Brighton springs a leak: Sheepshead Bites
Children’s Christmas party: Gerritsen Beach
Directory of community organizations: Pardon Me for Asking
Bringing a chorus program to PS 137: Bushwick BK
Construction starts at 205 Water Street: Dumbo NYC
Who’s Jackie Connor: Here’s Park Slope
In Treatment in Park Slope: Effed in Park Slope
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
From Middlemarch by George Eliot
Today’s Park Slope Patch, AOL’s new hyper-local news outlet in Park Slope has a fun list of five things to do this week in Park Slope.
Here’s one that caught my eye. Go to Patch to read more:
Relive your childhood Christmas classic with a holiday screening of Home Alone at Union Hall. Brooklyn comedy team the Raspberry Brothers presents an entire night of 90s pop culture at the Union Street venue, complete with a screening of Home Alone featuring live commentary and, well, mockery.
Anatomy of a shady deal: Atlantic Yards Report
Flutist names her band Bike Lane: Brooklyn Paper
Bushwick community board: Bushwick BK
Bring back the beat cop: McBrooklyn
Arts and Letters Middle School gets go-ahead for expansion: The Local
Even this week, the week before Christmas, there’s still lots of live music out there. I want to draw your attention to tonight’s Willie Nile (with a full band) show at Don Hill’s in Soho at 7:30pm, which was announced only on Willie’s Facebook page. For the rest of the week, including a performance of Jewmongous on Christmas Eve and Dar Williams at The Bell House on December 26th, check the handy list I’ve prepared for you here at Now I’ve Heard Everything.
–Eliot Wagner
I had so much fun caroling at a Christmas party on Saturday night. It was, truly, a classic Park Slope holiday scene. Here’s the recipe:
1 historic brownstone with a big Chirstmas tree in the bay window, decorated with arty, crafty decorations by children
20 or more votive candles strewn about for mood lighting
3 tables of pot luck casseroles, cheeses, breads, charcuterie and desserts
An assortment of wine, beer and alcohol
1 pianist at the upright playing through a book of carols
Booklets containing song lyrics for the guests
A smattering of interesting and friendly friends and strangers
Children of all ages hiding out upstairs
Mix it all together and you can create quite an idyllic scene. When the carolers launch into Silent Night, the hostess hands out votives to the singers and dims the lights.
Holy Night
It’s Saturday and there’s lots to get done and so much to do. Movies, theater, art, dance and music. Speaking of music, tonight Harry and the Potters bring their Yule Ball to The Bell House. Draco and the Malfoys with be there, too.
And shopping: Gifted at the Brooklyn Flea, Kings County General Store at Southpaw on Sunday, a Holiday Craft Fair at the Brooklyn Lyceum and just added a holiday shopping party at Urban Alchemist. Click on read more for all the essential details of what I’ve listed so far.
Park Officials broke ground on the new lakeside skating center and restoration of the revitalization of the surrounding nature.
The Prospect Park Alliance has $54 million of the $70-million needed for the project, which will include two skating rinks and a restoration of the shoreline around the lake.
“The old meets the new as the Prospect Park Lakeside’s historic landscape gets restored with improved access and state of the art, green amenities,” said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe told the crowd (as quoted in the Brooklyn Paper).
The design by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects looks very nice. I’ve always been a fan of those two.
Why? Because Tod Williams was responsible for the redesign of an apartment in the building I grew up in. My friend’s parents hired him to turn their pre-war Upper West Side apartment into a minimalist palace, sort of.
It was very minimal, and very lovely and it was the first time anyone I knew used Metro Shelving for kitchen shelves and even books. This was back in the 1970’s and it was oh so cool then.
So, I’m excited about the new skating rink, the design, and the fact that the Alliance has such a big hunk of the money needed to move forward. The only thing I’m sorry about is that the ice skating rink will be closed for quite a while.
Cut to:
Police are looking for two Marine Park sister, Chelsea Koenig (12) and Sara Koenig (15) who have been missing since Thursday day night when they went into the Cortelyou Road Q train station at about 11:30 PM according to the police.
According to the NYPD, Chelsea is 5’1 and 180 pounds with brown eyes and hair. She was last seen wearing blue jeans and a black jacket. Sarah is 5’6 and 180 pounds with brown hair and eyes, according to the NYPD.
If you have information on the missing girls, call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 800-577-TIPS. The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers Website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or texting their tips to 274637(CRIMES) then enter TIP577.
“He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”
Twas the weekend before Christmas and there’s loads to do in the way of movies, music, theater, dance and art.
And shopping. It’s an especially great weekend for shopping what with Gifted at the Brooklyn Flea, Kings County General Store at Southpaw on Sunday and a Holiday Craft Fair at the Brooklyn Lyceum. Click on read more for all the essential details of what I’ve listed so far.
As usual, in the days after the Park Slope 100 comes out I am still busy fixing typos, correcting mistakes, even adding names.
I’m sure there are still mistakes and typos and if you find any please let me know (I won’t be hurt or angry). This list takes so much time to put together: I need all the help I can get.
I apologize to those who think they should be on this list. The way this list comes together is very unscientific. It’s a combo of recent news, nominations from locals, things that pop into my mind. There’s always next year.
The list will be accessible by clicking on the tab to the right that says Park Slope 100 underneath Send Me a Tip. It’s one of those blue tabs with the white letters. See it? You can also, of course, click on the link above.
This is the fifth annual alphabetical list of 100 people, places and things that make Park Slope such a special place to live. 100 Stories, 100 ways of looking at the world.
This year I received many tips from readers of OTBKB. Quite a few of these blurbs were written by OTBKB readers. Thanks to all! Please send your typos, your fact checks, your comments to me.
Heck, I know you will.
Five years of the Park Slope 100. That means that if you combine all the lists there are 500 people, places and things, a sort of mini-history of Park Slope people, places and things since 2006.
Last night at Feast, Brooklyn Reading Works’ annual benefit reading for the food pantry at St. Augustine’s Church, Eliot Wagner, of Now I’ve Heard Everything told me that Neil Young played at the Bell House on Wednesday night with his wife, guitarist Pegi Young, who was playing with guitar legend, Burt Jansch.
Dang, I wish I’d followed my own bloggy advice and gone to the show. Dang, I hope you followed my advice and went to the show. I’ve been to two shows recently at the Bell House and I’m becoming quite a fan of the place. You can’t miss over there: it’s a wonderful place to hear music.
Bklyn Vegan and he has a review and mountains of pictures. Here’s an excerpt and just one pix from BV.
Young made the surprise guest appearance as part of his wife Pegi’s backing band, the opening act, and kept to the shadows most of the night. Bathed in dark crimson light, he filled in his wife’s rollicking, twangy sound with subdued yet accented guitar licks, that unmistakable gritty rhythm style, and on one occasion harmonica. Even in just a supporting role, his focus was impenetrable. When Neil Young raises his guitar neck and dons that irascible stare, it commands attention like a force of nature. Pegi finished off her set with a version of Neil outtake “Doghouse,” graciously letting her man share the spotlight as he sang backup and finally splayed out a solo.
But the highlight of the show was Jansch; his complex acoustic ruminations sprang to life like a Celtic fable, and his vocals, softer with age, tranquilly voiced stories that were equally anguished and joyous…
Tracy Atkinson at Root Hill Cafe: Art in Brooklyn
Hope and mercy in a cruel world: Water Over Rocks
Promise and fulfillment: Old First Blog
The stripper housewife: The Spiral Staircase
Interview with Stanley Crouch: Do the Math
Pitchforks top 50 albums: Brooklyn Vegan
Once I week I’m doing a column for the Park Slope Patch, a new hyper-local news site developed by AOL. The terrific Kristen V. Brown is at the helm and she’s doing a great job over there. Get out the welcome wagon and drop by Patch. Here’s an excerpt from this week’s piece, a rumination on the recent Howard Place tragedy.
Yesterday not far from Park Slope, a woman died at the hands of her 31-year-old son, who stabbed her in the abdomen and the eye. The mother, Margaret Devaney, was declared dead on arrival at Methodist Hospital.
How could this happen in an area known for its happy children and dedicated parents? Well, a tragedy of this kind can strike anywhere. Even in the stroller capital of the world where parents supposedly try harder.
But what if a child is a “bad egg” with serious mental and emotional issues? What if a child is a violent threat to friends, family and strangers? Reportedly the murderous son, Ryan Devaney, had a history of mental instability, numerous arrests and restraining orders against him.
That’s a scary thought and every mother’s nightmare. In a neighborhood where parents believe that if they do everything right the kids will be all right, the idea that your child could one day kill is downright unthinkable…
Read the rest at PS Patch.
Second Dan is a Brooklyn-based band with a lead singer, Dan Rosen, who comes from Australia, Melbourne to be exact. They put out a very good album this year, titled Angeline. Their new video, shot on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is of the title track. It’s quite charming. See it a Now I’ve Heard Everything by clicking here.
–Eliot Wagner
“Beneath her body are the cool stone and the whole mountain, enormous and solid and infinite. She thinks: How thin is the crust of Earth.”
Tonight participate in the Buy in Brooklyn Snowflake Celebration by buying gifts on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope and enjoying complimentary wine, special treats and discounts.
The Snowflake Celebration, an evening of merriment, late night shopping, caroling & community spirit, is “a No Sales Tax Xmas” event although some stores are deducting 10% from the price instead.
Rosewater has this terrific offer: For every $50 spent on dinner and/or the purchase of RW holiday gift certificates during the Snowflake Celebration Thursdays, we will issue a Snowflake Bonus Certificate of $25 to be used anytime between January 2 and March 20, 2011 (2/14 is the only blackout date). No limit, no strings – use toward food and bev purchases at either brunch or dinner. Give as gifts or use them yourself!
The Cocoa Bar is offering 10% off wine, beer, chocolate & cakes. Coffee/tea makers, mugs… great holiday gifts.
Lion in the Sun at 232 7th Avenue (at 4th Street) is offering cookies & Prosecco, 15% off entire store, Special handmade art & goodies
Photo by Eliot Wagner
The following is my verbatim interview with Kevin McPartland, a writer, who grew up on Fifth Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets. He now lives on Staten Island.
“I was home sick that day with asthma. Didn’t go to school. I was in 8th grade at the Holy Family School on 14th Street and Fourth Avenue (Denis Hamill just wrote an article about the school). What I remember: a tremendous amount of sirens, fire trucks, ambulances, police sirens on Fifth Avenue where we lived (between 11th and 12th Streets).
“My friend Brian’s brothers lived on 13th. He was a cub reporter at the time, a freelance photographer. He had a police scanner and was always rushing off to crime scenes. He was the first person on the scene at Sterling Place. You know those pictures you see of the crash — there’s no name attributed to them – I think they’re his pictures. His name was Jerry Haynes. He died young of juvenile diabetes.
“I don’t remember watching it on TV. But it was on the radio. WMCA. At first we weren’t sure what had happened. Was it a big explosion? Then we heard it was two airliners.
“My parents, everyone in our 6-family tenement building on Fifth Avenue, people were talking, people were crying. There was lots of talk. Someone was definitely crying.
“My neighborhood, Fifth Avenue between 11th and 12th, it was a tough neighborhood. Working class. Rough and tough. Street gangs, drugs. You know, I write all about that. There was heroin in 1960.”
“The area near Sterling Place was a better area.
“Stephen Baltz, he was the big thing. The kid that was still alive. I think he died, like, 24, 48 hours later. They found 67 cents in his pocket. It’s on the wall. That’s the memorial plaque. Someone had the idea to put the change in his pocket on the plaque as a memorial.”
Are you hungry for some stir fried fiction, fresh baked poetry and deep dish prose? On Thursday, December 16 at 8PM come feast on a succulent bounty from writers who use food as metaphor, motif and mnemonics of meaning. Bring an appetite for good writing and real snacks by Chef Ame Gilbert, who will be preparing tasty treats for you to enjoy.
This event is a benefit for the food pantry at St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church in Park Slope. You are invited to donate what you wish. Suggested donation is $5, which includes snacks by Ame Gilbert and wine. Feel free to give more for those in need.
The writers on the literary menu include: Greg Fuchs, Jim Behrle, Louise Crawford, Michele Madigan Somerville, Peter Catapano, Sophia Romero, Amy Gilbert and Jake Siegel.
The Old Stone House is located at Fifth Avenue and Third Street in Park Slope. For more information go to theoldstonehouse.org or brooklynreadingworks.com
Some random facts about the 1960 Airline Crash:
–The crash was the deadliest U.S. commercial aviation disaster of its time.
–All 127 passengers and crew on both planes died.
–7 people died, who were on the ground in Park Slope.
–It was the first time that a black box recorder was used to provide details to crash investigators.
–The little boy who survived the crash for 26 hours was named Stephen Baltz.
–10 brownstone apartment buildings, the Pillar of Fire Church, the McCaddin Funeral Home, a Chinese laundry and a delicatessen burned.
–Hollis Frampton, an experimental filmmaker, was scheduled to be on the United flight, but decided not to return to New York that day to see a retrospective by photographer Edward Weston in Minneapolis. Frampton said of this decision that he was “never…able to decide whether Weston tried to kill me, or saved my life.” (from Wikipedia).
I try to imagine it: a cold December day in 1960 much like today when two planes collided over Staten Island and one of the planes landed on Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue in Park Slope.
Headlines in the next day’s New York Times’ read: Disaster in Fog. DC-8 plunges into Park Slope Street missing school and 10 Brooklyn houses burn after plane hits a church
134 people (127 passengers and 7 people on the ground) were killed. An 11-year-old boy was found alive. He was brought to Methodist Hospital and died 26 hours later. There’s a plaque in the hospital’s chapel.
That event 50 years ago is a fact of life in Park Slope. A perennial question: “Was that where the plane came down?”
I think of it just about every time I pass that corner, which is often, or sit in Ozzie’s Cafe just a block away.
When a new condo was built on that corner I wondered: how would it feel to live on that site.
Life moves on but something like this is never forgotten. It leaves its imprint on a place, the trace of memory and mourning.
In 1960 the world was not accustomed to the familiar and tragic news of a catastrophic airplane crash. This was the first of its kind, the biggest air crash of its time. It must have been harrowing.
My mother and father came out to Park Slope on that day. They drove out in their little Austin Healey because they wanted to see what had happened in Brooklyn,where my mother was born.
“I saw everything,” she told me yesterday.
“Do you remember any details?” I asked.
“I saw everything,” she said again emphatically.
I’m still not sure what she saw.
My sister and I were only 2-years-old and they left us home in Manhattan. It’s strange to imagine my parents, thirty-somethings, wanting to see for themselves the magnitude of this disaster.
“We wanted to see it,” my mother told me. “Your father and I were like that then,” she said.
Today is the anniversary of that terrible day. People will gather at Green-wood Cemetery to commemorate and remember—they will dedicate a new memorial to those who perished.
I expect there will be makeshift memorials on that corner of Seventh Avenue. Flowers, notes, photographs.
It is how we remember that informs that which we can’t forget.
Lingering scars of Park Slope plane crash: City Room
New marker marks anniversary of plane crash: Wall Street Journal
Covering the story: City Room
50 Years and a whole new neighborhood later: NY Daily News
Old photos of crash: Found in Brooklyn
Memorial to be unveiled: Here is Park Slope
