If you live in Park Slope, or have wandered down Seventh Avenue, chances are you are familiar with D’Vine Taste. Especially since their major, major expansion into serious gourmet territory. Turns out the Boston Globe like them too. Specifically:

D’Vine Taste is a gourmet market in Brooklyn, in the middle of Park Slope’s tree-lined, brownstone neighborhood. Nalie Elsebaie, a native of Lebanon, runs D’Vine Taste with the help of her two brothers. Besides the wonderful selection of olive oils from Spain, France, and Italy, they carry five olive oils from Lebanon, which Elsebaie describes as having a stronger, greener taste. Make sure to sample the fresh fig treats, with figs imported from Lebanon.

Gowanus Lounge has not sampled the fig treats, but one of the hallmarks of our trips up or down Seventh Avenue is the presence of one of the D’Vine Taste brothers cutting up the fig treats in the front window for shoppers.

If you read Brooklyn blogs, you probably have known this for a while, but the First Annual Brooklyn Blog Festival is taking place tonight at the Old Stone House, located between Fifth Avenue and Fourth Avenue, between 3rd and 4th Streets in Park Slope. It starts at 8:00.

The blogfest has been organized by Louise Crawford of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn and will include the complete who’s who of Brooklyn blogging including, A Brooklyn Life, Daily Slope, Joe’s NYC, Design Sponge, Brownstoner, Callalillie, Lost and Frowned and, of course, OTBKB.

It will, no doubt, be heavily blogged and photoblogged.

No surprise that there are people sailing in (from) Brooklyn, given all that wonderful waterfront we have. Nonetheless, Gowanus Lounge was happy to get an email from the good people at Sail Brooklyn, which offers “A sailor’s view of Brooklyn and New York City.” Among the current features is an entry about catching a shark in the waters off Brooklyn. There is also a very cool photo of Coney Island from the water (above) from this weekend. The older items absolutely rock too–there is an entry about the Sheepshead Bay Yacht Club and an item called “Sailing Along the Gowanus Canal” (which is what brought the blog to our attention in the first place). The latter reminds us that a boat we always see on the Big G is a sailboat and that it must clear four bridges in order to actually get out on the water. Definitely check out this unique and informative blog.

Fugghedaboutit. Or, maybe not. The Downtown Brooklyn Council says there is great interest in many Brooklyn nabes including Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, Boerum Hill, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Sunset Park and Bay Ridge, to name a few.

The idea certainly has appeal in nabes where the half-life of an open parking space is approximately 1.75 seconds during peak times and people drive a block-and-a-half in reverse to get to a space they’ve spotted opening up via their rearview mirror. Come on, you know who you are–you have the predatory ability to spot a car starting from 300 yards away and to know instinctively which pedestrians are going to their car and which are not. It is likely to be less popular with the very same people if they need to go to neighborhoods other than the one in which they live and for which they possess a parking permit.

Other cities, like Washington, have long had parking permit systems, (which, by the way, not every resident loves), but they idea has never gotten much traction in New York. DOT’s study found that permits are feasible in downtown Brooklyn, but would be problematic because there are more cars registered than parking spaces. Community forums are planned, according to the Daily News.

Gowanus Lounge predicts endless debate on this idea. Until, the new reality of Brooklyn with tens of thousands of new units of housing sinks in and projects like Atlantic Yards become reality. After that, when parking goes from Olympic Sport to Death Match 2012, we’ll have permit parking.

A selective list of Brooklyn links:

Summer Scents, Nausea Included [Callalillie]
A Moment of Zen in Red Hook [Brooklyn Record]
Renters Get $lugged [NYPost]
Carroll Gardens Fight: Throw Grandma from the Building [Curbed]
Metro Playing McCarren Pool–Updated Schedule [Bklyn Vegan]
Checking in on BPL Plaza Renovation [Brownstoner]
Overheard in Fort Greene [set speed]
Historic Brooklyn Lighthouse May Open for Tours [NYDN]
Williamsburg Waterfront Battle [justiNYC]
Brooklyn Blog Fest: Come on By [OTBKB]
New Albany Administration and Atlantic Yards Opponents [NYSun]

The photo is one shot on the Williamsburg waterfront of a model being shot by a photographer on a vacant lot that is the future site of “The Edge” highrise luxury condo project.

Coney Island is known for many things–prime among them the Cyclone and boardwalk–but it also turns out that Brooklyn’s Riviera is home to more heavy smokers than another other part of the borough. Maybe, it’s that fine salt water air, or just the opportunity to stroll along the boardwalk, but more than 25,000 Coney Islanders smoke more than a half-pack a day, according to the Department of Health. Put another way, 23 percent of Coney residents smoke, as opposed to 17 percent of those living in Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights.

The Brooklyn Papers‘ Sara Vogel, who reported the story, suggests that demographics are at work. Twenty-six percent of Coney residents live below the povery line. “Poverty and smoking often go hand in hand,” Vogel writes.

The Sweet Cherry, a Sunset Park strip club that has withstood more than a decade worth of efforts at closure by both the city and neighborhood groups, is no more. The club closed its doors as part of a plea deal, the New York Times reports. The owners and managers agreed to get out of the business in Brooklyn and there were some guilty pleas to misdemeanor drug charges. Prosecutors dismissed all felony charges, including a rape charge against one manager. There were fines of $50,000, but no jail time or probation. Quothe the NYT:

Part roadhouse, part funhouse and part suspected house of ill repute, the Sweet Cherry was something of an anachronism in New York, a rough and unapologetic house of debauchery in a low-crime, noise-controlled, smoke-free city…But it was also something of a commonplace in Sunset Park, where the community board has counted nearly two dozen sex-related businesses that have opened since the city adopted zoning regulations in the 1990’s to reduce the industry citywide. The regulations effectively limited the sex trade to a few barren manufacturing zones, but the clubs in Sunset Park began to draw complaints when a waterfront revival brought new jobs and immigrant families to the area.

So, for neighborhood opponents, it’s one down and many to go. The Sunset Park photo above is courtesy of e-liz on flicker.

In Williamsburg, workers getting spaces ready for two new eateries on North Fourth Street between Bedford and Driggs. One is a San Loco, an outpost of the local East Village/LES Mexican eatery chain. The other is Banbalotto, a Mediterranean restaraurant and hooka bar.

Meanwhile, in Park Slope, Sweet Melissa, the Cobble Hill Court Street bakery is opening a branch in the Seventh Avenue storefront vacated by the Microchip Cafe at 175 Seventh Avenue, according to Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Tempo Presto is going to occupy the space vacted by Mojo Cafe at 207 Seventh Avenue. The Seventh Avenue branch will be a cafe featuring coffee and desert.

Weeks ago, someone left a comment in our item about the sale of the Jewish Press Building on Third Avenue in Gowanus to developer Shaya Boymelgreen, who was said to covet the building as a key part of the Gowanus Village development. The building, the comment writer noted, had a restrictive deed from the city requiring it to remain as a manufacturing facility. Ben Smith’s Daily Politics blog reports that restriction is in place until 2011 and fills in the fascinating political deal that led to the building’s original sale. (There is also some fascinating information in the comments section, including great detail about the property, like the fact that it has been used for the storage of “solid waste” and that, because the property has been used to dispose of construction material, the elevation of parts of the lot is now 10-15 higher than it used to be.)

The story dates back to 1969, when Jewish militant Meir Kahane was using his column in the Jewish Press to attack Mayor John Lindsay.

Lindsay biographer Vincent Cannato writes that the mayor struck a deal with the paper’s publisher: The Press fired Kahane, and Lindsay gave them a disused city building on the stinking Gowanus Canal at the industrial foot of Park Slope. Lindsay rented out the building on such favorable terms that, according to city documents, officials decided they’d do better by selling it to the newspaper outright for $20,000 in 1985. The terms of the deal required the building to remain in industrial use until 2011.

The sale price has not been disclosed, but its thought to be in the tens of million of dollars. There are several interesting subplots to the story. First, the development company Leviev Boymelgreen, is a partnership between the Brooklyn developer and international diamond dealer Lev Leviev, who made his fortune in such murky markets as Angola and the former Soviet Union. The firm is, or is not, on the rocks, with a split up reported in Israel between Leviev and Boymelgreen and the firm selling off property in Miami for $89 million and hiring a bankruptcy lawyer.

More signs of life at the Coney Island Development Corporation, which has announced that Dick Zigun, the founder of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow and Artistic Director of Coney Island USA, is joining the group’s Board of Directors. It’s significant in that Zigun is both the unofficial “Mayor of Coney Island” and the first person associated with the boardwalk amusement area to join the CIDC Board. There has been some sentiment in the past that the CIDC, which is overseeing the redevelopment of Coney Island, is not fully open to leaving the area south of Surf Avenue as a zone that is reserved largely for amusements.

Zigun–who holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama–began the Coney Island Circus Sideshow in 1983. Zigun and Coney Island USA produce the Mermaid Parade (which takes place this Saturday, 6/24) and host the Coney Island Film Festival.

Zigun says he intends to serve as a “voice of the arts and the amusement industry on the CIDC Board.”

A selective roundup of Brooklyn related news stories and blog items:

Coney Island’s Rebirth [Cherry Hill Courier Post]
Is the Bungalow Going the Way of the Dodo? [NY Times]
Sweet Melissa’s Coming to Park Slope [Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn]
B’klyn Beep Heart Scare [NY Post]
Summer on the Rooftop: Photos [A Brooklyn Life]
Baltic Street Update: Chan Engages Critics [Brownstoner]
Alert: Brooklyn Blog Fest on Thursday [Daily Heights]

[The photo is a detail of the old Domino Sugar plant on Kent Avenue in Williamsburg from my flickr photostream.]

Quadriad Realty Partners has revealed the nature of the quality-of-life bomb they would like to drop on the Northside of Williamsburg. You remember Quadriad–they are the firm heavy on political connections, in which former Rep. Herman Badillo is a partner, that has proposed building four towers of 38, 36, 20 and 12 stories between Bedford Avenue and Berry Street and North Third and North Fourth streets. (The site and ongoing demolition work is pictured to the right.) Gowanus Lounge previously called the project “the most outrageous development in New York City.” We realized that this is saying a lot, given the competition, but the so-called Williamsburgh Square is really that bad.

Now comes a sense of the rest of the plan, which had been hinted at in Quadriad’s ominous prospectus. The plan presented to the local community board includes 28 highrises from 12 to 40 stories. Most of the buildings would be in the 16-18 story range and would be built in the area between Bedford and Kent Avenues from North Third to North Sixth Streets. The area was downzoned last year as part of the deal to allow highrises on the waterfront.

28 freaking highrises in low-rise zoned parts of Williamsburg? Is somebody over at Quadriad smoking crack or has Albert Speer come back to life and started plotting the building of New Williamsburghia?

The only rational explanation (beside drug-induced dementia and megalomania) is that the developers are engaged in a fakeout to make the original Williamsburgh Square proposal seem like a small and rational development. Perhaps it is a bargaining chip–if you support the monster project on Bedford, we’ll drop the 24 other towers. Or, possibly, the simple explanation is that some chump made a mistake when they were taking notes at the Community Board meeting and instead of “2 highrises” wrote down “28 highrises.”

Assuming it’s not a note-taking error, the Quadriad plan would produce about 3,500 units of housing. Each of Quadriad’s super blocks would have four highrises. The good news is that the company only currently owns the Williamsburgh Square site. All of these projects would require changes to the downzoning enacted last year that protected most of Williamsburg from monstrous highrises as long as developers were allowed to build the wall of tall buildings that is beginning to rise on the East River. The New York Post reports that response from community leaders is not warm.

GL has said it before and we will say it again: One can only hope for a very large community movement against these neighborhood murdering plans.

Gowanus Lounge has been waiting for some of the notables that signed up to be on Develop-Don’t Destroy Brooklyn’s Advisory Board to use their names, stardom and/or intellect to try to sway public opinion about Atlantic Yards. We were pleased to Boerum Hill-raised novelist Jonathan Lethem’s very well done “Open Letter to Frank Gehry” in Slate. “The subject of my letter is the ill-conceived and out-of-scale flotilla of skyscrapers you propose to build on a series of sites between Atlantic Avenue and Dean Street in Brooklyn,” Mr. Lethem wrote.

To sample a bit more of Lethem’s brilliant deconstruction of the Gehry-Bruce Ratner plan:

Most people, if they’ve heard of this proposal at all, believe you’ve been hired to design a sports arena…Anyone who’s glimpsed the drawings and models, however, knows that other, larger plans have overtaken the notion of a mere arena. The proposal currently on the table is a gang of 16 towers that would be the biggest project ever built by a single developer in the history of New York City. In fact, the proposed arena, like the surrounding neighborhoods, stands to be utterly dwarfed by these ponderous skyscrapers and superblocks. It’s a nightmare for Brooklyn, one that, if built, would cause irreparable damage to the quality of our lives and, I’d think, to your legacy. Your reputation, in this case, is the Trojan horse in a war to bring a commercially ambitious, but aesthetically—and socially—disastrous new development to Brooklyn.

Among the other phrases Lethem tosses around are “outlandish disproportion,” “mendacious flimflam,” “appalling,” “lying to Brooklyn,” and “calamity-in-progress,” before urging Frank O. to walk away from the projects. GL highly recommends Lethem’s love letter to Frank O. in its entirety.

Don’t look now, but yet another hotel is on the rise in Gowanus (assuming you consider the west side of Fourth Avenue to be in Gowanus, which Gowanus Lounge does). The new structure, which is rising at 370 Fourth Avenue, next to the big cab depot, is said to be an 8-floor, 48-room “extended stay,” boutique hotel. It may not look like much now, but it will be across the street from Leviev Boymelgreen’s Park Slope Tower. A bar/restaurant is planned for the eighth floor. The site is owned by T&L Investors Corp.

There is also a new Holiday Inn Express on Union Street in Gowanus, although the hotel chain keeps saying that it is in Park Slope. Other lodgings are coming to South Brooklyn too, including a Comfort Inn on Baltic Street near the Gowanus Houses and a nearly 300-room expansion of the Brooklyn Marriott.

The old joke in Boston used to be that everybody had a band (and you can probably say the same in some part of Billburg). Well, in Brooklyn, circa 2006, everybody has a blog. We may be the bloggingest borough on the planet.

Gowanus Lounge wants to welcome the Sunset Parker to the mix, which covers–surprise–Sunset Park. This is particularly cool in that Sunset Park is very undercovered, at least, from the perspective of those that don’t live in the nabe. We welcome Sunset Parker and totally commend them for bringing more Sunset Park to the world in general.

As for all of us Brooklyn blogs and bloggers, don’t forget the Brooklyn Blogfest on June 22. It takes place at the Old Stone House, which is off Fourth Avenue in the park between Third and Fourth Streets. Festivities start at 8PM and it’s being organized by one of the pillars of the Brookloyn blogging scene, Louise Crawford of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn.

Coney Island, Sunday, June 18, 2006

Provence en Boite, the new French restaurant at Smith and Degraw occupying the space of the former Baluchi’s opened for business this weekend. While GL only stopped by to shoot a couple of photos, we duly noted that the new French spot drew a significant crowd (far more than Baluchi’s generally attracted). The new bistro also serves pastry, bread and other items to a walk-in crowd as well. The restaurant is a reincarnation of a popular French restaurant in Bay Ridge by the same name that had been run by the same couple. Smith street’s new French restaurant is located a couple of doors down from Patois, at 263 Smith.

Is it Gowanus Lounge’s imagination, or have the last several Seventh Avenue Street Fair’s taken place on blazing hot days? Regardless, yesterday’s big affair means that GL is now officially done for the year with New York City’s template-like street fairs. Well, we were done with the first one of the season, but held out to attend the rain-dampened Fifth Avenue Fair and to take a quick walk through the Seventh Avenue offering on our way to catch the F Train to Coney Island (where it was at least 10 degree cooler than Park Slope in late afternoon). There is so little variation among the events that many of the same (non-neighborhood) vendors are in the same place, year after year. GL is certain that there are those that enjoyed yesterday’s event in Park Slope, but we are not among them.

From the Empty Vessel Project comes news of a petition drive “to demonstrate community support of the project and help us legitimize our 1st Street berthing location.” With much development planned for Gowanus, particularly in the area of the canal itself, the good people at the Empty Vessel Project–which is a WWII Navy rescue boat being converted to use as a performance, classroom and community space–are launching the drive to ensure that their wonderful boat will continue to have a home.

The project’s sponsors are collecting signatures of registered Brooklyn voters to bring to the local community board to support their request for permanent berthing space and modest public funding to allow it to happen. If you want to help with a petition, you can copy and paste the following text to a document: “The Empty Vessel Project is providing a positive impact to the local community. I support government funding for the project. I support using government funding to create public berthing space on the Gowanus Canal.”

Then, print the document, sign it and print your name, address and zip code. (They promise not to use it for anything, but it’s needed to validate your petition with NYC government.) Mail the signed document to: Empty Vessel Project; 839 Kent Ave Rear 2; Brooklyn NY 11205.

The Empty Vessel Project ship is located at the foot of First Street on the Canal, between Carroll Street and Second Street. If you can’t find it, go to the Carroll Street or the Third Street Bridge and look for it. It’s the only boat moored on that part of the canal.

The excellent Gowanus photo above is from e-liz’s flickr photostream.

They’ve been giving things away for weeks at the Old Dutch Mustard Company building in Williamsburg (which still has a big “For Sale” sign attached to it). This latest batch, which has a very Ikea look, comes with its own pre-scrawled, political graffiti against the war in Iraq and the Bush Administration. The building once housed the mustard company founded by Czech immigrants Vladimir and Elsie Kedrovich, but hasn’t been used for industrial purposes for nearly 25 years. In its second life, it was one of the original Billburg loft spaces, and known for the huge parties thrown there. It’s been on the market for a while, destined to sell for around $25 million and return for a third life as luxury condos. There’s good detail about the building at The L Magazine.

That tree house on South Fifth Street in Williamsburg that was advertised on Craigslist for $150 keeps making headlines. The Daily News contains an amusing account of a night spent in the al fresco apartment. Some detail:

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was to the left, a third-floor living room to the right and the moon straight ahead. But all I could think about was whether the 23-foot-high South Williamsburg tree house I was sleeping in would hold up until morning…Before my retreat, Dougherty [the owner] warned me to watch for a squirrel who also makes its home in the branches, visiting mosquitoes and the brisk air, which seemed colder three stories above Brooklyn. But the biggest challenge was the climb, made all the more harrowing because I had to swing to a second set of rungs halfway around the tree. Dougherty’s girlfriend also pointed out a dangerous pair of rungs set so far apart that I practically had to take a leap of faith to get to the next one.

Finally, up top, I noticed how sturdy the 12-foot by 12-foot by 10-foot triangular shelter actually was…my girlfriend and I bided our time by reading newspapers and watching cars whiz by on the expressway. We had a killer view of the third-floor neighbors, but unfortunately they never came to the window.

Sirens and rumbling trains reminded us we were still in New York, no matter how many leaves clouded our view.

After a few hours, we unrolled a sleeping bag Dougherty had loaned us and tried to sleep, a task that came easily despite the wind and cold – and fear of death.

When I awoke, I was covered with mosquito bites, and the resident squirrel sounded like it was only a few inches away. We stared at the moon for a few more minutes before deciding to pack it in, still hours left before sunrise.

Excellent urban color, no?

We spotted our first Williamsburg street art penis about three weeks ago, next to 184 Kent on a construction fence on Kent Avenue. Once we started looking for them, we started noticing them everywhere, particularly on doors, for some reason. In any case, this particular juxtaposition of penis and warning of radioactive hazard within was particularly compelling. Now, about that radioactive thing that we hadn’t paid attention to before….

Gowanus Lounge’s instincts said “blog this” when we noticed a small item a week ago about the Health Department temporarily closing the Atlantic Terminal Mall Chuck E. Cheese for having what are known in the trade as “mouse droppings” in the kitchen. We didn’t. But now that the Brooklyn Papers have weighed in with a priceless description of the problem, we can no longer sit back. In any case, we are probably so far behind the curve that we are in front of it again. We’ll leave it to the Bklyn Papers to disect the Health Department report:

Approximately 30 mice droppings on paper goods storage shelf near kitchen entrance…Approximately 10-20 mice droppings on shelf floor of rear exit. Evidence of mice or live mouse present in facility’s food and non-food areas…Approximately 60-70 mouse droppings on floor in electrical closet in kitchen.

The restaurant has been reinspected and has reopened.

We have two comments, with one being a question: First, they actually count the mouse “droppings”? And, second, always blog when the little voice inside says so; mouse turds at Chuck E. Cheese is a story with legs, as they say.

Finally, beach weather! (We hope, despite the clouds early on this Saturday morning.) Temps in the 80s and into the 90s this weekend. To celebrate the opportunity to further develop our depleted ozone layer-induced skin cancers, we offer this priceless glimpse of the Coney Island boardwalk, which is certain to be rocking this weekend. We call this Brooklyn by the Sea classic, “Choking Chicken Little.”

One of the things Gowanus Lounge loves about strolling around are the snippets of conversation you can pick up, at least, when you’re not wearing your iThing. And so, we were walking on the boardwalk, just past the dividing line between Coney Island and Brighton Beach. It was right around the spot where you expect Leonid Brezhnev and Konstantin Chernenko and Yuri Andropov to come strolling arm and arm down the boardwalk decked out in Soviet Chic.

We passed by a guy and his girlfriend, who were clearly not Coney Islanders or Brighton Beachers, walking on the boardwalk.

Female: So, are we, like, in Brooklyn or Staten Island?

Male: Brooklyn.

Female: Oh. Cool.

GL has absolutely nothing to add to that.