Another classic New York story from Rob Lenihan at Luna Park Gazette. This one is about the history of place, memories and the wrecking ball.

My sister told me. And she sent me this link to  the New York Times piece by Josh Barbanel at 3:41 this morning. Apparently a Google engineer and his wife are moving into THAT house on Prospect Park West vacated by Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany. Guess we won't be seeing the twins at the Third Street Playground after all. 

The following memo was sent to me by Craig Hammerman, District Manager of Community Board 6. He received this memo from Whole Foods' Mark Mobley today. It's an update on Whole Foods Market's plan in Brooklyn. He says: "Reports of our demise have been greatly exaggerated." 

I
am writing with just a quick update to let you know that recent reports
of Whole Foods Market's demise in Brooklyn seem to have been greatly
exaggerated!  As you may have seen, the Brooklyn Paper published a
story this week that inaccurately suggests we have definitively decided
not to pursue the development of a store on our property at 3rd Street and 3rd
Avenue and further that we are planning to sell the property.  This is
simply not true and we have sent a letter to the Brooklyn Paper editor
clarifying our position and requesting a correction.

 You
may recall that last Fall I sent you a memo explaining that Whole Foods
Market had begun re-evaluating our plans for our property and that we
would be working to identify potential development partners for a
Brooklyn store.  That is exactly what we have been doing in recent
months and we are continuing these efforts in hopes of arriving at a
potential development scenario that will enable us to finally come to
Brooklyn .

 Therefore,
while nothing has yet been finalized and we are still not in a position
to be able to share any additional information, please be assured that
we will be back in touch as soon as we are able to provide more details
about our plans.

Vox Pop shareholder and manager Debbie Ryan dressed the part of Lady
Liberty after she was stolen to call attention to the crime. 

The very
disturbing video posted to Youtube has generated widespread media
attention and inspired the community to hold a fundraiser this Saturday at Vox Pop to replace the stolen and desecrated statue.

Vox Pop Coffee Shop (1022 Cortelyou Road at 8 p.m.)

Photo by Tom Martinez

 Brooklyn may be in the throes of trying to select a new Poet Laureate to replace Ken Seligman who died last month but the de facto poet laureate of Brooklyn on Tuesday night was Katha Pollitt, poet, essayist and columnist for The Nation, who read and signed her new book, The Mind-Body Problem at Bookcourt in Cobble Hill.

Pollitt may not be a regular visitor to Brooklyn these days but she grew up on Sidney Place in Brooklyn Heights and attended Packer Collegiate Institute, where she studied Latin with a Miss Rose Smith and translated Virgil as a teenager. She lived on Garden Place in the 1970's where, she says, "she could lie in bed
and see the harbor with the Staten Island ferry."

A reading by Katha Pollitt is an enjoyable exercise in lateral thinking. Her poems are at once fiercely intellectual but also personal and highly accessible. They convey a wide swath of knowledge about literature, politics and religion but are also full of sensory images that pop in the mind. As the owner of Bookcourt said in his introduction, "Pollitt's poems are subversive modern parables that are profound and accessible; they put her in the first rank of modern American poets."

I enjoyed Pollitt's patter between poems almost as much as the poems themselves. Complimenting the bookstore's recent expansion Pollitt remarked, "I plan to buy a lot of books. Not my own. I already have enough of those."

She introduced the poem, "Lives of the Nineteenth Century Poetesses" with: "I've said that I don't like political poetry. But this is a feminist poem."

"As girls they were awkward and peculiar,
wept in church or refused to go at all.
Their mother saw right away no man would marry them.
So must live at the sufferance of others,
timid and queer as governesses out of Chekhov,"

Introducing a poem about walking around the city and seeing what isn't there anymore (a topic dear to the heart of this native New Yorker) she said. "Someone asked why all of my poems are so sad. But I don't think they're just about loss and sadness, they're about a love of things."

Introducing another standout poem called "Mandarin Oranges," which was first published in the New Yorker, Pollitt recalled her time at  Packer, where, she says, she was miserable. They did, however, serve mandarin oranges as "a special treat of our high-school lunchroom."

A section of her new book is devoted to a series of poems based on the Old Testament, which Pollitt said she prefers to its sequel. Introducing a poem about Martha, the sister of Lazarus and Mary, Pollitt called her the "patron saint of housewives."

    "Well, did he think the food would cook itself?
    Naturally, he preferred the sexy one,
    the one who leaned forward with velvet eyes…"

A poem called "Silent Letter" brilliantly riffs on words like wriggle and writhe where you don't hear the W.

After the reading, Pollitt called for questions from the crowd of fifty or so friends and admirers and the discussion was illuminating. One person asked about  "the anxiety of influence regarding Philip Larkin, who's political views are starkly different from yours."

Pollitt, whose ability to wax fluidly intellectual on the spot is non pareil, jumped in with:  "Chekhov said: you can't ask a writer to come up with answers; they come up with the questions. With Larkin, I sift past the things that I don't like. He was conservative, racist and reactionary.  But the way he describes modern life, isolation and the dissolving connection with history is brilliant."

Another audience member compared Pollitt's work to the poetry of C.V. Cavafy (1863-1933), a modern Greek poet who lived in Egypt, which led Pollitt to say, "I might as well die and go to heaven now to be compared to Larken and Cavafy."

Pollitt reminisced about being a 14-year-old at sleep-away camp when her mother sent her a Cavafy poem cut out of Vogue Magazine. "How times have changed. I don't think Anna Wintour will be publishing poetry anytime soon."

Whole Foods has decided against a site near the Gowanus Canal on Third Street and near Third Avenue. The Brooklyn Paper had the story first (I think).

The grocery chain, known for its high-end food and prices to match,
said on Wednesday that it does still hope to come to Brooklyn, but it
won’t be at its polluted parcel at the corner of Third Street.

“Whole Foods does not have immediate plans to open in Brooklyn,”
said company spokeswoman Mara Engel Weleck, who suggested that the land
would be sold.

Whole Foods would have become part of a growing gourmet movement in
Brooklyn, joining such big-time grocers as Fairway and Trader Joe’s to
hawk expensive edibles to the borough’s well-heeled consumers.

But its proposed site between tony Park Slope and Carroll Gardens
was contentious from the start, not only because of the toxicity of the
canal-zone location, but also because of the inclusion of a 420-space
parking lot, which some critics pointed out was bigger than many
suburban stores.

 Late start today because I was having coffee with Truth and Rocket Science blogger, John Guidry. Read his latest posts about Robert McNamara, who died last week. Guidry and I had a great conversation and, hey, he paid for my coffee at Sweet Melissa. Not bad.

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz has granted $1,133,000 to Issue Project Room's capital campaign to renovate 110 Livington Street. Here is their response:

We are humbled, honored, and inspired to have been selected as grant
recipients for capital support.  This award provides us with critical
funding towards the $1.725 million necessary to complete a first phase of construction designed
to:  bring the jewel box theater space to code;
install the necessary systems for soundproofing and performance; make renovations; and begin presenting as early as Fall 2010.

Once
renovated, the new space at 110 will be home to more than 4,000
programs reaching more than 1,000,000 people across the next two
decades.  We are overjoyed at being so close to realizing this historic opportunity.