Here is the NYT's Maureen Dowd at her smart/nasty/cutting/funny best; www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28dowd.html

This caught my eye. It's in today's New York Times. Real estate crimes are up in Brooklyn: This is a job for Super Real Estate Crime Fighters!  Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes has set up a 12-member unit to battle crimes like fraud and deed forgery. Who knew it was so rampant?

The
need for such an office has been building, Mr. Hynes said, announcing
the new unit on Friday. As foreclosure rates have sharply risen in
central Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Mr. Hynes’s
office, with limited resources, has been forced to turn down real
estate investigations, and instead has referred victims to civil court
or relied on federal prosecutors, who generally concentrate on larger
schemes.

Mr. Hynes said the new 12-member unit would be
financed for two years with $875,000 in federal money and would help
people like Levi Latham, 75, a Brooklyn retiree whose house was, in
effect, stolen by a woman who took Mr. Latham’s personal information, a
prosecutor said. After executing and recording a false deed, the woman
is now listed as the owner of the house.

William Kristol may be the New York Times’ ultra conservative columnist (boo boo, hiss hiss) but his column on Monday, GOP Dog Days?, was good. Read this excerpt:

In other words, this was a good Democratic year, but it is still a center-right country. Conservatives and the Republican Party will have a real chance for a comeback — unless the skills of the new president turn what was primarily an anti-Bush vote into the basis for a new liberal governing era.

Those were my thoughts when, a few minutes into his victory speech, just after midnight, Obama told his daughters, “And you have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the new White House.”

I gulped.

Not out of my deep affection for dogs, fond of them though I am. But because while we’ve all known that Obama is a very skillful politician, he hasn’t until now been a particularly empathetic one. Competence plus warmth is a pretty potent combination. Suddenly visions of the two great modern realigning presidents — Franklin Roosevelt (with his Scottish terrier Fala) and Ronald Reagan (with his Cavalier King Charles spaniel Rex) — flashed before my eyes. Maybe a realignment could be coming.

Obama was, naturally, asked about the promised-but-not-yet-purchased puppy at his press conference Friday. (If one were being churlish, one might say that it was typical of a liberal to promise the dog before delivering it. A results-oriented conservative would simply have shown up with the puppy without the advance hype.)

Obama commented wryly that the canine question had “generated more interest on our Web site than just about anything.” He continued:

“We have two criteria that have to be reconciled. One is that Malia is allergic, so it has to be hypoallergenic. There are a number of breeds that are hypoallergenic. On the other hand, our preference would be to get a shelter dog, but, obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me. So — so whether we’re going to be able to balance those two things, I think, is a pressing issue on the Obama household.”

Here, in a few sentences, Obama did the following: He deepened his bond with every dog lover in America. He identified with every household that’s tried to figure out what kind of dog to get. He touched every parent with a kid allergic to pets. He showed compassion by preferring a dog from a shelter. And he demonstrated a dry and slightly politically incorrect wit by commenting that “a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.”

Not bad. It could be a tough four or eight years for conservatives

.

Brooklyn’s Colson Whitehad, author of John Henry Days, The Intuitionist and The Colossus of New York and the upcoming Sag Harbor penned a terrific Op-Ed in yesterday’s Times. Here’s an excerpt:

OVER the coming days and weeks, there will be many “I never thought I’d
see the day” pieces, but none of them will be more overflowing with “I
never thought I’d see the day”-ness than this one. I’m black, you see,
and I haven’t gained a pound since college. I skip breakfast most days,
have maybe half a sandwich for lunch, and sometimes I forget to eat
dinner. Just slips my mind. Yesterday morning, I woke up to a new
world. America had elected a Skinny Black Guy president.

This from the New York Times. Read more here.

ALBANY — Gov. David A. Paterson has directed all state agencies to begin to revise their policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions, like Massachusetts, California and Canada.

In a directive issued on May 14, the governor’s legal counsel, David Nocenti, instructed the agencies that gay couples married elsewhere “should be afforded the same recognition as any other legally performed union.”

The revisions are most likely to involve as many as 1,300 statutes and regulations in New York governing everything from joint filing of income tax returns to transferring fishing licenses between spouses.

Hey, that article by freelance journalist Lynn Harris, who interviewed many of us two months ago for an article about Why People Hate Park Slope originally intended for New York Magazine, is in the Style section of the Times this Sunday.

Props to Harris: she did email to say that the piece would probably be in the Times this week. The great thing about Harris is that she stays in touch with those she interviews and lets them know what’s happening with the article she writes.

That’s a nice journalistic habit.

The Times’ piece, called Where is the Love, explores the hatred that Park Slope evokes in some:

When I moved to the neighborhood in 1994, I promise you, Manhattanites
did not think about Park Slope any longer than it took them to blow off
a party invitation. But today, you mention Park Slope on a blog or even
in conversation and, especially if the reference involves the word
“stroller,” the haters lunge like sharks at chum.

How did it come to this? Most of the above could be said of just
about any other neighborhood in our tidied-up, child-rearing-friendly
New York City. Doesn’t the East Village have a Whole Foods? Hasn’t the
Upper West Side become Short Hills?

How did Slope Rage become a meme unto itself, even among people who won’t take the F train below East Broadway?

We
must take some hatred of Park Slope with a generous dash of salt
(organic, artisanal, hand-harvested). Much anti-Slope invective is
stirred up in comments on blogs, which are not known for universally
trenchant insight (“Puke Slope!”) or for their warm embrace of, well,
anything.

The article comes complete with a photo of a mom with a stroller taken at the Green Market at Grand Army Plaza. Quoted are many familiar names, including James Bernard (one of the Park Slope 100), who founded the magazine The Source and is on the board of the new Brooklyn Prospect charter school in Park Slope:

“This whole thing sounds like white people being
annoyed by and jealous of other white people, which I find kind of
funny,” said James Bernard, a union organizer and a member of the local
Community Board 6. “I live in the Slope. I love it. I talk about it as
much as anyone else does. But I founded a charter school near
Brownsville and I don’t hear anyone talking about Park Slope over
there.”

Also quoted are Slopers Suleiman Osman, an assistant professor of American Studies, who is writing a book about the history of gentrification in Brooklyn. Steven Berlin Johnson of Outside.In, and Josh Grinker of the Stone Park Cafe. No she didn’t use any quotes from me. 

It’s an article about a strange cultural phenomenon: the demonization of a neighborhood in a city full of neighborhoods that are fun to make fun of. I guess Park Slope is the current "it neighborhood" to hate. And people love to hate. They really do. 

In a world where there is so much to be angry about, it’s funny that Park Slope should absorb so much NYC rage. But hey, it’s got to go somewhere.

This morning there’s a front page article in the Times, Her Dream, Brandes as a Threat, about Debbie Almontaser and her thwarted effort to be the principal of the city’s first school for children of Arab descent. Here’s an excerpt:

Debbie Almontaser dreamed of starting a public school like no other in New York City. Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country’s elite colleges. They would be ready, in Ms. Almontaser’s words, to become “ambassadors of peace and hope.”

Things have not gone according to plan. Only one-fifth of the 60 students at the Khalil Gibran International Academy are Arab-American. Since the school opened in Brooklyn last fall, children have been suspended for carrying weapons, repeatedly gotten into fights and taunted an Arabic teacher by calling her a “terrorist,” staff members and students said in interviews.

The academy’s troubles reach well beyond its cramped corridors in Boerum Hill. The school’s creation provoked a controversy so incendiary that Ms. Almontaser stepped down as the founding principal just weeks before classes began last September. Ms. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor’s office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda.

The City section has an article by Alex Mindlin about the community effort to change the name of JJ Byrne’s namesake park (at Third Street and Fifth Avenue) to Washington Park. Kim Maier, director of The Old Stone House is, of course, quoted.

“It’s always ‘Who was J. J. Byrne?’ ” said Kimberly Maier, executive director of the Old Stone House, a historical center in a 17th-century farmhouse in the little park.

Like many other local residents, Ms. Maier has supported a move to strip the park of the name of Mr. Byrne, a Brooklyn borough president elected in 1926 who died in office four years later. Instead, the park would be named Washington Park, as it was in the 1880s, when it was home to the baseball team that would become the Dodgers. That name is a nod to the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, in which British and American forces fought for control of the farmhouse.

An article in the New York Times on Sunday about the hazards of blogging following the death of two bloggers.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style

.

In Saturday’s Style section of the New York Times, there’s an article about the creative connection between San Francisco and Brooklyn. The Times coined the phrase San Franbrooklyn and commissioned a really cool illustration. According to the Times, there is there is “a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area.”

Richard Florida, the author of “The Rise of the Creative Class,” which argues that urban renewal is sparked by high concentrations of high-tech workers, artists, gay men and lesbians, ranked San Francisco No. 1 on his “creativity index” and New York City No. 9. Although Mr. Florida did not break out data for Brooklyn, “anecdotally it has a large concentration of creative people who have moved from Manhattan and elsewhere,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I am confident if such data existed, Brooklyn would do very well.”

He added that the populations drawn to both areas by alternative art and music scenes, and by a tolerance for diversity, were looking for a “messy urbanism, a clash of different styles that Brooklyn still retains, that the East Bay still retains.”

Other communities across the country also fit this bill, but what Brooklyn and the East Bay share is proximity to more cosmopolitan centers — Manhattan and San Francisco — where the “creative class,” many of whom are freelancers, can earn a living.

“You can make money in both cities,” Ms. Levine said. “Can you make money in Portland, Ore.? It’s a cool city, it’s got lots of hipsters, but can you make money?”

In the New York Times today, Bruce Ratner is quoted as saying that the economy could cause major delays and changes to the Atlantic Yards Project, originally slated for completion in 2009.

The slowing economy, weighed down by a widening credit crisis, is likely to delay the signature office tower and three residential buildings at the heart of the $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, the developer said.

“It may hold up the office building,” the developer, Bruce C. Ratner, said in a recent interview. “And the bond market may slow the pace of the residential buildings.”

Mr. Ratner, chief executive of Forest City Ratner, did not specify the kinds of delays possible, but suggested that construction could be put off for years. His comments are his first public indication that the darkening economy has slowed the ambitious project, spanning 22 acres at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues

Perhaps scariest of all, if economic woes cause Ratner to change the scope of the project this could happen:

Given the current environment, some critics worry that Mr. Ratner will negotiate for deeper subsidies, reduce the amount of low- and moderate-income housing included or eventually sell off portions of the site to other developers who could use their own, less expensive designs

Daniel Goldstein, leader of Develop Don’t Destroy and the only resident still in a building on the AY site is also quoted in the article:

“We need leadership in the city and the state to face the music…The project needs to be reconfigured, rethought and renegotiated. The promise was affordable housing. It’s clearly been put on the back burner, while the arena has been moved to the front burner.”

The New York Times reports that Blue Iris is the Pantone Color of the Year. A spokesperson for the Pantone Color Instutute told the Times: “Blue Iris brings together the dependable
aspects of blue, underscored by a strong, soul-searching purple cast.
Emotionally, it is anchoring and meditative with a touch of magic."

This from the New York Times:

When editors at the New Oxford American Dictionary recently
announced that their word of the year was “locavore,” which means
someone who eats locally grown food, they also became the very
definition of publicity.

In the last few weeks Ben
Zimmer, an Oxford University Press dictionary editor, appeared on
numerous radio shows and on a syndicated public radio program to talk
about the word contest. The selection of locavore also had 25 mentions
in major newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post.

“There
are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary,” said Erin
McKean, a lexicographer at Oxford. While publishers can rely on
coverage for new entries in just-published dictionaries, some reference
books go for as long as a decade between revisions. “We are constantly
surveilling the language to see what new words people are coming up
with,” Ms. McKean said.

A nice piece by Jake Mooney in the City Section called, 400 Umbrellas Spell Park Slope:

The program has a certain “only in Park Slope” feel to it. The
neighborhood is, of course, home to a thriving food co-op where all
10,000 or so members have to work monthly shifts, and Catherine Bohne,
the umbrella program’s organizer and owner of the Community Bookstore,
says residents are always helping each other out. Once, she said, she
found a bag of dog food on the sidewalk with a sign that read,
“Perfectly good food, only my dog just doesn’t like.”

Not that
the umbrellas are solely a charitable endeavor. Although they are
partly a promotional campaign, one that has drawn a swarm of reporters
bearing free publicity, the social experiment is what everyone wants to
talk about. And here, so far, is the verdict: As of the other day, the
Community Bookstore, at least, still had a box full of umbrellas —
yellow ones, along with a green foldable and a black cane-handle that
had mysteriously joined their ranks.

The New York Times reports that the FDNY pool of black and Hispanic job applicants has more than doubled since 2002.

This comes two months after the Justice Department sued the city charging that the firefighter written entrance exam
screened out a large number of blacks and Hispanics.

Now, 30 percent of the 4,000 applicants scoring highest
on this year’s exam were black or Hispanic, compared with just under 14
percent in 2002.

There were also
three times as many women in this year’s top 4,000.

Did you see the front page article in the City Section about I Saw Your Nanny, a blog that’s been around for more than a year?

"What happens is that a stranger, maybe
a passer-by in the playground, witnesses a scene between adult and
child that looks alarming. If the child is white and the caregiver is
not, as is often the case in New York, the passer-by tends to assume
that the caretaker is the nanny, not the mother."

I liked the part of the piece where the nannies got a chance to express their side of the situation.

"But
day to day, being the subject of such pervasive examination can feel
deeply unsettling. Back at J. J. Byrne Park, where some nannies have
been decried as “obnoxious” and “cliquey” in ISawYourNanny postings,
emotions ranged from fatalism to indignation.

“What are you going to do?” said a Jamaican nanny named Gwen. “Life goes on.”

"By
early afternoon on that summer Friday, several nannies sat chatting on
the benches, a gathering that a poster on ISawYourNanny derided as “the
J. J. Byrne Bench Sitters’ Club.”

“Mostly there’s a group of us
that get together,” said Joyce, a longtime nanny from Barbados. “And
parents start gossiping. They describe what you wear.”

“We
gather together in little groups because we look out for each other,”
Joyce continued, stirring banana purée into oatmeal for the twin infant
boys being cared for by Prudence Forde, the nanny seated beside her.
With her other hand, Joyce gently rubbed the back of the boys’ sister.

"As
for the term “bench nannies,” Joyce shook her head. “I ignore it,” she
said. “Everybody’s got to sit down, and we sit on a bench.”

"Resentment
is a common reaction to many of the complaints posted on the blog, like
the use of cellphones. “Wait, what mother doesn’t talk on her phone?”
Ms. Forde asked.

"As nannies are frequently several skin tones
darker than their charges, it can be easy to identify them. Ms. Forde
mentions that nannies are often automatically blamed when a child seems
to be neglected. “When a child starts crying in the playground,” she
said, “the first thing a person will do is strut over to us and yell,
‘Who’s taking care of this child?’ before asking the other parents.”
But, Ms. Forde said, “it’s often one of theirs.”

"Another day,
several nannies sitting on the park’s benches shared some complaints
about their jobs: work hours that can extend from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.,
a pay rate in Park Slope of little more than $12 an hour, the
expectation that they also clean houses and apartments, and requests
that they work on Christmas. One nanny, from St. Lucia, recalled an
interview during which the mother, a lawyer, refused to pay her on the
books.

“‘Why is it so important to pay Social Security?’ she asked me,” the nanny said. “And this is who’s spying on me? Please.”

As part of Sightlines, a TimesSelect visual series, filmmaker Jeff Scher created a filmic homage to Grand Central Station and its commuters. It’s quite beautiful. The music is by Shay Lynch.

The are other films by Scher at the Times’. The artist’s portrait of his son, from birth to the age of four is also gorgeous. Music
composed by Sam Bisbee.

Take a minute to enjoy.

Jeff Scher is a New York-based filmmaker, who defines himself not as an animator, but as a painter working in motion. He is fascinated by the human mind’s ability to create the illusion of movement from disparate images. His montages are dizzying arrays of color, light, figures and forms that flit about like unruly thoughts, tricking the eye and revealing unexpected visual harmonies.

Scher gave up his pre-med studies for film while at Bard College in the mid-1970s. He still makes use of rotoscoping, an old animation technique in which film frames are blown up and traced individually onto animation cels. In Scher’s case, he painstakingly hand paints and shoots each frame of film, sometimes substituting clay, paper models or found materials for his paintings.

His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Academy Film Archives, Hirshhorn Museum, Pompidou Centre, Musee d’Art Moderne, Vienna Kunsthalle and the Austrian National Film Archive.

According to today’s City section, that is:

Even as New York’s hip young things invade and colonize
neighborhoods near, far and out of state, Staten Island has stayed
stubbornly uncool. It remains the forgotten borough; even the success
of the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan did not remove the island’s seemingly
impenetrable veneer of hiplessness.

Blame the former landfill.
Blame Melanie Griffith, she of the Aqua Net hair and adenoidal voice
who immortalized the stereotypical island lass in the 1988 movie
“Working Girl,” until she ousted her mean boss (Sigourney Weaver) and
lost her frizzy mullet.

But slowly that is changing. Within the
past few years, a small but growing number of hip young things have
begun staring in the face of the island’s lack of coolness and
embracing it, to the delight of local boosters. A report released in
the spring by the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy group,
recommended denser development near the ferry to attract more young
professionals and artists. But a good many are already there

I admired Muschamp’s writing and always enjoyed his personal and effusive style. On visiting Frank Gehry newly opened Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Muschamp had this to say in the New York Times. He was 59 years old and the cause of death was lung cancer.

After my first visit to the building, I went back to the hotel to
write notes. It was early evening and starting to rain. I took a break
to look out the window and saw a woman standing alone outside a bar
across the street. She was wearing a long, white dress with matching
white pumps, and she carried a pearlescent handbag. Was her date late?
Had she been stood up?

“When I looked back a bit later, she was
gone. And I asked myself, Why can’t a building capture a moment like
that? Then I realized that the reason I’d had that thought was that I’d
just come from such a building. And that the building I’d just come
from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.”

"…What twins the actress and the building in my memory is that both of
them stand for an American style of freedom. That style is voluptuous,
emotional, intuitive and exhibitionist. It is mobile, fluid, material,
mercurial, fearless, radiant and as fragile as a newborn child. It
can’t resist doing a dance with all the voices that say ‘No.’ It wants
to take up a lot of space. And when the impulse strikes, it likes to
let its dress fly up in the air.”

Continue reading HERBERT MUSCHAMP DIES: TIMES’ ARCHITECTURE CRITIC →

An obnoxious non-story by Alex Williams in the Times’ style section called "Brooklyn’s Fragile Eco System" about Brooklyn and its cache as celebrity magnet.

In that, though, lies a tale of arriviste anxiety. What if
Brooklyn’s recent cachet as the locus for what’s next is little more
than a thin and fragile crust of chic, hiding the insecurity of people
who constantly measure the social currency of their ZIP code by
Manhattan standards?

The number of trendy boutiques, bistros
and music clubs in Brooklyn may have spiked in the last five years, but
its infrastructure of cool still represents only a fraction of that
found in Manhattan. Its new identity is moored to a finite number of
shops, restaurants, luxury condominiums and, yes, celebrities. If even
one leaves, a void is created. Could the borough’s new status vanish as
quickly as it ascended?

In recent years, Brooklyn’s pool of second-tier celebrity mascots (John Turturro, Rosie Perez, Norman Mailer, Steve Buscemi) has swollen and taken on a level of movie-star glamour, thanks to recent home buyers like Jennifer Connelly and her husband, Paul Bettany, Adrian Grenier and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard.

The New York Times’ agrees with me that comments about drinking and drug use at Berkeley Carroll  (and at schools on the Upper East Side of Manhattan) were unsubstantiated and should not have been included in the article, Our Year Is the Most Competitive Year in the History of College Applications. Or Something Like That."

Last Monday I wrote: 

Did you see the City Section piece by
David Helene, a 17-year old Packer student, who lives in Cobble Hill?
Wonder what they thought of it over at Berkeley Carroll? I guess it’s
just one kid’s opinion but it seemed pretty ridiculous to me. Wonder
why the Times’  kept it in?

Well, the Times’ is now saying that the quote SHOULD NOT have been included. I kinda knew that. Here’s the Tmes’ correction or something like that.

A first-person article last Sunday, based on a transcription of an
interview with a 17-year-old who lives in Brooklyn and attends Packer
Collegiate Institute, included comments by the teenager that there were
drinking at the Berkeley Carroll School in Park Slope, and drug use at
Berkeley Carroll and at schools on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Those remarks were unsubstantiated and based in part on hearsay, and
should not have been included in the article.

Once this deal goes through there will be barely any cellphone free places in NYC. This means, you can talk on your cell just about every where except, of course, when the subway car you’re riding in in a tunnel.

Don’t you love it when the F-train goes overground at Smith and Ninth and Fourth Avenue? It’s a cacophony of cell phone rings and people talking, "Ma, I’m on my way home."  This from the New York Times:

All 277 underground stations in the subway system are to be wired for cellphone use, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced yesterday.

But riders may have to talk fast, because the subway tunnels will not be wired, out of consideration for riders who do not want to be stuck in a subway car full of chattering cellphone users. …Transit Wireless, will pay New York City Transit a minimu of 46.8 million over 10 years, the agency said. The company will also pay the full cost of building the wireless network in the underground stations…

St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights has a world-class water polo team. As the New York Times’ points out it sure doesn’t fit the profile of most top college water polo teams: It’s not in California, it’s not a military academy and it’s not in the ivy league. St. Francis is a small liberal arts college with 2,200 students. Check out the article and the sexy pictures in today’s New York Times:

St. Francis’s 15-man squad consists of three Americans, one Israeli, three Hungarians and eight Serbs, all with an eye on keeping St. Francis among the national elite. The Terriers are consistently ranked in the top 20 in Division I and made the Final Four in 2005, yet the college hardly fits the traditional mold of a water polo powerhouse.

Did you see the City Section’s piece by David Helene, a 17-year old Packer student, who lives in Cobble Hill? Wonder what they thought of it over at Berkeley Carroll? I guess it’s just one kid’s opinion but it seemed pretty ridiculous to me. Wonder why the Times’  kept it in. 

I don’t go to Park Slope much. I have friend who live there but I think the kids who go to Berkeley Carroll are kind of cocky. The partying is also way more intense there than over here. They drink a lot more than we do, and I’ve heard that the drug use may be a little more.

I loved Jake Mooney’s piece, Angst Amid the Artichokes, about the teenagers who work at C-Town on 9th Street.

Teenagers are everywhere at C-Town, which, in addition to being one of the neighborhood’s larger and better-stocked grocery stores, is a teen-centered ecosystem of raised voises, boredom and text messages.

The New York Times’ reports that a Papa John’s pizza franchise is moving in next door to Johnny’s Pizza, a fixture in Sunset Park for decades. The owner is especially upset because the original papa Johnny died a month ago.

Of all the spots the franchise could have chosen, why, he asks, did it have to be on the other side of the wall where two centurion busts stand guard above customers waiting for zeppoles or Sicilian slices?

READ MORE HERE.

In the City section today, there’s a piece about the small-town feel of Clinton Hill/Ft. Greene by Jennifer Bleyer (I did a double take there because the author of the Brooklyn blogging piece in the City section was Greg Beyer).

Architectural details like cornices, cast-iron columns, and brownstone sills and lintels have always spelled class in a city like New York. And now these small touches are being installed — or reinstalled — on a stretch of Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, a once-shabby strip that was a magnet for sailors and shipbuilders during the height of activity at the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Lots of Bloomberg news at the City Room. Even some live blogging from yesterday’s news conference. Have you checked out the Times new blog?

Read the New York Times’ Op-Ed about Atlantic Yards in the Staurday Times by novelist Jennifer Egan, who lives in Ft. Greene.

It’s the first one ever. Can you believe?

Egan, a novelist, is the author of "The Keep" and "Look at Me" and is on the advisory board of Develop Don’t Destroy. She does a great job of outlining the issues. I think her piece will make a big impression on Times’ readers.

Norman Oder, of Atlantic Yards Report, had this to say: "Some 38 months after the Atlantic Yards project was announced, the
first-ever national edition op-ed on the topic appears today in the New
York Times. (One was published in the City section in November 2005.)

Here’s an excerpt from Egan’s essay.

The developer Bruce Ratner broke ground this week on his Atlantic Yards
project in Brooklyn, despite an eminent domain suit over property he
must raze to build a basketball arena for the Nets. This “preparatory
work” is Mr. Ratner’s latest maneuver in a maddeningly effective
campaign to make his instant city — a 22-acre swarm of 16 residential
skyscrapers (and a 20,500-seat arena) that would create the densest
population swath in the United States — look and feel like a foregone
conclusion. READ MORE AT THE TIMES…

Remember that cool record store that used to be in the Times Square subway station blaring latin music during rush hour (and other times, too)? Well, after eight years, it’s coming back to the station. Just the other day I was reminiscing about that record store. I for one am glad it’s coming back. Here’s the story from the New York Times.

A lot of things have changed since 1999, when a legendary store that sold Latin music in the Times Square subway station shut down to make way for a major station renovation, but few things have changed as drastically as the music business.

So it is with a noteworthy combination of bravado, recklessness, nostalgia and faith in the future that the store, once a mecca of Latin music that drew aficionados from around the world, plans to reopen this spring after an absence of eight years.

The signs announcing the store’s revival appeared this month on a shuttered storefront inside the station, and to old customers who had never forgotten, it was like hearing a favorite song from long ago: “The return of Record Mart!” the signs trumpeted. “(That store in the subway.)”

THIS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

A plainclothes police
officer was shot while patrolling a brownstone-lined street in Brooklyn
early yesterday, the police said, and the husband of another officer
was charged with attempted murder.

 

Officer Jacqueline Melendez
Rivera, the wife of the accused man, was charged with hindering
prosecution and was suspended from duty. About 4 a.m. at Prospect Place
and Sixth Avenue in Park Slope, the Police Department said, a man
pulled up in a sport utility vehicle alongside a car carrying four
plainclothes officers. He opened fire, hitting the driver, Officer
Andrew Suarez. The officer’s partners shot back.

When the
police went looking for the gunman’s car, a white Acura with bullet
holes, they found it a little more than a mile away. Behind the wheel
was Officer Rivera, a law enforcement official said, and she told the
police that she was moving the car because her husband had parked it
illegally. Officer Rivera and her husband live less than two blocks
from the site of the shooting.

Officer Rivera, 37, and her
husband, Jose Rivera, 31, were brought in for questioning, although
detectives did not think she had been in the car during the shooting, a
law enforcement official said.

Mr. Rivera was accused of
attempted murder, defacing a firearm, criminal possession of marijuana
and other charges, the police said. Besides being charged with
hindering prosecution, Officer Rivera was accused of tampering with
evidence, possession of marijuana and obstructing governmental
administration, the police said.

Officer Suarez was in critical
but stable condition, city officials said, and the shooting left a
trail of shattered glass and bullets at Prospect and Sixth.

Officer
Suarez and three other members of the department’s anti-crime unit were
patrolling in an unmarked car when they locked eyes with people inside
the Acura, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

“Initially there was a glance exchanged, but no words were exchanged,” he said.

Mr. Kelly, who with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg visited the injured officer at New York Methodist Hospital, gave this account of what happened next:

The
Acura began tailing the unmarked car, and Officer Suarez, a policeman
for three and a half years, pulled over. The Acura then drew alongside
them, and its tinted passenger window slid down.

The Acura’s driver leaned across the passenger, and yelled, “You got a beef?”

Then
the driver pulled out a gun and fired twice, just as Officer Suarez
raised his arm in defense. A bullet pierced his underarm, just clearing
his bulletproof vest, and tore across his back before lodging beneath
his neck.

Then the Acura sped off, and the other three officers
opened fire on it, firing 13 shots in all. One of the bullets went
through the front and back windows of an unoccupied Subaru Legacy
Outback parked nearby, ricocheted upward and was later found 20 feet up
in a tree, the police said.

Bullets also pierced the Acura and shattered several of its windows, but no one inside was hit, the police said.

Officer Suarez’s colleagues then took the wheel of the police car and drove him to Methodist Hospital.

Helicopters
buzzed overhead as dozens of officers descended on the neighborhood,
taping off the site of the shooting and searching the streets for the
Acura. It was spotted at Prospect and Fourth Avenues, with Officer
Rivera driving.

Investigators also went to 33 St. Marks Avenue,
where the Acura was registered, a four-story row house near where
Officer Suarez had been shot.

Officer Rivera lives there with
her husband and three young boys, neighbors said. Mr. Rivera and
another man were seen being led from the house in handcuffs by the
police shortly before dawn yesterday, neighbors said. The identity of
the second man was not released. And another woman and three small
children were also led out, neighbors said.

The police also went
to the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Officer Rivera works,
and took her guns from her locker. Investigators did not believe they
had been used in the shooting, a law enforcement official said.

About
5 p.m. yesterday, the police said they found a 9-millimeter Ruger
handgun, with one round in its chamber, in the bushes at the fence line
in the backyard of 33 St. Marks Avenue. The gun had not been issued by
the Police Department, the police said, and it was not yet known
whether it was used in the shooting.

Yellow tape and police cars
sealed off access to Officer Rivera’s house and neighboring homes into
the evening yesterday, drawing curious stares from passers-by pushing
strollers.

Neighbors were not sure how long the Riveras had
been married but said they met about four years ago, salsa dancing at a
club. Officer Rivera, whose two oldest sons are from a previous
marriage, is pregnant with her fourth child and was recently overjoyed
to find out the baby was a girl, neighbors said.

Mr. Rivera is on
parole for first-degree assault, after having served four and a half
years for shooting someone in the leg and the chest after an argument
in Brooklyn, according to records from the State Department of
Correctional Services. More details of that shooting were not
immediately known.

Officer Rivera was taken to the 78th
Precinct, and was being questioned there along with the two men
believed to have been in the Acura, one of them her husband, the police
said.

Millie Santiago, 58, a longtime neighbor, said Officer
Rivera inherited the row house from her parents and rented out its
upper floors. “She’s a good parent, she’s a good wife,” Ms. Santiago
said. Officer Rivera is a veteran of the Persian Gulf war and has been
with the Police Department for 13 years, the police and neighbors said.

Other
neighbors said lately there had been friction on the street because
Officer Rivera parked her car outside the house in front of a fire
hydrant, with her Police Department permit displayed on the dashboard.

Officer
Suarez underwent surgery yesterday, and was expected to fully recover,
Mr. Kelly said. It was not clear whether the gunman initially knew he
was firing at an officer, a law enforcement official said. Officer
Suarez was the first New York City police officer to be shot on duty
this year, Mayor Bloomberg said.

Ann Farmer and Kate Hammer contributed reporting.