Editor Gersh Kuntzman sent me an email with the sad news. Reporter Ariella Cohen is leaving the Brooklyn Paper for greener pastures in New Orleans.
Here’s Gersh’s sorrowful note:
And so it has come to this: After two years of outstanding service
to the borough of Brooklyn and The Brooklyn Paper, long-suffering
reporter Ariella Cohen will leave The Brooklyn Paper to singlehandedly
restore New Orleans to its prior greatness.The best thing — or perhaps the only
good thing — that can be said about Cohen’s departure is that it gives
us all an excuse to go to Retreat and order "The Gersh," the bar’s
intoxicating mix of ginger vodka, grapefruit juice and grenadine.
At the Revere Sugar refinery on the new gold coast of
Red Hook, the high ceiling is a silver dome over the South Brooklyn
waterfront. Look past the tree growing in that window and see how the
Statue of Liberty shines on the water, see the skylines of Manhattan to
the north and Sunset Park to the south.
To be inside a factory on the verge of demolition is like visiting a
place of worship emptied by earthquake. The ceilings are high.
Unfiltered sunlight washes over everything: chairs that once held
people, stray leather shoes, a suit jacket, ink-stained ledgers,
bashed-up books. A sapling grows in the arch of a broken, scroll-shaped
window.