Thumbs up to the Brooklyn Record for bringing the story in Block Magazine about breastfeeding in Williamsburg to our attention. According to the Record, “In Williamsburg, groups of new mothers are meeting up at baby-friendly cafés like Willie B’s and Mamalu’s.” Block reports:

Williamsburg has an apparent lack of resources for breastfeeding mothers. Most women are forced to travel to Manhattan or Park Slope for breastfeeding stores and classes. The nearest representative of La Leche League, an international support and informational resource for breastfeeding women, is in Fort Greene. “There is definitely a need for lactation services in Williamsburg,” says Barbara Holmes, an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant who has many clients in Williamsburg.

We would, um, distinctly remember the day when Williamsburg needed serious detox services and, now it needs lacation services? We’ve got nothing against moms and the little ones, and breastfeeding is healthy and natural. However, Parkslopesburg, anyone? As a singer originally from Minnesota wrote and sang, You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

[Photo courtesy of Jada Shapiro, Birth Day Presence/Block Magazine]

Put a little sunshine back in your Brooklyn day with the video below, shot in Coney Island back in April. It’s nicely done. (Click on this link or the embed.) We came across this courtesy of Kinetic Carnival, the Coney blog, which also links to several other Coney vids. Hey, we find it more uplifting than all the recent news about Thor Equities evictions and development.

1) The first buildings going up at Northside Piers are now several stories tall. We’d noted the progress from ground level within the last couple of weeks, but Williamsburg blogger INSIJS offers up nice view of the progress on the development that is selling itself with the nauseating “bottle of wine and that cheese I’ve been dying to try” on Bedford angle.

2) As you can see in the photo above, the Old Dutch Mustard factory is no more. We caught some of the post-demolition action on Saturday and cobbled together a quick vid.

3) The New York Times finally took note of the controversy about all of the new development in Williamsburg, including the slow progress on affordable housing versus the surge of luxury construction. The coverage also noted the Department of Buildings got 337 complaints about construction in Greenpoint-Williamsburg in September. Last year, there were 24,610 permits building permits issued in Brooklyn, including 1,924 for demolition and 1,740 for new buildings. All the work is handled by 25 inspectors. Our limited math ability tells us that that is 984 permits per inspector. If one limits it only to new construction and demolition, that is 146 per inspector. Assuming scrupulous honesty (stop laughing), that’s an overwhelming workload.

4) The most notorious Williamsburg project, the Finger Building, is under a Stop Work Order. It will go to court on Nov. 13. A neighboring property owner says the developer built some things illegally to get extra height. The developer says the building should be a full 16 stories. It’s currently stopped at ten, but with steel beams on top indicating more floors are coming.

5) Also under a Stop Work Order is The Edge on Kent Avenue. INSIJS found the order tacked to a fence on N. 5th Street. Work on the luxury highrise project started over the summer, then stopped (long before the Stop Work Order was issued because of expired permits). Only the developer knows if The Edge has lost its edge.

It’s just a coincidence that it’s Election Day, but David Langlieb, the Parks Department employee who touched off a small tempest with an essay on Greenpoint that some believed contained ethnic slurs, has apologized. Meanwhile, the high school student who dressed up as Hitler for Halloween, didn’t apologize, but joined in a protest against his costume.

First, Mr. Langlieb, who released a statement apologizing for using words like “morons” and “vermin” to describe Greenpoint residents. “I would like to apologize to anyone offended by my essay, which I wrote as a private citizen, not as a city employee …,” Langlieb said in a statement quoted in the Daily News. He said he was trying to write satirical piece in the vein of Jonathan Swift, the 18th century author of “Gulliver’s Travels” known for his biting social commentary. (Uh, not exactly.) “In doing so, I was not sufficiently sensitive to the power of historical stereotypes, even when invoked for the purpose of satire,” Langlieb said.

“I ask for your forgiveness,” Mr. Langlieb said, sounding very much like a certain candidate for public office in New York State on this Election Day.

Meantime, Brooklyn’s Goose Step Kid, the student at Leon M. Goldstein HS who dressed as Hitler (twice) joined a protest against the costume yesterday by parents and students. Says the Post:

Walter Petryk, 16, and his parents strolled with about 50 people from the Leon M. Goldstein HS community to the nearby Holocaust Memorial Park.

“They called it a walk of tolerance and respect, so I figured I would go and show my tolerance and respect for other people’s views of my costume,” Petryk said.

Assuming he gives up dressing like Der Fuhrer, Mr. Petryk may have a future in politics.

I began at the subway at 4th Avenue and 86th Street; I had left this area in March 1993, and had returned periodically to visit my father about once a month, for dentist visits, and lunch at my favorite diner, Zeke’s Roast Beef on 8th Avenue and 66th Streets. Well, my father has passed on, and so has Zeke’s; it’s now a Chinese restaurant. I still have a good number of my teeth, though, and now and then, some of them hurt, so my connection to Bay Ridge is now my dentist. (I have never returned to my old grade school, St. Anselm’s; I consider June 17, 1971, my own personal holiday since that was the day I graduated. I wasn’t treated with the courtesy I thought I deserved from either my classmates or teachers. Of course the same also goes for some of the places I’ve worked.)

Absolutely wonderful writing and photos about two neighborhoods that many Brooklynites (let alone New Yorkers) don’t often visit. While we’re on the subject, don’t forget Kevin Walsh’s new Forgotten New York book, easily the best NYC book of the year.

Election Day:

• Local Campaigns Draw to Close [NYT]
• Election Day Info [NYT]
• Atlantic Yards/Eminent Domain Election Guide [No Land Grab]

Another Day:

• Talk is Cheap: City Planning Chair Praises Jane Jacobs [Gotham Gazette]
• Do Growth Right, Says Pratt’s Shiffman [AYR]
• It Came From the Blogosphere [No Land Grab]
• “Botoxing” Fulton Street Mall [Brooklyn Record]
• New Condos in Quasi-PLG? [Across the Park]
• Brooklyn Development is Out of Control [Gothamist]
• Elderly Man Hit Twice in Sunset Park and Dies [NYDN]
• Red Hook Biodiesel Plant Would be Boon to Sunset Park [Sunset Parker]
• Prospect Park in the Fall [Englishman in New York]
• As Williamsburg Changes So Does Northsix [Brooklyn Record]
• Do We Need $900 Bags? [clintoncentric]
• Markowitz Does the UK [NYDN]
• Seventh Avenue Bank of America Watch: Still Really Sucks [OTBKB]
• Doors Open Hell Ride on the A Train in Brooklyn [NYDN]

Mea Culpa:

• Brooklyn’s Halloween Hitler Teen Joins Protest Against Himself [NYPost]
• Greenpoint “Vermin” Writer Apologizes [NYDN]

If you read too many items or stories about crime in Park Slope and environs and you might think that crime is going up. Apparently, it isn’t, except for assault. The Police Department tells the Park Slope Courier that crime in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace is down for the year other than felonious assaults, which are up by 33 percent compared to last year. Pay no mind to the Gothamist map that shows all of the mayhem going on Brooklyn. The 78th Precinct reports that burglaries are up .6 percent and grand larceny is up 7.1 percent while robbery is down 24.4 percent. And, despite all the stories about cars being stolen, car theft is down 25 percent. Crime in Prospect Park is reported down by 26 percent. None of which does you any good if you become a statistic, but at least the trends are good. Now, about all the people posting on the Park Slope Forum about getting mugged and robbed on Sixth Avenue…

We’re guessing the developer will be targeting the Russian market drawn to Brighton Beach, as the building is being called The Sochi after the Russian resort city on the Black Sea. Units will have floor-to-ceiling glass windows, health club, tennis courts, indoor pool, etc. (This would be the most signficant development in the area since The Oceana on the eastern end of Brighton Beach on the water.)

The developer is the Bobker Group, which is also developing the property dubbed “Lake Windsor” in the South Slope. Now they’ll have a larger body of water with which to work.

Not that Donald Trump would be interested in tossing up one of his tacky elegant buildings in Brooklyn, but one of his Manhattan undertakings could have have fallout in Brooklyn neighborhoods that are still home to manufacturing. Trump is trying to put up a 45-story “condo hotel” at Spring and Varick streets in Manhattan. Why is this of interest? Because the parcel is zoned for manufacturing. Residential development isn’t allowed, but “transient hotels” are.

Trump’s proposal has drawn loud and bitter opposition, particuarly because of the height of the building. But Brooklyn activists are worried that if Trump succeeds in putting up the hotel, then it could spell doom for neighborhoods like Red Hook, Sunset Park and Gowanus. The latest Carroll Gardens Courier provides the details:

Condo hotels are like transient hotels in that they have all the services offered by hotels; they differ distinctly, however, in that the units are owned, not rented for a night or two. Thus, they become second homes or even primary residences for those who buy in, who can also rent out their units – possibly for months at a time — when they are not utilizing them. Condo hotels can be extremely lucrative for those who develop them; an added bonus is that the developer gets money for the units up front, rather than relying on the successions of comings and goings that fuel transient hotel profits.

Faced with the specter of high-rise development in the borough’s remaining manufacturing areas, Brooklyn activists have joined Manhattanites in decrying Trump’s proposal, which some say, would likely bring with it a rush to develop those areas – heretofore out-of-bounds for residential construction – in a way that would bring in luxury housing and squeeze the remaining manufacturing uses, without even a nod to affordable housing.

Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, calls the decision Trump is seeking “a total Trojan horse” and notes that the decision will, in effect, be made administratively. “It’s a back-door way to get what amounts to a citywide zoning change without any public process,” he says.

We caught the New York City Marathon, as we usually do, from Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn between Park Slope and Gowanus. The crowd watching along this part of the route seems to get bigger and bigger every year. Watch the slideshow below or click here to go over to flickr and check out the pics there.

Or watch the video below by clicking right here or by clicking on the embed.

The New York Times today catches up with the incredible level of development in Williamsburg and Greenpoint and the level to which it is having a negative impact on quality of life and on the community itself. The article also deals which such issues as the lack of affordable housing in the first developments being completed. There were 337 complaints lodged with the Department of Buildings in September about construction. The article details some of the quality of life horrors that residents are enduring, including very real threats to their safety.

Better late than never, one supposes.

Meantime, the most disturbing instance of cultural and historic vandalism in Williamsburg–the demolition of the Old Dutch Mustard factory–is done. All that remains of this wonderful building is a pile of rubble and a musty, concrete dust smell in the air. The building was gone late last week. We swung by this weekend to catch a look at the demolition equipment in action and to get one last shot of Dutch demo porn. In related news, a Willimasburg tipster says a voodoo practitioner has placed the “Curse of Old Dutch” (AKA the Curse of the Bursting Williamsburg Real Estate Bubble) on Steiner Equities. Any project that occupies the former site is doomed to price depreciation and mulitple construction defects including a tragically flawed plumbing system. Click here to go over to the youtube page or just click on the embed.

Marathon:

• The Marathon from Williamwsburg [Making the Connection]
• Watching, Helping from the Sidelines [Gothamist]
• Bruce Ratner Makes the Marathon [No Land Grab]
• Celebrating Marathon Madness [NYPost]
• Lances Finishes the Marathon [NYDN]

Non-Marathon:

• Williamsburg-Greenpoint Residents Say Development Out of Control [NYT]
• Learning from Newark [Brooklyn Views]
• Welcome to Brooklyn, ‘British Friends’ [Gumby Fresh]
• Walkabout (to Red Hook) [My Brooklyn Year]
• Bushwick Old School [Sunset Parker]
• Hobokenians: That Was Supposed to be Our Barge Pool [Hoboken 411]
• Sunset Park Haunting [Sunset Parker]
• Manhattan Bridge from 68 Jay [Dumbo NYC]
• Coney Residents Could Pay Up to $100M to Replace Bricks [NYDN]
• Protest Today Against Brooklyn’s Teen Hitler [NYPost]

Who says Coney Island is dead after the summer season? Z. Madison blog thoughtfully posted a vid of the David Letterman Show blowing up a huge pumpkin on the beach in Coney one night last week. Go over to Z. Madison to watch — or just go over to Z. Madison because it’s always a good thing to do — or click on the embed below.

The weekend means many things, and one of them is our weekly post of our favorite Craigslist Missed Connection. CL’s Missed Connections have a bit of everything: comedy, tragedy, romance, psychostalking, etc. This week, we again skip over the subway and turn to a natural location: the gym.

NYSC Are you the blondie im in secret love with – m4w – 39
You are about 5’6 blonde and have an amazing bottom, I am in ok shape but I try, was told I have movie star facial features but one thing is definite I have movie star financial status.

I am the guy who asked you about the hours then told you a joke that you said made your day.

I can offer you the financial security you deserve and in addition I am not hard on the eyes, don’t let all those wannabe successful gym guys fool you most do not have any money at all, I doubt there are any true financial independent guys in this gym that even come close to my status.

Get back to me please ill treat you like a real princess.

Dude.

Honorable Mention:
Green ipod Lady, Prancing Across Carroll St, Dropping Said ipod… – m4w

Marathon:

• Pre-Marathon News Roundup [Gothamist]
• NYC Marathon Sunday [Gerritsen Beach.net]
• Marathon Map and Info [nyc.gov]
• Marathon History [nyc.gov]
• Official ING Marathon Page [ingnuycmarathon]
• NYC Transit Spectators Map PDF [mta.nfo]

Non-Marathon:

• Intrepid’s Concorde to be Temporarily Housed at Floyd Bennett Field [NYT]
• Massive Floyd Bennett Field Sports Center to Feature Grimaldi’s, Jacques Torres [NYDN]
• When 500 Words is Too Much to Read About Atlantic Yards [AYR]
• A Walk Over Netown Creek [Boroughed]
• North Six in Williamsburg Prepares for Bowery Presents Takeover [NYT]
• DOT Picks Engineers for Brooklyn Heights BQE Segment Overhaul [Brooklyn Heights Blog]
• Letterman Blows Up Pumpkin at Coney Island Video [Z. Madison]
• The Fulton Mall [NYT]
• McCarren Lake? [A Test of Will]
• Buck Fever [1000 Bars]
• Litchfield Brooklyn Improvement Company [seriously excited!]
• Laws of Nature: Raccoon Kills Red Hook Chickens [NYT]

Blogger and Smart Mom Louise Crawford emails to remind us (and posts about it over at Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn) that the next Brooklyn Reading Works is taking place on November 16. The featured authors are Elissa Schappell, Ilene Starger and Darcey Steinke. Elissa Schappell wrote Use Me, which was nominated for a Pen/Hemingway award. She is co-editor with Jenny Offill of The Friend Who Got Away and the forthcoming Money Changes Everything. She also writes the Hot Type column in Vanity Fair.

Ilene Starger is a poet whose work has appeared in Bayou, Oyez Review, Georgetown Review, and other mags. She was a finalist for the 2005 Ann Stanford Prize.

Darcey Steinke is the author of Suicide Blond (a New York Times notable book of the year), Up from the Water and Jesus Saves.

Brooklyn Reading Works–which is curated by Louise–takes place at the Old Stone House in JJ Byrne Park on Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 4th Street. The event starts at 8 PM. Admission is $5.00 includes some refreshments. Check it out.

Boy, were we wrong.

We almost choked on our coffee when we saw Gothamist’s item about it and Gawker’s headline about “Polacks.” Turns out the “Polish joke” is a long essay about Greenpoint that ran in the Haverford College alumni magazine. The writer is a 2005 grad who wrote a humor column at the college and now works for the Parks Department. Clearly, the essay is satire and full of biting, sardonic verbiage. On the other hand, it’s so over the top that you can see how many would take serious umbrage.

If you want an interesting perspective on this, check the blog justsayin, which is written by someone who knows the writer and reporter that wrote the Sun’s article. It helps put the essay and its writer in a little perspective. For a different kind of reaction, you can check Transparentique, a blog that deconstructs the pieces.

Haverford’s alumni mag has yanked the essay from its website. But Gothamist preserved the evidence and ran most of it, and we filled in a bit more using Google’s cached pages. Here it is, with only a couple of passages deleted, because it’s pretty long as it is:

After graduating from Haverford in 2005 I decided to move to a neighborhood where I knew I could make a difference. That neighborhood was Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Greenpoint is a tightly knit, working class, semi-urban community of first- and second-generation Polish immigrants. It’s the kind of place where the old ladies shop at Gus’s Fruit Stand instead of Wal-Mart, and parents take their kids to the park on Sunday nights to play softball and drink lemonade.

Communities like Greenpoint are a dying breed in America, and thank God for that. Try ordering a Venti Caramel Macchiato at the Franklin Street “coffee shop” and you’ll see what I mean. While the community has several problems, most of them come back to the high density of Polish people infesting its rowhouses. Mocking Poles for being stupid is perhaps the last form of politically correct prejudice, as well as the most accurate. The other day I asked a local Polak shopkeeper if he’d heard the one about the Polish guy who tried to fill up his gas tank by driving the car in reverse. The shopkeeper didn’t respond because he’d accidentally put his pants on his head that morning and the waistband was cutting off his hearing.

I’m kidding, of course, but Greenpoint’s problems are no laughing matter, and they won’t be solved by teaching the locals how to wear pants. The Greenpoint business district, for example, is even uglier than the morons who work there. Shoddy hand-made signage pollutes the storefront windows, and some of the signs aren’t even in English. A friendly corporate logo or two would do wonders for the place. The good news is that it looks like they’re opening a Blimpie on Calyer Street, where Ula’s Deli used to reside. I’m not sure what they’re doing with Ula, but maybe if she promises to clean her ears once in awhile they’ll let her work the cash register.

Amidst these modest improvements are a few old-school New York charms. I’ll admit that I was kind of intrigued by the bearded alcoholic homeless man who lives outside the subway station. That was cute for about five minutes. But day after day with the nonsensical screaming and the pointing…get over yourself, buddy.

So why do I live in Greenpoint? Because if I didn’t, then it wouldn’t get any better…Not to toot my own horn, but I’ve done wonders for the community. My non-ethnic whiteness, above average hygiene, and dependable income have already attracted new investments to Greenpoint. Private developers are within months of breaking ground on a massive high-rise condominium complex on the Greenpoint waterfront. There’ll be a rooftop pool, a fitness center, and gorgeous views of the Manhattan skyline from across the East River. It’s not quite perfect—a small percentage of the apartments will go to low-income families—but nine tenths of a loaf is better than none.

One thing I do worry about is that Greenpoint will gentrify incorrectly. This is what’s happening in adjacent Williamsburg, where the Hasidic Jews are being displaced by hipsters. Sure, their parents give them enough money to keep the neighborhood looking decent, but the new population is almost as annoying as the old one. And yes, they do wear suits and ties sometimes, but only to be ironic. No thank you.

I’d hate to see that happen to Greenpoint, because it has so much potential. It’s a place I’d like to raise my kids: Within a stone’s throw of Manhattan, amidst lawyers and investment bankers, and as shut off from civil society as humanly possible. I dream of a Greenpoint where Banana Republic is open all night, where groceries are ordered over the Internet, and where the churches are converted to mixed-use parking facilities. Mine is a Greenpoint of the future, sensitive to the desires of its residents who so desperately need a racquet club and driving range. Or who will, anyway, after the vermin are gone.

So join me, my fellow Greenpointians. That is, if you’re literate enough to understand what I’ve written.

If you want to know a bit more about the writer, David Langlieb, he contributes to a blog called The Boob Tubers, which offers this commentary on the little tempest in a teapot. The writer writes about Sex and the City over there. His latest contribution is the Sex and the City Pre-Election Day Special.

There you have it.

Photos:

• 9th Street Bridge [bluejake]
• Second Street Doorway [seriously excited!]
• Gowanus at Night [miche718/flickr]
• Halloween Sunset and Williamsburg Bridge [imjustsayin/flickr]
• Going, Going, Gone [A Test of Will]
• Eminent Domain [Newington/flickr]
• Red Hook Gold [Lex’s Folly]
• Early Christmas [lesterhead/flickr]
• Greenpoint [justiNYC]
• Sunset Park Gem: Halloween for Christmas [Sunset Parker]
• Sunset on the Gowanus [seriously excited!]
• Cobbler Space on Bedford [A Test of Will]

Words:

• Tower Rising on Clinton [Brownstoner]
• Society for Ethical Culture in Park Slope Has Ethics Issues [P. Slope Courier]
• Bocce Bully Terrorizing Old Guys in Dyker Heights [Bay Ridge Courier]
• Sunset Park Photographer Arrested at Rally for Slain Photog [Sunset Parker]
• NYC Marathon [Clinton Hill Blog]
• Need to Get Something Done? Do It Today [NYDN]
• Reaction to Hamilton Ave. Waste Transfer Station is Mixed [B. Heights Courier]

Non-Brooklyn Triumph:

• Runaway Urban Bull Probably Saves Own Life by Running [NYT]

• Greenpoint: “Uglier Than the Morons Who Work There”
• Red Hook, Circa 2006
• Williamsburg View With and Without Mustard
• Williamsburg Development Avenue: Manhattan Avenue
• More Coney Island Aquarium Redo Renderings
• Brooklyn Waterfront Still Has (Trans)Gas
• New Williamsburg Development Site: All of Keap Street