The Park Slope 100 will be rolled out on December 6th. So if you have any nominees, send them in now. This year’s list has a different feel from last year’s.

Last year’s was foundational. It had all the "obvious" choices—ZuZu’s Petals, David Yassky, the Dinnersteins, Paul Auster, Chris Altman, Debbie Almontasser, Al Di La, Pastor Meeter, Rabbi Bachman, Susan Fox, Kim Maier, Daniel McEnney, Daniel Goldstein, etc. —with some interesting "unknowns" thrown in for good measure.

Last year, I called the list a highly opinionated, inherently flawed, subjective, obviously controversial list of talented, energetic, ambitious, creative
individuals with vision in the Greater Park Slope area who reach
outward toward the larger community and the world to lead, to help, to create, to teach, to
improve, to enhance, to inform, to network, to make change.

The people chosen for last year’s list were community
activists, entrepreneurs, volunteers, spiritual leaders, publishers,
bloggers, leaders of organizations, social workers, therapists,
artists, writers,
educators, politicians, chefs and restaurant owners and whatever else
I’ve left out.

This year’s list is just as far reaching and just as interesting. To me, it feels more topical—many of the people on the list have been mentioned on OTBKB.

Last year’s list may have included a disproportionate number of people connected with education and/or parenting. Last year, there were a lot of bloggers, activists, and politicians.

When all is said and done, I don’t know how it will play out but I know it’s going to be a great list with great people and great stories.  If you have nominees please send them in ASAP.

Best of all, the Park Slope 100 now has a spiffy logo designed by Elizabeth Reagh of Good Form Design.

It’s always an honor to have Richard Grayson’s columns on OTBKB. An English and composition instructor in numerous colleges around the city, Grayson is author of "With Hitler in New York" and "I Brake for Delmore Schwartz," as well as other books.

This column is about the annual celebration of Dutch culture in New York City. He wrote me, referring to my recent column about cleaning out the basement, "Of course you’ve been ‘sweeping memories away’ but we need to hold on to some stuff, too, I hope."

Sunday was the last day of “5 Dutch Days, 5 Boroughs” – the  annual celebration of Dutch culture in New York City.  The day’s events included a morning service at the Old First Reformed Church on Carroll Street and Seventh Avenue as done in its congregation 300 years ago, using the Netherlands Liturgy of 1619, and an afternoon family exhibit at the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House in Ridgewood to show kids what life was like for young people in the early years of the city.

Four centuries ago, of course, Brooklyn was part of the great Dutch commercial world empire, but traces of Dutch Brooklyn have all but vanished in my lifetime along with the dirt roads like Mill Lane I used to walk and the wooden planks that preceded sidewalks in my little corner of what had been Nieuw Amersfoort.

When I was born, about 70 Dutch-American farmhouses stood in Brooklyn.  Today only 14 are left.

On Sunday afternoon, I was at the Lefferts Homestead for “Disappearing Dutch Brooklyn – Where Have All the Houses Gone?” — a presentation by anthropologist and archaeologist Christopher Ricciardi, who showed slides from his dig at an old house I know well, the Hendrick I. Lott House on East 36th Street, down the block from my friend Ken Falk’s house in Marine Park not far from where I grew up.

Living in this Dutch Colonial farmhouse from 1720 until 1989, members of the prominent Lott family participated in the Revolutionary War, supported abolition – freeing their slaves as early as 1801 and then hiring them as paid servants – and may have later used the house as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

In 2001 Ricciardi and his colleagues from the Brooklyn College Archaeological Research Center discovered the slave quarters, a windowless, cramped garret room roughly ten feet square.  A tiny space – a closet within a closet, its door hidden behind coat hooks that would have held a curtain of garments – may have been a way station for escaping slaves.

Ricciardi acknowledged that just as many 18th century houses claim that George Washington slept there, most pre-Civil War houses in the North claim to be a stop on the Underground Railroad.

But two different descendants of the Lott family, who didn’t know each other, both remembered the same story when given tours of the old homestead. “They said this was where they kept their runaway slaves,” Ricciardi said.

Although southern Brooklyn Dutch farmers were quite wealthy, Ricciardi noted, apparently they were not materialists like their equally rich counterparts in Manhattan and what is today brownstone Brooklyn, who had more opulent homes.

The dig proved that the Lotts lived frugally, with plain dishes, glasses and pipes and no fancy materials in the construction of their house.

The Lott House is one of four Brooklyn sites owned by the Historic House Trust of New York City, along with the Lefferts Historic House Museum (c. 1783), the Old Stone House (1699), and the oldest structure in New York City, one I can recall my first girlfriend’s mother, an East Flatbush community planning board member, fighting to save in the late 1960s: the original portion of the Pieter Classen Wyckoff House on Clarendon Road and East 58th Street, which dates from 1652.
The Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum now looks a lot better than the old dump with a caved-in roof sporting a crooked TV antenna I remember from that day in August 1970, when Mayor Lindsay presided over a ceremony marking the start of its restoration.

In a fascinating Q&A session following his presentation, Chris Ricciardi said that it’s hard to get New Yorkers interested in southern Brooklyn’s old Dutch farmhouses because they’re a bit out of the way. But, he concluded, it’s important to respect our borough’s past and preserve our common heritage.

Despite the excruciatingly painful treatments that Toby Pannone’s is receiving for the neroblastoma, a relatively rare and fierce cancer that has taken over his body, Toby is still able to enjoy the few days when he is not in the hospital. Recently he enjoyed time in Prospect Park and at the Brookyn Children’s Museum.

He and his parents, Mooki and Stephen are managing to stay strong and hopeful despite the living hell that they inhabit. Mooki’s writes, "Living with neuroblastoma is so singular, isolating and overwhelming,
that I feel like my words don’t even come close to describing what is
really going on in Toby’s life."

Recently Toby started a painful—but potentially helpful—treatment called 3F8, which is described here by Toby’s mom, Mooki on the family’s blog.

3F8 is mouse derived monoclonal antibody that is injected into the
bloodstream where it finds neuroblastoma cells, attaches to them and
then signals the patient’s own white blood cells to kill the
neuroblastoma. The white cells are boosted into “killer” cells through
daily injections of GM-CSF. With time, as Toby’s own immune system
recovers from chemo and becomes stronger, the 3F8 treatments may help
his body learn to fight tumors on its own. The aim is to give repeated
3F8s for up to two years, on a cycle of one week on, two to three weeks
off.

The main side effect of 3F8 is pain because it also attaches to a
marker on nerve cells. And the pain is excruciating. I can barely
describe it. And that’s the real reason why I haven’t been able to
write in two weeks. All I wanted to do by Friday was crawl into a dark,
quiet place, and not relive the experience by putting pain into words

The Written Nerd works at an independent bookstore in New
York City’s SoHo neighborhood and hopes to someday own a bookstore of her own.

TWN loves reading books, talking about books, and "being
where literature hits the streets." She lives in Park Slope with her ALP (Adorably Literate
Partner). She publishes these great Brooklyn Lit Life interviews. Friday, she posted an interview with Edwidge Danticat. Here’s an excerpt. Read the rest at the Written Nerd.

Why do you think Brooklyn has such a
dense population of writers? Is there something particularly literary
about Brooklyn?

Brooklyn
lacks the craziness of having to be all business all the time
publishing wise, plus it offers a community. I think that’s very
appealing to writers.

Second Avenue Sagas sent this in:

The sports bar/pool hall at 7th Ave and Park Place right at
the subway stop is roped off with police tape this morning [Saturday].

Local business owners are saying that there was a shooting in the bar late
last night/early this morning. That’s all I know

From: Second Avenue Sagas
Blogging the Subway from A to J/M/Z