Next Thing You Knew, You Was Gentrified!

I guess it’s not a nice thing to wake up one morning next to an IKEA:

When she moved to her apartment five years ago, Perian Carson’s small corner of Red Hook in Brooklyn looked much different. An abandoned Civil War-era warehouse sat a few blocks away on Van Brunt Street. Nearby, along the cobblestones on Beard Street, she could see the remnants of the old Todd Shipyards, where ships were repaired in a massive graving dock.

It was a drowsy neighborhood where one could smell the harbor, a close-knit community where people signed for one another’s mail. Ms. Carson tended a small garden on the sidewalk near her building.

Today, the graving dock and many of the cobblestones are paved over, and from her garden, Ms. Carson sees something else: an enormous blue and yellow Ikea superstore, all 346,000 square feet of it, rising along the waterfront. The old warehouse is now a Fairway supermarket, with luxury rentals above.

“I’m at the fulcrum here,” Ms. Carson said one evening, as she tended to the lilies and goldenrod in her garden. “It’s so much at once.”

R, FK T, We’ll Call It What We Want

In the end, it may have been a gracious but hollow measure to rename the Triborough Bridge to honor Robert F. Kennedy:

What’s in a name, anyway? Would that which we call the Triborough Bridge by any other name — oh, let’s skip the Shakespeare and get to the point. Would anybody call the Triborough anything but the Triborough?

The short answer seems to be, no.

“It connects three boroughs,” said Susan Breslaoukhov, the manager of a French Connection clothing store in Rockefeller Center. “That’s self-explanatory, I expect people will keep calling it Triborough for a long time.”

The what-will-they-call-it question came up after the State Assembly voted to rename the Triborough the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, for the former attorney general who was elected to the United States Senate from New York in 1964. He died 40 years ago Friday, after being shot in Los Angeles, just after he won the California Democratic primary.

Gov. David A. Paterson is expected to sign the bill making the name change official. His predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, suggested the bridge renaming in January. At that time, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the eldest of Robert Kennedy’s 11 children, said, “This has been a dream for quite a while.”

But some said the renaming could be confusing for commuters. “It’s been that way for a million years,” said Morton Mozzar, an automobile-service consultant in Queens. “If they had renamed it right afterwards, O.K., like they did with J.F.K. Airport.” (The airport was called Idlewild but was renamed after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It only seems as if the Triborough has been around for a million years. Next month it will have been open for 72 years.)

Some New Yorkers pointed to name changes that did not take. Consider the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge, as it has been known for 30 years in honor of the former Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman and Mets manager.

Or what about renaming the Miller Highway the Joe DiMaggio? Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki agreed to that in 1999, soon after DiMaggio’s death.

The Miller Highway? Nobody called it that in the first place (except, perhaps, relatives of Julius Miller, the Manhattan borough president when the first section was opened in 1930). It ran from West 72nd Street to Battery Place and was not to be confused with the Henry Hudson Parkway, which runs north from 72nd.

“And what about the Thruway?” asked Mimi Marenberg of Airmont, N.Y. “Its name is the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, but who calls it that? No one. How about Newark International Airport? No one calls it Liberty. We spend money on big signs, renaming these things, but all it does is generate money for the sign people.”

What about RFKTB? Like NKOTB, only more reverent . . .

Earlier: Few Will Have The Greatness To Bend The Span Between Queens And The Bronx.

Location Scout: Triborough Bridge.

Mother Rapers, Father Stabbers, Father Rapers, Gentrifiers!

The Vermontization of the Lower East Side:

The National Trust for Historic Preservation designated the Lower East Side of Manhattan as one of the 11 most endangered in places in America on Tuesday.

But for some people, the designation only makes explicit the obvious: that the wide swath of Manhattan well known for its immigrant communities and countercultural vibe has long ago given way to rampant real estate development and gentrification.

In a news conference at Seward Park High School, the National Trust warned that construction of new hotels and apartment towers threatened to efface the area’s immigrant past.

“The community, with little recourse for protection,” it said, “is reeling from the recent destruction of its cultural heritage, including the defacing of several historic structures and the loss of First Roumanian Synagogue. Slapdash and haphazard renovations have led to the destruction of architectural detail, while modern additions to historic buildings sharply contrast with the neighborhood’s scale and character.”

Howdy Pardner, Welcome To Ye Olde Timey Time

Now that Red Hook has passed its prime, it’s ready to be Wyominged*:

A reborn Cheyenne Diner could be serving up bison burgers, French fries and chocolate egg creams on Brooklyn’s Red Hook waterfront by the summer.

Preservationist Michael Perlman said Monday a contract has been signed to move the Cheyenne, one of the city’s last rail-car-style diners, to the Borough of Kings.

The Cheyenne, a landmark at 33th St. and Ninth Ave. in Manhattan for more than 50 years, closed April 6 to make way for a nine-story residential and commercial development.

Perlman, who formed a committee to save the diner, said Mike O’Connell of O’C Construction, the son of noted Red Hook developer Greg O’Connell, is the buyer.

*As in.

Ed Koch Is So Badass, He Has The Power To Turn Trinity Into A Jewish Cemetery

1847’s Rural Cemetery Act notwithstanding, it is still possible to be laid to rest in Manhattan:

Former Mayor Edward I. Koch said on Monday that he planned to stay in Manhattan — for good.

Mr. Koch, who turned 83 in December, said that he had purchased a burial plot in Trinity Church Cemetery.

“The idea of leaving Manhattan permanently irritates me,” said Mr. Koch, who represented the East Side in the City Council and in Congress before being elected to the first of three terms as mayor in 1977.

Trinity Church, part of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, operates a nondenominational cemetery at Broadway and 155th Street. Trinity describes the uptown cemetery as the only active cemetery in Manhattan that is still accepting burials.

. . .

The cemetery is on the site of one of the fiercest battles of the American Revolution. Trinity describes it as a grassy retreat, dotted by century-old elms and oaks, and “a special place of peace and tranquillity far from the chrome and glass towers of central Manhattan.”

Those buried include Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote “A Visit From St. Nicholas”; the artist and naturalist John James Audubon; the actor Jerry Orbach; and Mayor Fernando Wood, who proposed that the city secede from the Union during the Civil War and was later elected to Congress, where his colleagues censured him for intemperate remarks.

. . .

A mausoleum at the cemetery offers above-ground niches and crypts, but only a few below-ground burial plots remain vacant. Cemetery officials said they were reserved for special citizens.

Mr. Koch chose a plot on what he described as a “small mountain” overlooking Amsterdam Avenue, and he researched the propriety of being buried in a non-Jewish cemetery.

“I called a number of rabbis to see if this was doable,” he said. “I was going to do it anyway, but it would be nice if it were doable traditionally.”

He said he had been advised to request that the gate nearest his plot be inscribed as “the gate for the Jews,” and the cemetery agreed.

He was also instructed to have rails installed around his plot, so he ordered them.

Being buried in Manhattan, Mr. Koch said, would also make it easier for former constituents to visit.

“I’m extending an open invitation,” he said.