Baristanet, the Montclair/Glen Ridge, NJ blog that inspired and mentored OTBKB, made it into the New York Times. A new feature charts the town’s changing architectural landscape. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times piece.

On Sept. 22, the Web site started a new feature to chart the town’s
changing architectural landscape — an interactive map that shows
teardowns, homes with historic designations and recent construction.

“Maybe
something like this will give people pause,” said Ms. George, 39, in
her office at her gracious 100-year-old home. “Knowing you’re having
your house on the teardown map, knowing it will be part of this trend,
I don’t think it has a positive implication.”

The teardown
issue has taken on a sense of urgency here after a developer bought the
blue-shuttered Colonial-style house, on North Mountain Avenue, for
$870,000 last fall and demolished it this summer with plans to build
six town homes. The action led town officials to rezone about 200 lots
— including the North Mountain Avenue property — from a designation
that allows up to eight units on a single lot to a designation that
allows only two. The developer has since dropped his plans and has put
the empty lot up for sale.

“The fear is that teardowns, in a
long-established community with little space for new development, are
slowly changing Montclair’s character and ambiance,” Ms. George wrote
on the Web site.

“Longtime residents often say the Montclair
they knew has changed,” she continued, adding that she envisions the
online map as serving as “an evolving document chronicling change in
Montclair.”

A similar interactive map on WestportNow, a news Web
site in Westport, Conn., inspired the Montclair site, Ms. George said.
On that site, the “Teardown of the Day” feature includes photographs of
construction equipment razing Cape Cods, ramshackle ranches and
architectural gems.

In this Daily News exclusive, writer and editor Phyllis Fine describes what it was like to be at the center of Saturday’s Brooklyn hostage drama – an ordeal that began with a psycho’s knife to her head and ended with a single shot from a cop with deadeye aim. Here, in her own words, is her stunning story:

No, my life didn’t pass before my eyes.

But I found myself thinking, "It must be a dream, please let this be a dream. …"

Your thoughts sound like a cliche when your life is being threatened. That’s what I found when I was taken hostage Saturday morning by a man who kept shouting, "Kill me!" to the cops surrounding us.

Okay, I thought, maybe you want to die, but I don’t. Why do you have to take me with you?

It all started with a simple morning errand to the supermarket two blocks away.

I was almost at the entrance when I saw people running from the opposite direction. I paused, confused, and that’s when my attacker, Joseph Bernazard (whose name I only learned later) must have grabbed me.

It took a minute to feel the menace and realize what was going on. I felt a tug to my hair, something against the back of my head – the knife.

Bernazard never spoke directly to me.

From what he was saying to the cops – "After what they did to me … Carlos told me …" – I thought I had interrupted a drug bust and the perp had glommed onto me to keep from being arrested.

But that was the standard "Law and Order"-style narrative, one that I could have been watching on TV – helped along by the police saying, "She’s innocent, don’t hurt her."

The other, more compelling narrative was the threat of the guns facing me and the knife behind me. I have to prepare for death, I thought. In the months after 9/11, like many New Yorkers, I’d reminded myself that death could come at any time, and that was okay.

But I was out of practice with such thoughts. I’m not a religious Jew, but later, I wished I had memorized the Hebrew prayer, the Shema, that Jews are supposed to say before dying.

I think it would have been comforting to me, as if I were my own priest giving myself last rites.

Then I heard the shot that set me free. I don’t remember him letting go of me, but he must have. My first thought was, had the shot hit me? Then I ran quickly away from the circle of danger without looking back.

I’ve learned two things from my ordeal: Life can be interrupted at any minute, so you have to enjoy it while you can. And if you see a group of people running wildly – and it’s not the marathon – don’t stop to figure out what’s going on.

Just run like hell.

The Domino Sugar sign next to the Williamsburg Bridge may become a New York City landmark if preservationists get their way. This from the New York Times:

Now, the sign may point the way to the borough’s next big historic preservation fight.

Last
month, the Waterfront Preservation Alliance of Greenpoint and
Williamsburg formally asked the city’s Landmarks Preservation
Commission to consider the old sugar factory for landmark status.

A
plan for a project combining market-rate and low-income housing at the
site is being drafted by the partnership that bought the property
shortly after the factory closed in 2004. It consists of the Community
Preservation Corporation, a nonprofit organization, and Isaac Katan, a
private developer.

The preservationists, supported by the
local City Council member, David Yassky, want any development to
conform with the factory, a hulking brick Romanesque Revival structure
that dates to the late 19th century and recalls an era when New York
was the nation’s leading sugar producer.

Mr. Yassky angered
local preservationists last year by helping to override the landmark
designation of a nearby warehouse. The Domino plant, he said, is more
significant. “It’s an icon,” he said. “It’s a landmark in the popular
sense of the word. When I talk to people in Queens or Manhattan about
that part of my district, I say it’s right by the Domino Sugar factory,
and they know where that is.”

Picture from Flickr: flickr.com/photos/mireille/

This fall’s readings at Night and Day, which is really shaping up to be quite the cultural center here in Brooklyn.

SUNDAY OCTOBER 8
LAUNCH PARTY: Hardboiled Brooklyn
Detective fiction in New York’s finest borough.
Featuring: Peter Blauner, Gabriel Cohen, Reed Farrell Coleman

Sunday Oct 15
6 pm
LAUNCH PARTY: Heliotrope issue release
for the Heliotrope launch party, add these names as the readers:
Barbara Elovic, Linda Susan Jackson, Richard Levine, Constance
Norgren, & Jessica Stein

Monday Oct 16
6 pm
Playwrites: BARBARA WIECHMANN & RICHARD FULCO

Monday Oct 23
6 pm
Sackett St Writers’ Workshop
Featuring faculty & students from the Brooklyn writing workshop.

SUNDAY OCTOBER 29
6 PM
Fiction
Edie Meidav, author of CRAWL SPACE
& Emily Barton, author of BROOKLAND

Set in eighteenth-century Brooklyn, Brookland is the story of a determined
and intelligent woman who is consumed by a vision of a bridge: a
gargantuan construction of timber and masonry she devises to cross the
East River in a single, magnificent span. With the help of the local
surveyor, Benjamin Horsfield, and her sisters-the high-spirited,
obstreperous Tem, who works with her in the distillery, and the
silent, uncanny Pearl-she fires the imaginations of the people of
Brooklyn and New York by promising them a bridge that will meet their
most pressing practical needs while being one of the most ambitious
public works ever attempted. Prue’s own life and the life of the
bridge become inextricably bound together as the costs of the bridge,
both financial and human, rise beyond her direst expectations.

Thursday Nov 2
6 pm
FICTION. Hosted by Kristan Ryan of Behler Books

Sunday, Nov 5
6 pm
Sarah Langan & Victor LaValle

Monday, Nov. 13
6 pm
Sackett St Writers’ Workshop
Featuring faculty & students.

Wednesday, Nov. 15
6 pm
Sackett St Writers’ Workshop
Featuring faculty & students.

Thursday, Nov 16
6pm
Book-Launch Party & Reading!
JOHN HIGH
reading from his new novel, Talking God’s Radio Show

Monday, Nov. 27
6 pm
Sackett St Writers’ Workshop
Featuring faculty & students.