As Long As It’s In Brooklyn, There Is Hardly Anything Marty Markowitz Won’t Support

If only Borough Presidents were about shaking up the system . . . but then there’d be no Borough Presidents:

A shadowy group calling itself Occupy Brooklyn is set to rally in Grand Army Plaza on Saturday — the first big protest in Brooklyn — and unlike many mainstream Democrats and Mayor Bloomberg, Borough President Markowitz is offering some support.

“It was only a matter of time before the . . . rallies made their way to Brooklyn,” Markowitz told us. “There is no doubt that Americans — those in the ‘99 percent’ — are hurting, and we can all agree that some of the issues being raised by these protests . . . are concerns we can all rally around.”

That’s How You Weave A Narrative!

The Daily News makes it sound like the grant money is going to fight gentrification itself:

A local Brooklyn Latino organization wants to help long-time residents take back the community before hipsters and their trendy bars and overpriced clothing stores wipe out the area’s Latino culture for good.

“When you wake up one morning and you see the corner bodega is now replaced by a fancy cafe or restaurant and you see your neighbors being pushed out because they can no longer afford the rent, all of a sudden you’ve lost your friends,” said [the] head of El Puente. “You begin to wonder, ‘Am I next?’”

El Puente (The Bridge) has landed more than $2.8 million in federal, city and private grant money for its Green Light District project to send swarms of volunteers door-to-door in the next 10 years to help Latino residents get healthier, more educated and more cultured.

. . .

Though Southside remains largely Latino, hipsters from Williamsburg are encroaching quickly.

“We want to spark the Latino community to take back their community,” [the El Puente head] said.

Housing Authority Employee Reclaims True Meaning Of “Pitchfork,” Confounding Search Engines And Hipsters

The idea of keeping a giant rat as a pet in a city where there is a rodent problem seems . . . kind of inspired, actually! Just don’t ditch it, lest it meets its untimely demise on the tong of a pitchfork:

They’re nocturnal, can grow to three feet and four pounds or more, and live seven or eight years.

Imports have been banned since 2003, when they were blamed for a monkeypox outbreak that sickened 100 people in the United States.

Dr. Paul Calle, director of zoological health at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said the Marcy Houses specimen was probably an escaped or discarded pet who decided to join the regular rat race.

Earthquake 2011: All-Important Local Angles

Queens Self-Centeredness: “Earthquake strikes Queens”.

Brooklyn Insecurity: “Earthquake: Brooklyn Probably Shook More Than Manhattan”.

Staten Island Remaining Relevant: “45 seconds of panic as quake’s tremors reach Staten Island”.

Truer Words Never Spoken

“‘Once you throw up, it’s over.’”

Party Like It’s 1897, Bitches!

Oh my god, they’re actually baking their own bread:

Brooklyn, fiercely proud of its independence from Manhattan, is an expanding frontier for the Do It Yourself movement — resourceful residents are baking bread, raising chickens for eggs, keeping bees for honey or simply renovating brownstones themselves.

Economic Slumpwatch: College-Educated Brooklynites Resembling Hillbillies

Making bathtub hooch:

Lance is not a hillbilly. He’s a quiet-natured young professor at a local college. Rousseau, Diderot, Hume, and Kant inhabit his bookshelves. Predictably, he’s erudite on even the topic of moonshine, explaining that Brooklyn hooch differs from that produced in, say, Tennessee because the mineral content of the water used for distilling alters the spirit’s flavor.

Lance isn’t the only local expert. New York City moonshiners are giving the spirit a new identity. Today’s urban moonshiners are sophisticated. But some of their palaver still has that country flavor. Take Tim. He describes his moonshine as “slightly sweet” with a “vanilla nose” and “a light taste of corn.” His final verdict is as country as cornpone: “It’s pretty smooth going down, but then you get a sunburn from the inside out.”

Sure, The Vestigial Office Of The Borough President Might Soak Up Precious Municipal Resources . . .

. . . but it also serves as a creative outlet for five of the most enthusiastic boosters in the city . . . is a useful stepping stone for higher office . . . produces official maps? . . . oh, and of course the best thing about the vestigial office of the borough president is that it provides plenty of good copy for those always entertaining beep-in-your-bonnet pieces in the New York Post:

They get chauffeured to the office, hobnob at community barbecues, attend ribbon cuttings and concerts, and — in the case of Brooklyn Beep Marty Markowitz yesterday — attend canine weddings.

Markowitz was actually supposed to officiate the nuptials of Jack, a puggle mix, and Penny, a miniature poodle, at a benefit for the Brooklyn Animal Foster Network in Prospect Park. But when he sniffed the media was around and might mock yet another of his pointless public appearances, he fled like a frightened poodle.

Do Not Pity The Poor Squirrel; Rather, Let An Alleged Band Of Homeless Poachers Eat Them And Rid The Park Of The Scourge (Pigeons, Too, Now That I Think About It)

This seems like a win-win sort of thing but whatever:

Cops have busted a group of oddball poachers in Prospect Park — a band of vagrants that was trapping and eating ducks, squirrels and pigeons.

. . .

“This is a dodgy group,” said [a park-goer], who spotted one of the men catching a pigeon while his friend started a fire. “They are the most threatening people in the park.”

The disheveled — and possibly homeless — tribe in question uses “makeshift” fishing poles and traps to catch the critters, then grills them over the fire, according to park watchdogs.

Plan First, Ask Questions About How To Pay For It Later

I’m surprised they even got this far:

A build Williamsburg’s largest waterfront park has stalled — perhaps permanently — because the city doesn’t have the cash to buy the land.

City officials dropped a bombshell on community leaders last Thursday, revealing that they had no money and no timetable to buy several private properties off Kent Avenue and N. 11th Street surrounding the 28-acre Bushwick Inlet site.

Infuriated community leaders accused Mayor Bloomberg of revoking the city’s long-standing agreement to build parks at the edge of the East River in exchange for rezoning most of the waterfront for luxury high-rises in 2005.

Maybe they should have just called it a “pilot project”.

Location Scout: Bushwick Inlet Park, Citistorage Records Center.

No Problem — We’ll Just Catch A Showing Of Sixteen Candles Or Karate Kid Somewhere Else

Mickey Rooney’s buck-toothed Asian character Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of the most embarrassing things about the 1960s. Good riddance. Or not:

” ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ is a beloved movie, with one irredeemable, superfluous scene from an era in Hollywood when more overt racism was acceptable in movies than it is today,” a [Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy] spokeswoman wrote.

Nancy Webster, executive director of the conservancy, said that she hopes to address people’s concerns, but hasn’t decided how just yet.

“We appreciate hearing people’s views about our programming, whether they are critical or supportive,” she said. “We trust our audience to use their own judgment about what is appropriate for their families.”

Or they could scrap it and screen a bunch of old Jerry Lewis shows . . .

Today In Hyperbole

Click link for alleged life-threatening situation:

“For them to have to fear for their lives is just ridiculous.”

Stupidest Holiday Ever Claims Another Victim

The bizarreness that is Brooklyn-Queens Day is causing yet more trouble:

As the sun faded following a thunderstorm, police were walking shoulder to shoulder on the boardwalk, shining flashlights into the crevices of the pieces of lumber, looking for shell casings.

. . .

The mayhem on the boardwalk unfolded after hundreds of kids enjoyed a day off from school for Brooklyn-Queens Day.

Passenger Inconvenienced By Sudden Stop, Punches City Bus Driver . . .

. . . and says: “You should have f- -king killed the dog.”

The Real Reason The City Is Building All Those Bike Lanes . . .

Easy collars and money in the coffers:

Cops are slapping cyclists with nearly double the number of traffic tickets per month in the wake of a “crackdown” on rogue bikers in Brooklyn.

Officers wrote at least 695 bicycle summonses in the borough during the month of February — compared to just 375 in the same period last year — with cops citing “pedestrian safety” as the impetus for the booming ticket blitz.

. . .

Early in the ticket blitz, for example, one man got three tickets from a single incident on Union Avenue near S. Third Street in Williamsburg: One for riding on the sidewalk, another for riding against traffic — and the last for mouthing off to the officer who stopped him in the first place.

And Now Everyone Thinks You’re Racist

Supposedly tried-and-true tactics for avoiding jury duty — claiming you’re racist and that you never trust the cops, for example — can sometimes backfire, leading to even more jury duty, as well as public scorn in the Post:

An incensed federal judge sentenced a racist Brooklyn woman to indefinite jury duty on Tuesday after she trashed the NYPD and minorities.

“This is an outrage, and so are you!” Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis told the woman, holding up her bile-filled juror questionnaire.

. . .

It is not unheard of for people to try to get out of jury service by making ridiculous statements concerning their views.

It was unclear Tuesday whether that was this woman’s motive.

And if it was, it didn’t work.

Indeed, the woman was going to be seeing a lot of Brooklyn Federal Court.

“She’s coming back [today], Thursday and Friday — and until the future, when I am ready to dismiss her,” Garaufis said.

Public Fatigue At All-Time High When It Comes To Thinking About Bike Lanes

Which means The Brooklyn Paper will do what it can to generate clicks and manufacture controversy:

A bike lane currently exists on Greenpoint Avenue, but ends just short of the bridge to Queens, a northern suburb of Brooklyn.

We’ll Keep Those Fond Memories Of Miss Brooklyn In A Special Place Close To Our Hearts . . . Right Alongside The Scars From The Eminent Domain Abuse And The Heartburn That Followed Once You Finally Realized That Your Children Actually Might Grow Up Rooting For The Nets

In an SEC filing, Atlantic Yards developers admit that the big project that will reshape downtown Brooklyn may never pan out, meaning that all the project would amount to would be one lousy arena — no low-income housing, no Miss Brooklyn tower and little economic benefit, because sports arenas don’t easily recoup a $300 million public investment:

Documents filed last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission by developer Bruce Ratner and his Forest City Enterprises warn that the non-arena portions of the plan could experience “further delays” leading to most or all of the rest of the 22-acre, $4.9 million project being scrapped.

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

Remind Me Again Why We Need Borough Presidents?

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz has three full-time drivers:

In an unusual arrangement, the ebullient beep has placed his three drivers on staggered, 16-hour shifts so someone will always be available to wheel him around town between 8 a.m. and midnight, seven days a week.

. . .

Taxpayers pick up the tab of $177,372 a year, not including overtime.

It’s all within the city’s lax rules, since the Conflicts of Interest Board has decided that elected officials with government vehicles can do just about anything they want with them.

One late-night stint last month took Markowitz and driver Robert Macko to the Blue Water Grill in Union Square during Restaurant Week.

Proving Yet Again That If You Lie Down With Bicyclists, You’ll Wake Up With Anemic Census Figures

See, you can’t be surprised — or shocked! — to learn that “the hottest borough in which to live, work and play grew only a small percentage in the past decade” when the image in popular culture is that Brooklyn is a place where childless 30- and 40-somethings while away Thursday afternoons playing kickball at McCarren Park:

The film, which won the award for Best New York Narrative at the Tribeca Film Festival 2010, portrays New York City’s largest borough as a land where aimless thirtysomethings move to avoid adulthood.

“The idea was to make a narrative film that felt like a documentary about the demise of a Brooklyn couple,” says the 37-year-old [director Dana Adam] Shapiro, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the documentary “Murderball.” “The male character rides his bike everywhere — which is a very Brooklyn thing to do — and finds being stationary scary. He doesn’t want to settle down, and I think a lot of people will relate to that.”

Cost Efficiencies Finally Fully Realized In Department Of Transportation Sign-Saving Plan

The other way to look at it is that DOT correctly anticipates demographic trends:

The shuttered St. Anthony of Padua school on Leonard Street — whose “No parking–school zone” signs are still in affect and snaring drivers even though the school has been closed for five years — will re-open this year, meaning that soon the parking tickets will at least be legit.

As For All Those Union Jobs . . .

. . . they were (pre-)fabricated:

And this week, Forest City Ratner confirmed that it was considering erecting a 34-story prefabricated, or modular, tower, as a way of cutting its construction costs and fulfilling its obligation to start building housing.

The construction unions that Mr. Ratner had lauded last year for sticking with him were stunned by the suggestion that much of the work might take place in a factory, where wages are much lower than on-site. Forest City has put off the start date for the tower, the first of 16, until the end of the year.

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

Truer Words Never Spoken

“In the end, anything is a urinal when you want it to be.”

It Feels Like Something I Saw On Web Soup; It Hurts

Kickball-snark experts at the Brooklyn Paper sound the alarm about subpar renovations at Brooklyn’s McCarren Park Kickball Fields:

Just try to imagine a summer without Brooklyn Kickball. It’s a nightmare, right?

Location Scout: McCarren Park.

Star Trek 2.0: Path Of Khan

How the worldwide push toward progressive transportation goals died for Bloomberg’s sins:

Connect the dots, and this becomes a much more significant story than the future of one bike lane in Brooklyn, or even the career of one official. New York City justly sees itself as the world’s greatest city: here, in some sense, people live the way everyone would live if they had the chance. How New York — the city that still has a uniquely low level of car ownership and use — manages its transport planning in the 21st century matters for the whole world: it is the template. If cycling is pushed back into the margins of that future, rather than promoted, along with efficient mass public transit and safe, pleasant pedestrianism, as a key part of that future, the consequences will be grave and grim.

[Via.]

The Soft, Smooth, Gentrifying Sound Of Indie Rock Calms Any Neighborhood

Or, how NPR and The Decemberists slowly sucked all the life out of your borough. Which is also to say, indie rock is officially dead:

A group of persnickety Park Slopers don’t want a hip-hop haven in their hipster hood.

A petition circulating in the Brooklyn enclave begs the owner of Prime 6, a club slated to open not far from the new basketball arena, to adopt an “indie rock” theme.

Kurt Andersen Comes Down Against Basketball, Wants To Take “Recreation” Out Of “Parks & Recreation”

Not to mention that there’s also something really pretentious sounding about “piazza”:

He told [the Brooklyn Paper] that his notion is to annex the “underused” western portion of [Carroll Park] near Court Street for the piazza, setting up tables, chairs and awnings — a cosmopolitan space where area cafés could serve drinks and food.

. . .

Andersen, the former architecture and design critic for Time magazine and a co-founder of Spy magazine, conceded that basketball players could be displaced by his plan, but ballers would have a readily available option nearby, as PS 58 at Smith and First Place has outdoor courts.

. . .

“Certainly, this connects to the ethnic heritage of the neighborhood of the last century,” he said. “But to me, this is for everyone in the neighborhood,” he said.

Location Scout: Carroll Park.

In Struggling Economy, Community Boards Open To Compromise

One Brooklyn Community Board 6 member explains the difference between “stripping” and “burlesque”:

Community Board 6′s Public Safety Committee voted unanimously to recommend a liquor license for Dave Ruggiero and the Paris Burlesque Club that he plans to open this spring on Commerce Street.

. . .

“This is as reasonable as an establishment like this can be.”

Her Name Was Written On Her Coat, Her Life Was A Miserable Anecdote

Why it’s a growler from the chainstore:

One corner of the Duane Reade store on Bedford Avenue in the Williamsburg neighborhood has Fire Island Lighthouse Ale and eight other beers on tap, with growlers — refillable glass bottles — lining the walls. Uniformed clerks-cum-beer-experts fill the growlers and conduct tastings only — sorry, no pints served. Behind a bar, a large walk-in refrigerator stocks common national brands as well as local, craft and imported beers. “We knew we would have a little bit of a battle to try to bring Duane Reade into this community, because they really don’t like a chain store,” said Paul Tiberio, senior vice president for merchandising and marketing at the company.

The Williamsburg beer bar is part of a larger effort by Duane Reade to recognize — and capitalize — on the fierce identity and local needs of many New York City neighborhoods.

One More Innocuous Pastime Brooklyn Will Eventually Make Annoying

Quizzo:

“There are a lot of young professionals in Brooklyn, and those are the main people you see at a trivia night — people with a lot of education who still like to go out and have drinks,” [a participant] said, laughing.