Queens Is The Bestest, Better Than All The Restest . . . Borough Of Dreams: Queens

The Not For Tourists Guide to Queens book-release party makes Talk of the Town:

The partygoers sprawled across the SculptureCenter’s gravel courtyard, picking at pieces of fruit and cheese. Many of them hailed from Manhattan or, disproportionately, from the newly trendy Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, just across the Pulaski Bridge. Michael Sendrow, a twenty-nine-year-old Sunnyside resident (and brother-in-law of one of the guide’s editors), gave a possible explanation for the party’s inter-borough popularity. “It was posted on Myopenbar,” he said. (Myopenbar.com is “your guide to free booze’ in New York. “Queens is full of good shit,” the site’s notice for the N.F.T. party had said. “The Astoria pool, Indian gold by the pound, men with mustaches, strip joints . . .”) “Terrible,” someone chimed in. “I’m telling you: they’re all hipsters, here for the free beer. Cheats.”

Insofar as other Queens residents could be found, they, too, were wary of outside interest in their borough. Bryan Kimpel, a lifelong Astorian, confided his concern that Queens was on the verge of an invasion by exiles from pricier parts of the city. “I was just telling some of my friends about Water Taxi Beach, and then I was going, ‘Oh, jeez, I better not tell too many people.’ Because we’ll have to wait in line.” Cathy Albright, the one local who expressed unqualified enthusiasm for the guide, had moved, just a year earlier, to Astoria from Texas. “I’ve been waiting for the Queens edition to come out,” she said, clutching her complimentary copy. “The addresses are so screwy here.”

. . .

By eight, the party was winding down. Revellers had begun spilling out onto Jackson Avenue, some in search of the E, G, and 7 trains, others in the general direction of the nearby L.I.C. Bar. A dozen more loitered on the sidewalk in front of the SculptureCenter, apparently uncertain of their next move. Sendrow said, “I imagine that these people, who probably don’t know where they’re going, get a Queens guide and have to look at it in order to get back to wherever they’re from.”

What a wag . . .

Tape Loops Are Not A Crime!

Now that’s inventive:

In his long fought battle against the bar next door, Vernon Boulevard resident William Garrett got creative this summer. Fed up with the constant noise wafting into his backyard from Lounge 47 next door, and growing frustrated with the proper channels, he got out his digital recorder and decided to “make a little noise back at them.”

He taped snippets of an evening’s laughter and talking heard in his backyard, and then played it back over the fence.

“Instantaneously, the people in the bar were quiet—they were embarrassed,” he said.

The silence was short lived. Police responded within 48 hours, telling Garrett he could be arrested for “criminal eavesdropping.” It didn’t prove to be a very effective tactic, either.

But it does illustrate the level of frustration residents can reach when trying to fight seemingly hopeless battles against development too close to home.

Tim Doocey lives upstairs from the Garretts and is worried they are losing their battle against “reckless development” in the neighborhood.

“One of the great things about this neighborhood is that at night, it was like — crickets.” The latest battle is against a proposed restaurant/bar located immediately adjacent to the north of Garrett’s property on Vernon Boulevard.

Cops. They just don’t have a sense of humor, do they?

But that’s not all for this up(chuck)-and-coming neighbhorhood:

In addition to the noise, drunken revelers vomiting in the streets and the smoke from the outdoor patios, residents also complain that other types of establishments are needed. Doocey reports having to walk six blocks to the closest laundromat and others complained that a reliable grocery store remains absent as bars and restaurants keep moving in.

(How you can live in a neighborhood without a laundromat is beyond me . . .)

A State Liquor Authority hearing scheduled for Aug. 8, on whether to grant an on premise liquor license to the new restaurant — a Latin fusion place called Blend — was canceled at the last minute, but rescheduled for Sept. 19.

“We feel that granting this liquor license is a tipping point for the future of Vernon Boulevard being full of bars and that’s what worries us most,” said Garrett, who was also frustrated with the last minute cancelation of the hearing after they had rallied community support.

Joe Conley, chairman of Community Board 2, indicated that rescheduling the meeting was in the neighborhood’s best interest, allowing them time to galvanize support and get everyone the facts. “Our concern was we wanted to make sure the community would be heard,” Conley said.

He is sympathetic to the residents of Vernon Boulevard and the larger issue for the growing neighborhood.

“We are concerned about the density of bar restaurants in the area . . . I have been long on record to say we do not want Vernon Boulevard to turn into another Bell Boulevard,” referring to the Bayside strip of bars and restaurants that has seen its share of residential complaints.

Bell Boulevard? Try the East Village! That might stir up some response . . .

Forget The 1,500 Construction Jobs, This Is Sure To Provide Beat Reporters With Years Of Work

Sure to occupy the mental space of Brooklynites for years to come, the first in a series of high-profile, high-intensity meetings about the controversial Atlantic Yards project took place yesterday:

An overflow crowd vehemently laid out the pros and cons of the proposed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn for seven hours last night at a raucous public meeting. Their passions suggested that opinions had only hardened in the three years since development plans were announced.

“This project essentially separates the neighborhoods of Brooklyn rather than uniting them,” said Jonathan Barkey, a photographer, brandishing posters he had generated of proposed skyscrapers towering over existing brownstones and playgrounds. “I would call this development a Great Wall of Brooklyn.”

Bring it on, said Dan Jederlinic, an ironworker. “Bulldozers are coming,” he warned the project’s opponents to whooping applause, “and if you don’t get out of the way they’re going to bulldoze right over you!”

. . .

Umar Jordan, 51, a black resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant, said he had come to “speak for the underprivileged, the brothers who just got out of prison,” and he drew loud cheers when he mocked opponents who had moved to Brooklyn only recently. Mr. Jordan suggested that they “just go back up to Pleasantville.”

“People complaining about the size of a building, the height of this or that?” Mr. Jordan said. “Welcome to the hood; this is Brooklyn!”

. . .

Outside the auditorium, meanwhile, hundreds from the housing group Acorn, which supports the project, chanted, “This is our neighborhood, and we know what is good.”

The Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a civil rights activist whose church nearly abuts the project site, was talking to reporters about the need for lower-income housing when Mr. Barkey, the photographer, interrupted him.

“Like this?” Mr. Barkey said sarcastically, pointing to his posters of huge, blank building faces towering over a neighborhood. “This is rich folks’ housing. Look at these walls.”

Mr. Daughtry was not impressed. “Don’t you understand that all we’ve been around is walls all our lives?” he said. “You need to take that somewhere else.”

(Say what you want about the Ratners — they really built up a solid flank . . .)

Location scout: Atlantic Yards.

Omerta Is Sicilian For “Courts 6 And 7 Are Ours, Motherfuckers”

The latest front in the war between old timers and hipster carpetbaggers is the McCarren Park tennis court:

Hipsters, beware: Brooklyn’s old-timers are protecting their turf. Or at least they are at the McCarren Park tennis courts, in Greenpoint, where a gang of 50 retirement-age ralliers — a de facto tennis mafia — calls the shots, swearing at those who try to uproot them from “their” two chosen courts.

“They seem to own the place,” complained one young player from Williamsburg, who said that in the past the men cursed at him when he asked them to move after their scheduled time was up.

Another irate — and intimidated — player corroborated those claims, saying that the men have hurled “more Polish at me than I know what to do with.”

Many of the McCarren racketeers are old friends, and have met at the park for tennis for more than two decades.

“Over the years, courts 6 and 7” — the two most-secluded courts, on the Berry Street side of the park — “kind of became the Polish courts,” explained Amleto Mazza, a rare Italian member of the group.

. . .

And although they might not be playing nice, technically these Greenpoint goodfellas aren’t breaking any rules. For instance, by rotating players on their own, no one violates the one-hour per player per court time limit.

But try explaining that to the players who end up stalled on the other side of the fence — a crowd that has doubled in the past five years.

A few spats over the years got so bad that police had to intervene and toss the guys out.

The group’s bad reputation has grown, and the threat of conflict seems to have effectively aced would-be interlopers. A handful of McCarren’s younger regulars hesitated when asked to comment on the gang.

“Trying to get them off is a big headache,” one tennis player finally said. “They don’t want anybody else playing on their courts.”

Another player said he sometimes gets to play with the geezers, “but it took me years to get to that point,” the player told The Brooklyn Papers — as long as we promised anonymity.

He refused to answer additional questions. “I’ve pretty much said all I can say,” he explained.

A Loose Coalition Of Antibar Activists Seeks To Halt The Assault On The Senses

The Villager’s Lincoln Anderson is on the verge of popularizing a new phrase — “antibar activists”* — in the course of profiling a woman who is raising children next to an East Village bar:

Last month, a few neighbors held a protest rally outside that bar, Boxcar, between 10th and 11th Sts. Their ranks were swelled by antibar activists who don’t live in the neighborhood, including individuals who had coalesced to push for the closing of The Falls, the Soho bar where Imette St. Guillen was last seen in February before her murder, allegedly by a bouncer.

Wearing a nightgown and robe, Liz Glass, who lives around the corner on E. 11th St. and whose first-floor apartment’s backyard abuts Boxcar’s backyard garden, organized the rally. With her were her three young children, ages 2 through 7, whom she says are kept awake by the bar’s noise, the older two of whom toted protest signs.

“We can’t sleep anyway. It’s a pajama protest,” Glass said, with a forlorn expression.

More than a year ago, Boxcar agreed to a curfew for its backyard of 11 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on weekends.

However, shortly after the bar agreed to the backyard curfew, Community Board 3 passed a resolution calling for the State Liquor Authority to close the bar’s backyard entirely. Glass, the bar’s primary critic, is asking the S.L.A. to follow through on the resolution.

Although Glass is the neighbor most affected by the noise, others say they are too.

“I moved to here to be by the beautiful park, and then I got this,” said Eden Fromberg, an OB/GYN doctor who lives on 10th St. whose rear windows face into the block’s interior. “Somehow, with the A/C on and a tape of a babbling brook playing, I can still hear them,” she said of her unsuccessful efforts to block out the bar’s noise at night.

A woman from Huntington House, a shelter for female parolees and their families on the other side of Avenue B, saw the protest and came over to briefly lend support and add her name to their petition.

“Let me sign it!” Haydee Figueroa said, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth as she grabbed the clipboard. She said she was angry “because of the bullshit in the morning — 2 a.m., 3 a.m. they come out to talk and to fight. This one is worse,” she said, gesturing at Lakeside Lounge a few doors down from Boxcar. “A lot of women can’t sleep,” she said.

Although it’s unclear how much noise is too much noise, one’s threshold seems to lower when you involve a two-year-old:

Boxcar also built a sound-barrier wall between its backyard and Glass’s backyard — Glass called in a complaint to the Department of Buildings as the bar was building it because they didn’t have a permit. Spingola says they didn’t know they needed a permit.

Standing in Glass’s backyard around 10:30 p.m. the night of the protest, a steady mumble of voices could be heard from Gnocco, a restaurant on 10th St. with a backyard dining area. Less audible was the sound from Boxcar’s backyard. Inside Glass’s apartment, with the windows closed, it was hard to hear anything from either place.

“We have no violations — no noise violations, since she started her thing,” said Spingola. “The Department of Environmental Protection was here last Thursday night and we did not get a violation. And D.E.P. doesn’t mess around.”

*The first recorded (or at least Googlable) reference seems to be Anderson’s After ‘Falls murder,’ a flood of concerns about bar safety from March 2006.