how he negotiated with the mugger for his health insurance card. He wrote, in part, in his blog:
Getting a knife pushed into your ribcage now and again is just part of the price we pay to live in a city, and New York is supposedly one of the safer of the bunch. But I have to admit, it makes me question working two extra gigs (I won’t divulge which ones they are) in order to pay the exorbitant rent this part of Brooklyn – when the streets are less safe than they were in the supposedly bad parts of Manhattan where I used to live.
Then, his wife, who does a blog on Babble, weighed in with her own item about how the couple was not only going to move from Park Slope and Brooklyn, but would leave New York entirely. Too dangerous, she wrote, which is an understandable reaction when your mate is faced with possible loss of life while taking out the garbage. A sample of what she wrote in her blog, A Girl Grows in Brooklyn:
Brooklyn, Schmooklyn. Yeah, it’s pretty here, but we are surrounded by crime. Kings County (Brooklyn’s county) is one of the highest crime areas in the country. Insurance is more here than almost any other place. It costs $2000 a year to insure my wedding ring. Most other cities it would cost $150. The other day we saw a coke deal go down in front of the post office while Bugaboos passed. The diner up the street (the one next to the hospital) was robbed on Friday night. Nah, I am not liking it here much now.
Yesterday, Park Slope author and outside.in founder Steven Berlin Johnson weighed in with an item called On Leaving Brooklyn that is sympathetic to his friend while offering an analysis of whether Park Slope is, in fact, more or less dangerous than other neighborhooods. He writes:
Barbara talked on her blog about feeling much safer in the east village in the 1980s. If you look at the precinct data on the NYPD site, you can see that the there were literally FIVE times as many crimes committed in the east village in 1990 than in the Park Slope precinct in 2005, even though the east village has only about 20% more people in the precinct. (Exact numbers: 5,991 crimes in the east village in 1990 vs. 1,138 in the Slope in 2005.) Interestingly, the east village in 2005 had slightly more crime per capita than Park Slope.
I don’t hate Brooklyn. But I do feel certain parts have gotten too expensive, and that the super-expensive “communities” within Brooklyn that some of us are buying into aren’t as substantive as ones that are more heterogeneous and less gentrified.
If there is an “us and them” thing that’s annoying, I’d suggest that it is exacerbated by unnaturally accelerated gentrification.
We’re pretty certain the discussion isn’t finished.
Up, down, turn around. Please don’t let me hit the ground. –New Order
Yeah, it’s a little off to quote an 80s song (totally out of context, no less) in an item about Brooklyn real estate prices, but it’s what came to mind about the future of the overheated Brooklyn market over the next twelve months. Yesterday, the Daily News noted that prices are still strong in Brooklyn, but we wonder for how much longer.
We think there’s going to be a lot of unsold stock as new units come on the market in neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Greenpoint, where, to put it crudely, a lot of grossly overpriced crap is going up. The Flatbush Avenue corridor and its new luxe highrises will be another interesting test of market demand. Other neighborhoods like Park Slope could soften a bit too in an overall slump, but that is because prices have zoomed into the stratosphere. We think demand will remain relatively high and undergird prices relative to other parts of Brooklyn. In simple terms, a $500K 1BR apartment in a brownstone with a view of Prospect Park will hold up far better in a softer market than a newly-built $500K 1BR in the middle of a construction zone on Berry or Kent Avenue. Just before the New Year, Brownstoner offered a very informed analysis of which neighborhoods could fare well and which might not, and there is a very long discussion thread with the item too.
I went poking around last couple days at unfinished condos as well as relatively new units in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Some prices are cut 10-20% off original asking prices, and sellers/developers were open to offers 10% below those discounted prices. This is not the bottom. Spring/Summer 07 will be a sight to behold.
It will be an interesting thing, indeed, to see what a more realistic market will bear as thousands of new units come on the market. We actually think that late 2007 and 2008 will be the real time of carnage in Brooklyn in terms of price cuts and unsold inventory.
January 4th, 2007 · Comments Off on Whole Foods Speaking to Park Slope Civic Council Tonight
Whole Foods is slated to make a presentation about their 68,000 square foot supermarket in Gowanus tonight to the Park Slope Civic Council. The meeting is at 7PM in the Executive Dining Room at Methodist Hospital in Park Slope. The entrance is on Sixth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Whole Foods made a presentation about its original plan to the Civic Council last year, but the both the store and planned parking (now nearly 800 cars) have grown dramatically since then and additional environmental problems (a “toxic plume” of highly carcinogenic benzene) near the site have recently been revealed. The project is “as of right,” which in plain English means there is no public review or input. The proponents of putting a green roof atop the store–which is currently slated to be a parking lot–will also speak at the meeting.
In a rational world, one would think that the environmental issues would be thoroughly aired in public and that something as potentially threatening as a concentration of underground benzene near the site would possibly ring enough alarm bells to merit an examination of any potential health risks, particularly to workers that would be impacted if a very potent cancer causing chemical is present and they face long-term exposure.
January 4th, 2007 · Comments Off on Brooklyn Parrots Part II: Two Brooklyn Parrots Music Vids
Steve Baldwin, the Brooklyn Parrot expert and person behind brooklynparrots.com, has posted two music videos, with original songs and music that he created, on youtube and on his Brooklyn Parrots blog. The Washington Post described the first one as “a Lou Reed-style song, ‘The Ballad of the Brooklyn Parrots’…which mixes human and parrot voices and which one ‘critic’ called ‘Jim Morrison meets Rick Moranis at the Audubon Society.’ You can definitely spot the Lizard King influence in the heavily processed vocal.
Ballad of the Brooklyn Parrots
Brooklyn Parrots Bring the News
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The Brooklyn Parrots have made the Washington Post and the story is still being picked up and run by other papers around the country like the News & Observer, which is where we found the story late yesterday. All of which goes to show that every loves an animal story, especially when the creatures in question are our cool Brooklyn Monk Parrots (which are still experiencing a vile poaching problem). Here are a couple of excerpts from the Post story, which is totally worth a read on its own because it’s, well, delightful. (There’s a word we don’t get to use much without any sarcasm whatsoever.):
They are the wild parrots of Brooklyn, these emerald-feathered yakkers with the wisenheimer sense of humor. Thought to be long-ago escapees from a container at John F. Kennedy International Airport, their ranks replenished by unauthorized releases from pet shops, the parakeets — originally from Argentina — have become accomplished city dwellers. There is a parrot colony along the Hudson River cliffs in New Jersey and another bunch that prefers Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. Of late, two arrivistes have taken up residency on an apartment ledge on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
But mostly these are Brooklyn parrots, content in their adopted borough of 2.5 million people.
“They are successful Brooklynites, in that they are adaptable, eat a wide variety of foods and like to talk,” says Eleanor Miele, a professor at Brooklyn College who lives in the Park Slope neighborhood and has found herself entranced by the parrots…Most Brooklyn parrots live in colonies of 50 or 60 birds, although a few less sociable types live on Coney Island or in Canarsie or Gravesend. They favor homes atop light and transmission poles; at Green-Wood Cemetery they inhabit the soaring gothic spires near the gate. Their nests are vast 400-pound constructs, with foyers and anterooms and a space where the females lay eggs and enjoy a respite from the males.
The story also notes how “state and federal wildlife-control officers” at first tried to exterminate the birds, which is just as reprehensible as the jerks who are stealing them, most likely for breeding purposes. For more about the Brooklyn Parrots, always check out brooklynparrots.com, which the authoritative source of info about our cool freakin’ boyds.
We love Gowanus. While we cast a very wide net around Brooklyn, we took our name from our favorite canal, so it pains us to have to return time and again to the toxicity of Gowanus. For instance, the foul water and oil slicks in the Big G, the toxic plume near Third Street and the state of the Gowanus Whole Food site. One almost feels traitorous pointing out things like that.
In any case, we got an email from a reader who was apartment hunting in the hood, and figured it was worth reproducing here:
I just looked at an apartment today for rent on 3rd avenue by union street. I like it over there…but it smells like gasoline. So I thought maybe it was just from the gas station on 4th ave or maybe someone was cementing something nearby…but then I looked online and…despite how much I would love to live there, it seems like a health hazard. It’s horrifying that such toxic ground will be home to Whole Foods! Do you think it’s safe to live there or… I mean does it always smell like fresh gas/cement? What do you think about 3rd ave as a place to live…air-wise?
We don’t know about the cement smell, but we’re thinking that the gasoline scent could be coming from the Bayside Fuel Depot at Bond and Union or, even, from one of the industrial buildings or trucks parked nearby. In a more big picture way, Gowanus may be the butt of jokes, but there are sites throughout Brooklyn, particularly in Williamsburg and Greenpoint that are equally troubling in terms of what may be beneath the surface. It is going to be more and more of an issue as well, given that the city’s long-term plan is to handle some of its growth by cleaning up and using brownfield sites for housing.
Do we have faith that the public agencies charged with overseeing cleanups will do so in a thorough and aggressive way? Uh, not exactly.
As we noted yesterday, the reason we fell into a sinkhole on N. 11th Street in Williamsburg was because we were having another look at the site of the McCarren Park Mews condos on the oily site we like to call the Roebling Oil Field. What we found was that the coverup cleanup is almost done. A foundation is being poured and vast amounts of soil are being laid over the oil beneath. We’ve said before and we’ve said again that we’re not oil cleanup experts. So, what’s going on here may be entirely appropriate, even if we’d personally look to a more pristine site for our dream home. What surprised us, though, is that oil is still oozing into the site from the north, which leads us to conclude that, perhaps, the source of the pollution is in that direction. The shot below shows the general progress of work at the Roebling Oil Field.
January 3rd, 2007 · Comments Off on Weird Williamsburg Motorcycle Graveyard
We were wandering around a site in Williamsburg, about which we’ll have more later, when another photographer who had wandered onto the property–which had previously been behind a wall and locked gate–said, “Woah, get a load of this. There are hundreds of old motorcycles back here.” When we wandered back, we found a motorcycle graveyard. All credit to the other photog for this find, because the odds are we’d have never made our way back to that part of the property. We’ll have more photos of the rest of the property, but for now, check out the bikes.
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Richard Meier’s On Prospect Park development is taking shape nicely, albeit slowly. While photographing its project, we came across this juxtaposition of hanging sneakers against Meier glass. Interesting.
January 3rd, 2007 · Comments Off on The Greenpoint Aqua Condo…Boat?
So, we’re walking along in Greenpoint after shooting some photos of McCarren Park and Karl Fischer Row (aka Bayard Street), when we notice the Aqua Condo has finally lost some of its scaffolding and black netting. As we get closer we notice…a boat on top of the scaffolding at the corner. Seems to be taking the water theme at the Aqua a bit far, but it certainly makes for a most interesting visual. Anyone knows what the boat is doing there, please do share.
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January 2nd, 2007 · Comments Off on Revenge of the Roebling Oil Field: GL Attacked by Sinkhole
So, Gowanus Lounge ended 2006 by falling into a sinkhole in Williamsburg, allowing us to finally know the joy of what it feels like to have the ground give way beneath your feet. This bit of year-end fun took place at the horrific interesting development site at N. 11th and Roebling in Williamsburg that we’ve dubbed the Roebling Oil Field. We were there to have another look at the attrocious toxic muck oozing from the ground challenging development conditions. (We’ll have a pictoral update of the oily slime remediation-in-progess tomorrow.) In any case, back to how we fell into a freaking sinkhole in the sidewalk. (That’s the offending hole above, minus yours truly).
We were walking alongside the site on N. 11th Street when we noticed a patch of asphalt. About the time we noted that it was sagging slightly, we stepped on it and it gave way. We sank into the small, yet very menacing hole nearly to our waist before the ground stopped giving way and we lifted ourselves out.
The irony of being attacked by a development that we’ve been blogging about did not escape us, even as we brushed off the stinky dirt, took off our shoes to shake out the soil and wondered if we’d go to lunch smelling like a can of motor oil. We’re certain that the Little Roebling Oil Field Sinkhole will be filled at some point today (and hope that no drunken New Year’s revelers stumbed into it at 4AM), but our advice–other than to check out what was under your Williamsburg or Greenpoint condo before dropping $500K on it–is to steer clear of the sidewalks around the Roebling Oil Field.
In googling to find out whether sinkhole is one word or two, we also discovered that there’s a sinkholelawyer.com. Seriously. It’s a law firm in Florida, where humongous house eating sinkholes happen with alarming frequency. And, there’s also a sinkhole.org, where we learned that our little Williamsburg Hipster Hole isn’t a sinkhole at all, but a hole probably caused by soil contraction or settlement. In plain English, the Oil Field workers didn’t throw in enough dirt before covering the opening with asphalt.
As we noted noted before, two Brooklynites behind the Green Roof Whole Foods Market blog have proposed that the big retailer include a green roof as part of its Gowanus market on Third Street, which is slated to open in 2008. (Assuming the site’s dubious environmental heritage and the “toxic plume” that may be coming from next door don’t cause problems, literally or figuratively.) Well, it turns out Whole Foods seems to have already said “no thanks” to the green roof idea. A story in the Carroll Gardens Courier says that Whole Foods says it has sent a letter to the green roof advocates that it considered a green roof “early in the design phase” but that “we subsequently determined that a green roof simply would not be feasible for this particular project.”
Which is where it gets interesting. Madalyn Warren, one of the people pushing the interesting green roof idea and a founder of Eidolon Culture, tells GL that “we never received any correspondence from Whole Foods” and that “we haven’t recieved any direct feedback from Whole Foods other than, wait until after the holidays, we are too busy right now.” She says the green roof project “is still being pushed forward” and expects to have a discussion with the retailer now that the holidays are over. Meanwhile, the Courier quotes from another letter sent by a Whole Foods exec to Community Board 6 saying, “Whole Foods Market has never been approached directly by these individuals.”
A veteran PR firm, Yoswein New York Inc., which includes handling land use projects on its list of services, is working for Whole Foods. Among the efforts on which the firm–which was founded by former New York State Assemblymember Joni A. Yoswein–has worked are helping Ikea gain approval for store on the Todd Shipyards site in Red Hook and fighting moves to ban playing the Mr. Softee jingle. The green roof advocates have been in contact with the Yoswein firm, and also say they are interested in “brokering an environmental community benefits agreement” with Whole Foods.
One reason Whole Foods cites for rejecting a “green roof” is that it is planning a 177-car parking lot for the roof in question. (There will also be a 480-car garage on the site.) The 66,000-square-foot Whole Foods could attract as many as 1,800 cars an hour at peak times.
Will the Gowanus Whole Foods have a green roof or will the only greenery be the occasional bag of organic spinach dropped by a shopper? Stay tuned.
GOWANUS BONUS: The Brooklyn Papers’ Ariella Cohen reported in the most recent edition of the paper that workers at the Verizon facility across the street from the Whole Foods site have filed a complaint because workers weren’t told that carcinogenic benzene is beneath the site. Local 109 of the Communication Workers of America says Verizon may have violated state safety laws by not informing workers that they are working on top of a “toxic plume” that includes benzene. The site at Third Avenue and Third Street, across from the Whole Foods parcel, was used as a fuel station until the late 1990s. The tanks were removed, but Cohen notes that Department of Envirnmental Conservation records show five oil spills at the site. Verizon says “in all liklihood, we are not the source of the problem,” meaning the “toxic plume” that is said to have spread to the Whole Foods site and that it is moving in the general direction of Park Slope. More than 11,000 tons of contaminated soil have already been removed from the Whole Foods site. Because of zoning for the site, standards for the cleanup–up to 25 percent of the cost borne by taxpayers–will be less stringent than for other types of development such as housing.
Here it comes. The Starbucks at Smith and Wyckoff is taking shape fast, creating a revolutionary new world in 2007 in which you can cop a spiced pumpkin latte on Court Street and chase it with a doppio espresso on Smith Street. Ah, the glory of it all, even though we still really, really miss Halcyon and have a hard time going into the Amazon Cafe franchise that hacked up and took over the space.
The Courier-Life papers have a long Q&A with Brooklyn developer and Thor Equities CEO Joe Sitt, who is the most prominent and controversial figure on the Brooklyn development scene after Bruce Ratner. (Besides his huge holdings in Coney Island and the Revere Sugar site in Red Hook, Mr. Sitt owns the Albee Square site in downtown Brooklyn, which is said to be under consideration by Wal-Mart.) Among the general points that Mr. Sitt makes is that he is waiting for city action on rezoning in Coney Island and that the Revere Sugar demolition in Red Hook is part of a yet-to-be-developed plan for a mixed use development that will open access to the waterfront. In terms of Coney Island, he expressed frustration that zoning changes haven’t yet been made, saying that “The city has a plan. We submitted a plan. The city knows exactly what we’re looking for and we’re waiting for them.” The developer also noted that a person is being added to focus on the jobs part of the Coney development. In terms of the city, Mr. Sitt may have to keep waiting. A preliminary comprehensive rezoning may be done in the spring, followed by public review and the land use process in the fall. Assuming no conflict or schedule changes.
On the Sitt Coney Island vision:
It will include a hotel component and a residential component.
The mix is driven by several factors. One of the largest problems Coney Island has right now is it’s dead most of the year and it’s a scary neighborhood late at night almost all year long because of the lack of people present there.
In our plan, one of our goals is to include a residential and hotel component that will create that 24/7 activity 365 days a year so that there’ll be constant activity which is what creates the vitality for areas and developments like this cause you have people there, and in the case of the hotel, transient activity — people coming and going.
So the goal is to have a mixed-use project of all three of those components and we think by having all three of these components we’ll make this into a really important destination location where people want to be, people want to sleep, people want to vacation, people want to visit, people want to own a second location.
On the Coney planning process:
Taconic [Developers] owns nearly as much as we have in Coney Island and they haven’t even begun thinking about putting a pencil to paper, because they are saying they don’t want to spend that energy until they see the city go ahead and do the rezoning.
So it’s not the chicken or the egg. It’s the city or the city. The city’s in control. We then fill in the blanks. We’ve done our master plan work, but we’ll have to modify to fit in with what the city does.
On housing in the current amusement zone:
A lot of our residential we hope are going to be folks on time share, folks that come and buy like two weeks out of the year and/or some second homeowners like they do at a lot of resort and vacation spots, but the biggest part that make up where people sleep is going to be the transient folks — people who sleep in the hotels and/or the time shares, as an example.
There’s no rule that says sorry, you are too wealthy to come visit Coney Island and sleep in a hotel. Part of democracy is you want anybody at any income level to welcome them to be able to sleep in Coney Island.
We’ve delayed doing a post about Mulchfest–the annual Christmas tree recycling event–for weeks. Before Christmas, it was depressing. We thought about it the day after Christmas when a discarded tree blew onto Hamilton Avenue and right into the path of the vehicle in which we were riding, but still felt it was too soon. And, now, with the New Year here, it’s time to note that you can recycle your Christmas tree on January 6 and 7 from 10AM to 2PM. (Everyone else is noting it too, so you truly can’t say that you didn’t know about Mulchfest.) You can check out the Mulchfest web page here for locations all over the city. For your convenience, we’re listing the Brooklyn locations below. Make sure to remove all the decorations and lights from your tree before you sadly (or gladly) drop it off for mulching. All sites are both “drop off” sites and chipper sites unless noted:
Prospect Park, Third Street and Prospect Park West.
Owl’s Head Park, Colonial Road and 68th Street.
McCarren Park, Driggs Avenue and Lorimer Street.
Cobble Hill Park, Congress and Clinton streets.
Marine Park, Avenue U between Stuart and East 33rd streets.
Von King Park, Lafayette Street and Marcy Avenue.
Ft. Greene Park, Washington Park and Willoughby Street.
Amazing Garden, Carroll and Columbia streets. Drop off site only.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park, Dumont and Bradford avenues. Drop off site only.
Maria Hernandez Park, Knickerbocker Avenue and Suydam Street. Drop off site only.
Greenwood Cemetery, 25th Street and 5th Avenue. (This site will be open on January 13 only for those who have separation issues.) Drop off site.
There was some sky writing up there on New Year’s Eve. We caught this “Who” over Williamsburg around 11:30AM. Later, we noticed a plane doing some writing over Manhattan, when we were about to have lunch in Curry Hill. In any case, the “who” was the only word that we know of that appeared over Williamsburg, leading one of the soccer players in McCarren Park to point at it and shout several times, “Who killed Saddam?” If anyone caught a full sentence or phrase over Brooklyn or Manhattan, we’d love to know what it was about and who was behind it. Maybe, Whole Foods?
UPDATE: As a commenter noted, and as Gothamist posted, the sky writing was part of an ad campaign for a TV series. A pretty dumb ad, though, since it didn’t note the show. Duh. Glad we were only unwitting tools for an inept marketing effort.
We found this vid of last night’s (this morning’s) excellent fireworks in Prospect Park posted over at youtube by matt3303. We chose to watch, for a change, rather than videotape, but we’re glad someone did. Click on the embed below or this link.
January 1st, 2007 · Comments Off on Annual Coney Island Polar Bears Dip Today
If it’s January 1, it can only mean that it’s time for the Coney Island Polar Bear Club to do their annual New Year’s Swim. Of course, those fun and crazy swimmers do their thing every Sunday in the winter, but the Jan. 1 dip is the one that gets all the press. This year the swimmers are raising money for Camp Sunshine.
The festivities, which have been a tradition since 1903, start on the boardwalk at Stillwell Avenue and swim time is 1:00.
We’re certain there will be some photos and blog items (like this one we posted about back in November) for tomorrow. While the water will be nice and chilly, the temps for today are supposed to be in the 50s, with rain, making for a much warmer New Year’s Day than some. (The photo above is last year’s New Year’s swim, from the Polar Bears online photo album.) Now, that’s what we call turning Coney Island into a year-round destination.
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The year is only a few days old, but we already have our first Brooklyn Blog Debate of 2007 in the form of a discussion about whether Brooklyn–and specifically Park Slope–is less safe than Manhattan and, say, the Upper West Side. This all started when writer Douglas Rushkoff was mugged on Christmas Eve in Park Slope while taking out the garbage. He blogged about it, including how he negotiated with the mugger for his health insurance card. He wrote, in part, in his blog:
