I’m
going away for a few days. Hepcat will be holding down the home front and the OTBKB fort.  I’ve prepared a special 4-day version of Scoop Du Jour – to
keep you all on top of what’s going on in Brooklyn this weekend. There will be no other posts for the next few days. Unless Hepcat has time to post a No Words_Daily Pix.

I will be in the Berkshires
attending a workshop. It’s going to be a beautiful spring weekend
and I should have some free time  for lying on a hammock, reading, meditation, hiking, and whatever else I feel like doing.

OSFO isn’t thrilled about my going away. We’ve been talking about it for weeks. Tonight, we even had a going away dinner. Every so often she says, "I don’t want you to go!" But I promise to call every morning and at bedtime. I’ll be back on Sunday.

Four days is a long time in our lives.

I am looking forward to tomorrow’s three and half hour bus ride from Port Authority to Massachusetts. I
love the limbo – being between two points, feeling the anticpation of
going someplace different.  I am, of course, nervous about being away from the
family. But I think we’ll all survive.

Teen Spirit is disappointed that I’ll be missing his band, Cool and Unusual Punishment, at Liberty Heights Tap Room. It’s the first gig I’ve ever missed and I wish I could be a fly on the
wall. It kills me to miss it…

But I’ll be somewhere else that day. Far, far away from Brooklyn.

They should start calling New York Magazine Brooklyn Magazine. They seem just smitten with the borough. And this week – they’ve devoted the  whole damn issue to us.  I haven’t seen it yet at the newstand, but I did read a bit of it on-line. Here’s a taste of what’s in the latest issue of Brooklyn, I mean, New York Magazine.  New York, you’re on:

As annoying as this announcement will be to those who live there,
Brooklyn has become an adjective, a shorthand for a certain style of
living. It’s mostly Manhattan’s fault, of course; real-estate
ridiculousness over the past ten years has forced the young, the
creative, and people who want separate bedrooms for their kids to
embrace 718. But what was once a reluctant move has become an
enthusiastic, don’t-look-back migration to a place with more space—and
thus, literally, more open to change, risk, experimentation. Real
communities (the kind where neighbors invite each other over for
dinner) have coalesced, and so has the style we’re calling Brooklynism:
looser and more playful than its Manhattan counterpart, homey and
ironic, comfortable but always conscious of its looks, and often of its
politics (green and recycled are key). It’s not just limited to home
design: In the following pages, you’ll see Brooklynism in all its
manifestations, from the growing new-cuisine movement to the close-knit
fashion-design community to the increasingly potent
product-and-furniture-design gang, who’ve become an international force
in just a few years. Brooklyn, you’re on.

BIG weekend in Brooklyn – the cherry blossoms are in BLOOM. Glory be. A line will stretch from the gardens to the library at Grand Army Plaza — anxious onlookers eager to see the TREES. But that’s the way it always is. Unless it rains. And then it won’t be so very crowded. But even in the rain there’s a crowd. If you’re a member you can usually walk right in. This from New York 1.

It’s confirmation that yes, it is springtime in New York – Brooklyn, to
be exact – hundreds of blooming cherry trees, right off of Flatbush
Avenue.

"It’s spectacular, it’s like the whole garden is filled with pink
right now. It’s beautiful," says Anita Jacobs of the Brooklyn Botanic
Garden.

And that beauty will be the backdrop for Sakura Matsuri – the
Japanese celebration of the cherry blossom at the Brooklyn Botanic
Garden – with a variety of performances featuring Japanese Culture,
from the power of taiko drumming to the grace of the colorful flower
hat dance, which looks much better without my involvement.

Plus, see a kimono fashion show. And what would a cherry blossom festival be without Samurai Sword fighting?

"Everytime you grab your sword and see your opponent, what helps
you is your mind and spirit," says Samurai Sword Soul’s Yoshihisa
Kuwayama.

Samurai Sword Soul will recreate one of the legendary samurai
warrior battles, kind of like Ali-Fraizer, but with swords instead of
gloves.

"If you are Japanese, everyone know this story, the big fight
between Musashi Miyamoto and Kojiro Sasaki," says Samurai Sword Soul’s
Yoshi Amao.

The entertainment is not all traditional Japanese. Gajin a Go Go
are based in Brooklyn and play groovy 60’s style music with a Japanese
twist.

"We actually have a song too called Omeditto, which means celebrate, so we are expecting to perform that," says Kiku Komonalisa.

If you hang around this place long enough this time of year, you
start forgetting you are in Brooklyn and you actually think you are in
Japan. If you want more information about the Cherry Blossom Festival,
check out the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Website at www.bbg.org.

One piece of advice, enjoy the samurai sword show, but don’t challenge the guys to a fight. It can get really tiring.

See Teen Spirit’s band, Cool and Unusual Punishment, at the Rockin’ Teens Showcase
34 Van Dyke St.(Corner of Dwight)
Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY, Ph: 718-246-8050
For News and Updates, please visit www.libertyheightstaproom.com

THIS SATURDAY APRIL 29th 1:00PM

Featuring (I’ve highlighted the bands I’ve heard. They’re all great. Haven’t heard Good to Go but am very excited to see/hear Luca Balser in his first performance):

<>

The Chase Scene, The Floor Is Lava, Chris Cori,Free Feeling, Francesca Perlov, Good To Go,

<>

Jonathan Edelstein Unplugged, Flamingo, Cool & Unusual Punishment, Public Affair,

Tetsuwan Fireball

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Hosted by: MC & Stand Up Comic: Jake Gilford.

Free AdmissionAmple Street Parking

This obituary of Jane Jacobs, 89: Urban crusader, is by Warren Gerard at the Toronto Star. Thanks to my friend Adam for sending it to me.

Jane Jacobs was a writer, intellectual, analyst, ethicist and moral thinker, activist, self-made economist, and a fearless critic of inflexible authority.

Mrs. Jacobs died this morning in Toronto. She was 89.

An American who chose to be Canadian, Mrs. Jacobs was a leader in the fights to preserve neighbourhoods and kill expressways, first in New York City, and then in Toronto.

Her efforts to stop the proposed expressway between Manhattan Bridge on east Manhattan and the Holland tunnel on the west ended contributed toward saving SoHo, Chinatown, and the west side of Greenwich Village.

In Toronto, her leadership galvanized the movement that stopped the proposed Spadina Expressway. It would have cut a swath through the lively Annex neighbourhood and parts of the downtown.

Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, became a bible for neighbourhood organizers and what she termed the “foot people”.

It made the case against the utopian planning culture of the times — residential high-rise development, expressways through city hearts, slum clearances, and desolate downtowns.

She believed that residential and commercial activity should be in the same place, that the safest neighbourhoods teem with life, short winding streets are better than long straight ones, low-rise housing is better than impersonal towers, that a neighbourhood is where people talk to one another. She liked the small-scale.

Not everyone agreed. Her arch-critic, Lewis Mumford, called her vision “higgledy-piggledy unplanned casualness.”

Mrs. Jacobs was seen by many of her supporters — mistakenly — as left-wing. Not so.

Her views embraced the marketplace, supported privatization of utilities, frowned on subsidies, and detested the intrusions of government, big or small.

Nor was she right-wing. In fact, she had no time for ideology.

“I think ideologies, no matter what kind, are one of the greatest afflictions because they blind us to seeing what’s going on or what’s being done,’’ she was quoted.

“I’m kind of an atheist,” she said. “As for being a rightist or a leftist, it doesn’t make any sense to me. I think ideologies are blinders.”

Mrs. Jacobs scorned nationalism and argued in her 1980 book, The Question of Separatism, that Quebec would be better off leaving Canada. Moreover, she argued that some cities would be better off as independent economic and political units.

Continue reading JANE JACOBS DIES →

I had such fun at the Perch Cafe last night that I wanted to spread the word that they’re doing readings every Tuesday night. Readings begin at 7 p.m. and are followed by an Open Mic.  Last night, a 12 year-old-girl read an incredible piece of poetry about her grandmother.

P E R C H  L I T E R A R Y  T U E S D A Y S
READINGS BEGIN 7 PM
FOLLOWED BY OPEN MIC
$5 PER PERSON MINIMUM
3 6 5 5 T H A V E N U E P A R K S L O P E
F/R Train to 4th Avenue/9th Street (between 5th and 6th Streets)
W W W. T H E P E R C H C A F E . C O M
7 1 8 – 7 8 8 – 2 8 3 0

April 18 – BEATRIX GATES has published three books of poetry—the most recent, In the Open, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. She conceived of and was the librettist for the opera “The Singing Bridge,” and has recent work in The Cream City Review and Poems to Heal the Blues (edited by Marilyn Hacker). She is currently working on a manuscript
called Bonefire.
STEVE TURTELL’s Heroes and Householders will be published this year by Windstorm Creative
Press. His poems appear in Blood & Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard and This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys &
Barbarians 2. He is now working on a memoir called Home Address.

April 25 – LOUISE CRAWFORD’s poems have been published online at Poetry Superhighway and Strange Road, and she is at work on a novel called Crossing the River. She has a weekly column in the Brooklyn Papers called “Smartmom,” and runs the web site Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn. She lives in Park Slope with her husband, photographer Hugh
Crawford, and their two children.
STEFANIA AMFITHEATROF, a fiction writer, will be reading from Home Schooled, a
work in progress.

May 2 – TRACY K. SMITH is the author of The Body’s Question (Graywolf, 2003), which was awarded the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and Duende, which will be published by Graywolf in 2007. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe
Writers’Award and a Whiting Writers’Award. She teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University.

May 9 – JANE E. BRODY is the Personal Health columnist and sometimes science writer for The New York Times. She is the author of 11 books, including two best-sellers, Jane Brody’s Nutrition Book and Jane Brody’s Good Food Book. She
lectures often to lay and professional audiences on nutrition and fitness, surviving cancer, heart-healthy living, alternative
medicine, and other health-related topics.

May 16 – MATTHEW ZAPRUDER is the author of two books of poetry, American Linden (Tupelo Press) and The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, forthcoming in fall 2006). He lives in New York City, where he is an editor at Wave Books,
and teaches at the New School MFA Program in Creative Writing. EDMUND BERRIGAN is the author of Disarming Matter (Owl Press) and Your Cheatin’ Heart (Furniture Press). He also performs music as I Feel Tractor, with a CD forthcoming
from Goodbye Better records

May 30 – MARY MORRIS is the author of 12 books–six novels, including her most recent, Revenge; three collections of short stories, including The Lifeguard; and three travel memoirs, including Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Travelling Alone and Angels & Aliens: A Journey West(all published by Picador USA). She has also co-edited with her husband, Larry O’Connor, Maiden Voyages, an anthology of the travel literature of women. The Recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of the Arts and Letters, Morris teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College. In 2007, she will publish The River Queen (Henry Holt & Co.), about her adventures going down the Mississippi River in a
houseboat.

I wish there had been a book like this for me when I was in my 30’s – ah, that was a long, long time ago. And yet, I still feel like I’m 12 (and I mean that in a good way). Kimberly Askew, the  editor and a contributor,  emailed me this morning to clue me into this event. Looks like a really interesting anthology — even if you’re not in your 30’s. I am so there for the  after-party at Brooklyn Social.

Readings by the contributors to "The
May Queen: Women on Life, Love, Work and Pulling it All Together in
Your 30s" anthology. 8 pm. 163 Court St. (718) 875-3677. Free.

I was checking out Dan Zanes’ web site when I saw this bit of good news. Our friend WARREN ZANES, has a new album out, PEOPLE THAT I’M WRONG FOR. We were blessed to have this incredibly good-humored, interesting person in Park Slope a few years back with his fantastic family. WE MISS THEM. His first album, MEMORY GIRLS, was super and we went to see him a bunch of times at South Paw and Mercury Ballroom. Here’s what Dan Zanes’ has to say about his bro. Both of them were in the Del Fuegos in the 1980’s. Everyone remember that great band? I for one am heading out to Sound Track to see if they have the album because an album by Warren is an EVENT (he can really write LYRICS)!!

back in the 1980s i was in a band called the del fuegos with a bunch of guys who, i’m happy to say, are still my good friends today. one of them is my brother warren zanes. we’ve all gone on to do the things we love, and for warren that has meant some good adventures, but it has also meant playing music along the way. i’m thrilled to report that he has just released his second solo cd, People That I’m Wrong For! i wanted to share this news and recommend the cd to all of you. sometimes he joins me onstage at dz and friends shows, but this new cd is for a grown-up crowd. to find out more (click
  here) and give it a listen!

PICTURE OF WARREN BY HUGH CRAWFORD

 

The reading at Perch went very well. I read some Smartmom and some
poems. The audience seemed to like it. This piece was written last summer when I was thinking about attending my 25th college reunion (not to be confused with my 30th high school reunion in less than a month).

The 25th anniversary of Smartmom’s college graduation is coming up this
June. It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since the day the great
I.F. Stone, that iconoclastic journalist and critic of the Cold War,
McCarthyism, and the Vietnam War, spoke to her class of 1980 at SUNY
Binghamton.

She can’t remember a word he said but she does
remember that his commencement speech was quite long and
characteristically controversial, as it elicited boos from some parents
in the audience. Their reaction disgusted and embarassed her.

While Smartmom is not sure if she
will be attending her 25th reunion in October, she took a look at the questionaire, which said something like: "So, what have you been doing since graduation?"

To
Smartmom, it seemed like a horrendous exercise in personal
reductiveness. A friend said she
took one look at that questionaire and knew that she was incapable of
filling it out. "I’m having a mid-life crisis, I wasn’t going to sit
there and do it," she said.

Those kind of reunion
questionaries invite boasting, whether it’s about your spouse,
children, career, or creature comforts. You feel like you’ve really
gotta impress all those people you went to college with: Look how great my life is. Look at my kids. Look where I live. Look at my degrees. Look at my job. Look how much money I make!

But still, it got Smartmom thinking: WHAT
have I been doing since the day I.F. Stone spoke to my class in the
Broome County Arena? What fabulous resume can I whip out to impress my
peers, what personal biographical detail will just wow them all….

Hmmmm.

Well…

Ahhhh….

Seriously,
how does one honestly characterize a quarter century of one’s life? Is
it all really just a list of degrees, courses, jobs, projects,
addresses, and names. Are we nothing more than our resumes?

What
about the interstitial life – the life that goes on between the lines
of all the other stuff. The little discoveries we make about ourselves;
the conversations we have with friends on the phone; the surprising
moments we have with our children on the way to the store; an inside
joke told over and over; the words of a wise therapist; getting
proposed to at Two Boots Restaurant on Avenue A; an ephiphanic walk
across the Brooklyn Bridge; stopping at the National Poultry Museum
while driving through Kansas; hearing Caetano Veloso and Ornette
Coleman in concert and Patti Smith at CBGB’s ; a memorable meal in a
small Tuscan town; Teen Spirit and OSFO’s first words…

What of
the life we live concurrent to the resume life. The life of our hearts,
our minds, our sensations? Our attempts to just be.

Rebbe Moses Teitelbaum, the leader of the Satmar Hasidic sect died on Monday. Thousands of observant Jews are in Brooklyn mourning his passing. This from New York 1.

The rebbe, or Grand Rabbi, died Monday at the age of 91.

Teitelbaum had more than 100,000 followers worldwide, most of them in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the upstate village of Kiryas Joel. His Satmar sect is the largest Hassidic Jewish sect in the United States.

Police in Williamsburg began cordoning off streets late Monday afternoon in expectation of the large crowds.

The rebbe died at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he had been treated since late last month for spinal cancer and other health problems.

He leaves behind two daughters and four sons, two of whom have fought over who will succeed their father. In 2004 the pair went to a Brooklyn judge, who ruled it was up to the rebbe himself to choose his spiritual heir.

 

Here’s a big Brooklyn Story from NY1 — Junior’s will be opening a branch in Times Square. Wow. Now tourists won’t have to come out to Brooklyn to try the cheesecake. But they won’t get the real flavor of the place – the ambiance, the attitude. It’ll be the tourist version. Still, cheesecake is cheesecake.

Junior’s Restaurant is bringing its famous cheesecakes to Times Square.

Junior’s will be opening a new restaurant on 45th Street and
Shubert Alley sometime in June. The original Junior’s opened on
Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn in 1950.

The new restaurant will have 200 indoor seats plus an additional 80 for an outdoor cafe. The menu will be the same.

Thanks to mail-orders and online sales, Junior’s sells half a million cheesecakes a year

An article in the  New York Times by Andrew Jacobs about the man who was killed in Prospect Park on Saturday. No suspect yet but ivestigators said they were exploring
whether Mr. Oliver was the victim of a robbery, a random act of
brutality or perhaps an attack motivated by homophobia—the Vale of Cashmere, where the murder took place, has been the site of  gay attacks in the past.

William Oliver was a housecleaner, a gardener, a patient uncle and a
reliable jack-of-all-trades. But more than anything, Mr. Oliver, 61,
was known by those who loved him as a walker.

His
tireless amblings across the city were almost always accompanied by the
music that, wearing oversized headphones, he played on a portable CD
player.

On Saturday afternoon, police officers responding to a
911 call from a passer-by found Mr. Oliver’s rain-drenched body in a
thickly wooded corner of Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

Mr. Oliver, who lived with relatives in Brooklyn, was killed by a knife plunged into his chest, the police said.

Yesterday,
the authorities said they had no suspects in Mr. Oliver’s killing,
which took place about 4 p.m. in the Vale of Cashmere, a lush, hilly
swath near Grand Army Plaza, which draws bird-watchers and, in good
weather, gay men looking for sexual encounters.

Reared in rural
Virginia, one of seven children born to a tobacco-farming couple, Mr.
Oliver was a quiet, courtly man who, according to family members, held
a variety of jobs after moving to New York in the 1970’s: as a worker
in a handbag factory, a salesman at a jewelry store and, in recent
years, a housecleaner for affluent clients in Manhattan.

Wilson
Oliver, 67, said he could not imagine why anyone would want to harm his
brother, a pacific soul who mostly kept to himself.

Although he
worked when he could, his brother said, William Oliver did not earn
enough money to rent his own place so he alternated between his older
brother’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant and his sister’s house in
Flatbush. Mr. Oliver would get a bed and home-cooked meals, and his
siblings would enjoy his good-natured company and the benefits of his
industriousness.

In the winter, Mr. Oliver shoveled snow, and
in the spring, he prepared his sister’s backyard vegetable garden. Not
long ago, he painted her living room robin’s-egg blue.

"You didn’t have to ask him to do anything," said the sister, Shirley Puryear, 69. "He just did it."

Walking
and listening to music, family members said, seemed to be his solace.
He would regularly stroll the 3½ miles between his brother’s and
sister’s homes. Sometimes, he would hike all the way into Manhattan.
"He’d just walk and walk and walk," said a niece, Evelyn Puryear.

Prospect
Park is near the route he usually took between the homes of his brother
and his sister. Last night, investigators said they were exploring
whether Mr. Oliver was the victim of a robbery, a random act of
brutality or perhaps an attack motivated by homophobia. When asked, Mr.
Oliver’s brother and sister said they did not know whether he was gay.

Over
the years, the Vale of Cashmere has often been the site of attacks on
gay men. Last October, two men were shot and wounded there; in 2000, a
man dressed as a ninja slashed and beat five men there. No arrests were
made in those attacks.

Clarence Patton, executive director of
the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, said he was
consulted yesterday by an investigator from the Police Department’s
hate crimes unit, who was trying to determine whether the victim was
gay.

Though Mr. Patton said he did not know, he said at least 10
percent of victims of anti-gay violence are not gay, but rather are
targeted in places thought to be gathering spots for gay men or
lesbians. "It’s hard to say whether you hope it was a robbery or an
anti-gay attack," he said. "At the end of the day, a man is dead, and
it doesn’t really matter."

Aaron Naparstak , Brooklyn blogger, urban activist, and author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote to Road Rage," had an interesting piece on his blog about world oil usage and biking.

An editorial in the New York Times on April 20th, "How Dare They Use Our Oil!"
sounds all of the right notes. It lays down a brief but harsh critique
of the Bush administration’s continuing failure to address energy
policy in a serious way. And on the occasion of the Chinese president
Hu Jintao’s visit to the White House, it takes the administration to
task for "asking other countries to lay off the world’s oil supply so
America can continue to support its gas-guzzling Hummers." It almost
sounds like Bill Maher has joined the editorial board.

Then there is this jarring line: "The United States doesn’t have the right to tell a third of humanity to go back to their bicycles because the party’s over."

It’s
just a quick little transition, a throw-away line, probably not
something that anyone put a lot of thought into. And yet this one
sentence highlights a profound set of assumptions about how a city
should be.

It’s a little reminder that a significant segment of
New York City’s decision-making class still views bicycling as
something to be done by children, Lance Armstrong and impoverished
people in Third World countries. Biking isn’t seen as an integral part
of the healthy, sustainable 21st century urban metropolis. Rather, it
is more often perceived as a disruption, an annoyance, and maybe even a
little bit backwards and uncivilized. To the writer of this sentence, a
city filled with bike commuters clearly does not represent progress.

That’s
so different than how I see it. Getting on my bike to drop my son at
day-care, run an errand, or go to a meeting isn’t a sacrifice. It
doesn’t mean "the party’s over." It doesn’t represent some sort of
personal or societal failure. The way I see it, a city filled with bike traffic is the party.

–Aaron Naparstak

Dope on the Slope posts a comment defending  Callalillie on her blog.

As a blogger, I consciously put myself and my words out there and part of that is the risk of being taken out of context. If she had interviewed me, it would be a different story. – Callalillie

I think that’s true, but it takes a lot of class not to take a swipe at the author of that article, which is a sloppy bit of fluff about the future of Red Hook, a subject which I think deserves more serious attention.

I also think it’s trashy for paid journalists to lazily skim the blogosphere for material, and then heap thinly veiled condescension on those same bloggers later. Trashy, but entirely expected. After all, as you point out, we are fair game.

Keep up the good work. You are the best ambivalent embarrassed post-yuppie in the blogosphere.

In the aftermath of the Roosevelt Island tram rescue, the New York Times picked five places you would not want to get stuck and presented them to the Fire and Police Departments to see how they would respond. Thoughts of getting stuck at the top were foremost on my mind when I rode the Wonder Wheel last year. Now that would be awful

Your cousin from Cleveland has persuaded you, against your better judgment, to ride the Wonder Wheel, and, at the 150-foot summit, it comes to a halt.

The power is out. How do you get down?

Step 1, Chief Norman said, is to call in one of the department’s 95-foot-tall tower ladders as a base of operations. Rescue workers would then climb the wheel’s steel skeleton, using ropes, clips and nylon webbing as safeguards.

With the stokes basket or a special seatlike device called a diaper harness, they would then lower riders either to the ladder’s platform or onto the ground.

The Fire Department has actually been itching for a chance to practice on the Wonder Wheel, Chief Norman said, and officials have gone so far as to stand at its base, planning rescues from below.

So far, however, the department has not been allowed to use the wheel for drills because of liability concerns. Chief Norman said its owners asked him, "You want to climb out there for what?" For practice, he told them.

The answer, he said, was no.

In a piece about Red Hook, Village Voice writer Carla Blumenkranz characterizes fellow blogger, Callalillie, as an ambivalent post yuppie. Huh?

Like a prehistoric, three-legged fish crawling out of some slurpy,
subterranean swamp, here is Red Hook in its current state of evolution:
two healthy-looking 30-somethings wearing drugstore sunglasses, using
the backboards at the Harold Ickes playground to practice their tennis
strokes. It’s a real open court, this neighborhood, part-deserted, well
located, and prepared to be made over in the image of its newest and
least-hardy settlers.

Oldish-youngsters aren’t much newer to this area than
gentrification is to certain parts of Brooklyn. What’s changing,
drastically, just this month, is the basic interface of the
neighborhood: One long blink and Red Hook won’t look, sit, taste, or
travel anything like it did before. On April 15, Carnival’s Queen Mary
2 docked, with great fanfare, at the new Brooklyn Cruise Ship Terminal,
at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Columbia Street. And while Red
Hook might seem bleak to the first few rounds of Carnival-goers, their
ships will soon come in to truckloads of fresh produce: Fairway Market
on Van Brunt Street looks about ready to burst open. Meanwhile, the
Ikea site, also on the waterfront, awaits transformation; developers
float visions of parks, condos, and fish markets; and relatively
long-term residents rest just a little uneasy.

Local blogger Callalillie smartly embodies the embarrassed
post-yuppie ambivalence of future corporate shoppers. On the one hand,
she claims she would gladly trek to Manhattan for vegetables, if it
meant saving the gnarled warehouses she adores. On the other, she write
that when Fairway opens, she’ll be one of the first in line, buying
each and every one of the canisters in the spice section. Looks like
she won’t have to choose….READ MORE