This is a multi-part series from OTBKB reader and frequent commenter: Brooklyn Beat (his bio is below):

It’s time you walked away
set me free I must move away leave you be…
time’s been good to us, my friend
wait and see how it will end
we come and go as we please…we come and go as we please…
that’s how it must be
Here in crystal chandelier, I’m home
too many days, I’ve left unstoned
if you don’t mind happiness
purple-pleasure fields in the Sun
ah, don’t you know I’m runnin’ home…don’t you know I’m runnin’ home…
to a place to you unknown?
I take great peace in your sitting there
searching for myself, I find a place there
I see the people of the world where they are and what they could be…
I can but dance behind your smile…
I can but dance behind your smile…
you were the world to me for a while
— "D.C.B.A. " by Paul Kantner, Jefferson Airplane

Wow, besides now fading"The Sopranos" finale (which my son is already
tired of hearing my digressions and speculations on), the Summer of
Love, 1967, is popping up in the media as a cultural icon of the Summer
2007.

40 years ago this summer, I was a 12 year old, the age that my
younger daughters are now, and I was an elementary school kid at Holy
Name on  Prospect Park West (or 9th avenue as it was often referred).

Music of the era made its way to my consciousness thanks to the radio
and the LPs that my older sister, then in high school at St Brendans,
brought into the house.Although the music and the culture were
exploding around me, it would still be a few years until I started
writing and pursuing publication in earnest as a student at Bishop Ford
HS and before I began to select and buy music much less dare to make
critical assessments of it..

But then, back in 1967, I was still an
elementary school brat at HNS (or, as our Windsor Terrace crowd later
referred to it in our rebellious teen years, at "The Mission"). Music
was everywhere, New York City, at least the mainstream and parts of the
city locked into the media maelstrom, was undergoing waves of change,
but Brooklyn, my Brooklyn, was still dormant.I grew up on 17th Street
between 9th and 10th avenues. I remember a young couple moving into the
basement apartment of a home across the street from us. He had the hip
look, long hair and beard, dressed for business during the week if I
recall correctly, but most noticeably, on the weekend wore jeans and
high leather boots, the first time such cool and radical fashion
probably trod these Brooklyn streets..

We referred to him simply as
"Cow Man" and I sincerely hope that we were not teasing or mean to him,
although, children being who they are, we probably were and came off as
dumb Brooklyn urchins..He lived next door to the "Stretzelmeyer"
(pronounced by us as "Stretchemeyer") home, which was a remnant of old
Brooklyn, a large Victorian house, like we live in now in Flatbush, but
it was on a large piece of land, fenced in from 17th street to Prospect
Avenue, behind a fairly high grey fence..two elderly ladies lived
there, largely out of touch with the rest of us Irish, German and
Italian working folks who had moved into the neighborhood in succeeding
waves. We would see them occasionally when a ball went over the fence
and they were patient enough to allow us into the yard to retrieve
it..I imagined the house and the sisters were from "Arsenic and Old
Lace" and I assume the house had been there from the 19th century when
Windsor Terrace was more open land, farms, etc., and the brownstones
and row houses of 17th street and beyond had simply grown up around
them.

That reminds me of another childrens’ book, about a little cabin
in the woods, that becomes a small home, and is eventually dwarfed by
the City structures and skyscrapers built around it. Years later, when
the homes was taken down and new construction was built on the site.
The home and fenced in land were easily replaced by four or five
attached homes on 17th street and an equal number around the block on
Prospect Avenue…

Tune in tomorrow for Summer in Love in Brooklyn by Brooklyn Beat.

BIO: BB resides deep in the heart of Brooklyn in Fiske Terrace with his wife and four kids (ages 12-19) and a voracious Corgi. When not up to his elbows as a manager/analyst/writer in organizational realms, BB reflects on life’s mysteries, and other issues as befits a superannuated existencialista, and attempts to give expression to them in his writing, blogging, illustration, and painting.   
 

Brownstoner has the latest on the  Park Slope Armory on 8th Avenue and 14th Street. For years, people have been talking about its transformation into a sports complex.

Part of it will remain a women’s shelter. The City recently issued a Request for Proposal to those who might be interested in running the sports center. So what’s going on?

Read more at Brownstoner.

This from New York 1:

A veteran teacher has been tapped to temporarily head the city’s first
Arabic-language public school, following the resignation of the
school’s original principal just weeks before opening.

Danielle Salzberg will temporarily head the Khalil Gibran
International Academy in Boerum Hill. The veteran teacher replaces
Debbie Almontaser, who resigned from her post last week.

Salzberg is currently a senior program officer at New Visions for
Public Schools. Salzberg is helping teachers prepare their curriculum
for the first day of school, which is September 4th.

Don’t you just love Wikipdia at times like these. Here’s the Wiki on John Jacob Astor, who was the great grandfather of Vincent Astor, who was the third husband of Brooke Astor, a great philanthropist and New York citizen, who died today at 102.

Born in Walldorf, near Heidelberg in the old Palatinate which became part of Baden during the 19th century, Germany (currently in the Rhein-Neckar district), his father was a butcher, and he learned English in London while working for his brother, George Astor, manufacturing musical instruments. Astor arrived in the United States in March 1784 just after the end of the Revolutionary War. He traded furs with Indians and then he started a fur goods shop in New York City in the late 1780s.

Astor took advantage of the Jay Treaty between Great Britain and the United States in 1794 which opened new markets in Canada and the Great Lakes region. By 1800 he had amassed almost a quarter of a million dollars, and had become one of the leading figures in the fur trade. In 1800, following the example of the “Empress of China”, the first American trading vessel to China, Astor traded furs, teas and sandalwood with Canton in China, and greatly benefited from it. The Embargo Act from Thomas Jefferson in 1807, however, disrupted his import/export business. With the permission of President Jefferson, Astor established the American Fur Company on April 6, 1808. He later formed subsidiaries: the Pacific Fur Company, and the Southwest Fur Company (in which Canadians had a part), in order to control fur trading in the Columbia River and Great Lakes area.

The Columbia River trading post at Fort Astoria (established in April 1811) was the first United States community on the Pacific coast. He financed the overland Astor Expedition in 1810-12 to reach the outpost. Members of the expedition were to discover South Pass through which hundreds of thousands settlers on the Oregon, California and Mormon trails passed through the Rocky Mountains.

His fur trading ventures were disrupted once again when the British captured his trading posts during the War of 1812, but rebounded in 1817 after the U.S. Congress passed a protectionist law that barred foreign traders from U.S. Territories. The American Fur Company once again came to dominate trading in the area around the Great Lakes. In 1822, Astor established the Astor House on Mackinac Island as headquarters for the reformed American Fur Company, making the island a metropolis of the fur trade. A lengthy description based on documents, diaries etc. was given by Washington Irving in his travelogue Astoria.

In 1802, Astor purchased what remained of a ninety-nine year lease from Aaron Burr for $62,500. At the time, Burr was serving as vice president under Thomas Jefferson and was desperately short on cash. The lease was to run until May 1, 1866. Astor began subdividing the land into nearly 250 lots and subleased them. His conditions were that the tenant could do whatever they wish with the lots for twenty-one years, after which they must renew the lease or Astor would take back the lot.

if i could live all over again, i would buy every square inch of Manhattan.
John Jacob Astor

In the 1830s, John Jacob Astor figured that the next big boom would be in the build-up of New York, which would soon emerge as one of the world’s greatest cities. Astor withdrew from the American Fur Company, as well as all his other ventures, and invested all his proceeds on buying and developing large tracts of land, focusing solely on Manhattan real estate. Foreseeing the rapid growth northward on Manhattan Island,

Astor purchased more and more land out beyond the current city limits. Astor rarely built on his land, and instead let others pay rent to use it.

After retiring from his business, Astor spent the rest of his life as a patron of culture. He supported the famous ornithologist John James Audubon, the poet/writer Edgar Allan Poe, and the presidential campaign of Henry Clay. At the time of his death in 1848, Astor was the wealthiest person in the United States, leaving an estate estimated to be worth at least 20 million dollars.

In his will, he gave orders to build the Astor Library for the New York public (later consolidated with other libraries to form New York Public Library), as well as a poorhouse in his German hometown, Walldorf. As a symbol of the earliest fortunes in New York, John Jacob Astor is mentioned in Herman Melville’s great novella “Bartleby the Scrivener”.

The great bulk of his fortune was bequeathed to his second son, William Backhouse Astor Sr., instead of his eldest son John Jacob Astor II (1791-1869).

John Jacob Astor is interred in the Trinity Churchyard Cemetery in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The famous pair of marble lions that sit by the stairs of The New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street were origially named Leo Astor and Leo Lenox, after Astor and James Lenox, who founded the library. Then they were called Lord Astor and Lady Lenox (both lions are males), before being given the names Patience and Fortitude by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia during the Great Depression.

 
From her weather tower in Coney Island, here’s the Weather by Rose at 9:00 a.m.

"Monday will be hot and humid. High in the 80’s. Tonight the temperature is going drop down to the 60’s. Tomorrow will be sunny and in the 80’s. (You’ve got a good day for flying). There were some showers early this morning; I could see some dark clouds when I woke up. But the rest of the week should be nice. But on Wednesday or Thursday, they’re saying that there’s a chance of showers. But sometimes the weatherman is wrong. They say it’s going to rain and it doesn’t do anything at all."

If it’s good enough for Seeing Green…

Stardust is probably the best of the movies I have seen with my son, most of which are formulaic (Eragon), overloaded with special effects (Transformers),
trying too hard to be hip and funny (anything by Dreamworks) or
marginally entertaining (too many to name.) I do, however, grit my
teeth and go see them for his sake.

Stardust was an extremely pleasant exception. Based on the novella of the same name by Neil Gaiman, and directed by Matthew Vaughn,
it has all the elements of the classic fantasy story… a Quest, a
likable young hero (Charlie Cox), evil witches (four of them, Michele
Pfeiffer being the most evil,) villainous characters (an airship
captain (Robert De Niro) and several unsavory brothers who vie for the
kingdom of Stormhold) and, unexpectedly, a true love story with the
unlikely female star being, indeed, a real star…a fallen one, that
is, in the shape of the beautiful, injured and cranky Claire Danes.

The Stephen Talkhouse Fellows, the Montauk Club’s
“house subcommittee for under-35’s," was out in force today on the steps of the Montauk Club doing all kinds of home improvements to the building.  These are the guys who were profiled on New York Magazine’s blog recently (and pictured left):

“Every other Thursday, the Fellows take over the club’s spectacular
second floor. Tompkins e-mails invitations to a “curated list." The crew personally unscrewed half the bulbs in the
bar area (it used to be lit like a high-school gym), wheedled the club
into replacing the ancient eggplant-colored tablecloths with crisp
white linens, and expanded the cocktail menu. Staff complaints about
the Talkhouse crew, which came bearing well-forgotten cocktail recipes
and ostentatiously exacting standards, waned with the arrival of a
demographic long unseen at the bar: young women."

Clearly, they’re bringing fresh energy to the mysterious Montauk Club, which is a popular spot for film shoots, weddings, Weight Watcher’s meetings and Gymboree.

I’ve been hearing about jazz music nights and literary readings. It’s all a win-win for Park Slope and the Montauk Club. One of the Talkhouse Fellows said that there are frequent prospective member events and hey, I wanna know about it.

My office is downstairs in the condo part of the building. I love going to work in that building. It gives me a lift every day. And I love walking out because someone is always gawking at the building, admiring it and reading the historical plaque.

Props to the guys on the stoop. The Stephen Talkhouse Fellows are my kind of guys. Shining up the bannister, restoring, improving, bringing some much-needed spirit to a very special place.

The new svelter Smartmom still has a ways to go.  Just keeping you posted, that’s all. Somebody tell Hepcat he’s supposed to notice and make complimentary noises.

This from New York 1:

Residents will be able to fill out the paperwork when the city opens a
Disaster Recovery Center tomorrow at I-S 30 on Ovington Avenue. The
center will house several agencies including Homeless Services, the Red
Cross, the State Insurance Department, and a clothing bank.

For more information, call the DOB Hotline at (212)227-4416.

The New York State Insurance Department will also be back in
Brooklyn tomorrow helping residents who want to recoup some of their
losses.

State Insurance examiners will be back at the Bay Ridge Community Service Center between 1 and 4 p.m.

"The people coming in – it’s all different questions: my homeowners
insurance, auto questions, my neighbor’s tree fell on my car. It has
been a lot of different things,” said Vincent Palma of the New York
State Insurance Department. “Some people have actually been paid
already. I met a man who bought his new car already."

Residents with insurance related questions can also call the department’s toll-free disaster hotline at 1-800-339-1759.

Bklyn Stories is sad about the imminent departure of Seventh Avenue Books. I like her blog and have become a daily reader.

The real downer is the imminent closure of 7th Avenue Books, near 2nd Street.  As the clearing house for great literature in both used and new format, the store will be closing on August 31st. 

As the Brooklyn Paper reports,
Tom Simon opened the bookstore on Seventh Avenue, between 7th and 8th
streets, six years ago . In 2002, he opened a children’s bookstore down
the street, between 2nd and 3rd streets. In 2005, after the landlord
raised the rent of the original storefront, Simon moved his entire
operation to the same block of 7th Avenue where his kids book store
sits. “I’ll tell you one thing,” said Simon, who guessed he had about
20,000 titles in stock. “If we do go out of business, we’ll offer the
best moving-out sale New York has seen in years.” Good luck to the
writer moving to Park Slope for creative inspiration.

The red-haired beauty with the fairest skin, a contagious laugh, and the brightest eyes imaginable is turning three. Hard to believe she’s three already.

But oy is she three. She’s so full of spunk and fun; a little bossy sometimes and very, very smart; she’s oh so definite about what she wants to do and what she does and doesn’t want you to do.

She and OSFO are thick as thieves. Sisterly cousins, they play and play and play. There’s no end to OSFO’s love for Ducky and visa versa. OSFO has set aside the entire day for birthday prep; filling Ducky’s pinata, getting Ducky’s balloons at Little Things, helping at Ducky’s party.

And let’s not forget Diaper Diva, who nailed the Clam Bar for its rude child-unfriendly signage and even ruder staff. She has been a mother for three years now. That’s something to celebrate, too.

Three years and the transformation is complete. Diaper Diava morphed from a non-parent living in the Slope (who was slightly annoyed by the nabe’s child centeredness) to a full-fledged leaves-her-stroller-in-the-middle-of-the-sidewalk-Park Slope mama.

At least she doesn’t have a Bugaboo.

But motherhood becomes her big time and she and her red-haired beauty are quite a team at the playground, on Seventh Avenue, at Tempo Presto, at the temple pre-school, on Third Street.

And wherever they go, people comment on Ducky’s red hair. “Look at the hair on her.” “I’d love to have hair the color of that little girl’s. ” Such gorgeous hair…”

Fiercely protective, loving, nurturing, and serious about her mothering, Diaper Diva travels with Dora the Explorer Band Aid’s, a pocketbook full of First Aid supplies, and sugar free lollipops for potty training incentives (Ducky is fully trained now). And you don’t even want to know what’s in Diaper Diva’s well-stocked red Skip Hop diaper bag.

Happy Birthday to Ducky.

And Happy Birthday to another niece of mine: the Underwater Ballerina, who is off exploring the blue Carribean sea. She turns 23 today (see post Underwater Ballerina Turns 23 below). Love to her wonderful sisters, too.

The New York Times’ reports that the Federal Highway Administration has changed the font used on highway signs from Highway Gothic to Clearview.

The Federal Highway Administration granted Clearview interim approval in 2004, meaning that individual states are free to begin using it in all their road signs. More than 20 states have already adopted the typeface, replacing existing signs one by one as old ones wear out. Some places have been quicker to make the switch — much of Route I-80 in western Pennsylvania is marked by signs in Clearview, as are the roads around Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport — but it will very likely take decades for the rest of the country to finish the roadside makeover. It is a slow, almost imperceptible process. But eventually the entire country could be looking at Clearview.

The typeface is the brainchild of Don Meeker, an environmental graphic designer, and James Montalbano, a type designer. They set out to fix a problem with a highway font, and their solution — more than a decade in the making — may end up changing a lot more than just the view from the dashboard. Less than a generation ago, fonts were for the specialist, an esoteric pursuit, what Stanley Morison, the English typographer who helped create Times New Roman in the 1930s, called “a minor technicality of civilized life.” Now, as the idea of branding has claimed a central role in American life, so, too, has the importance and understanding of type. Fonts are image, and image is modern America.

I am reprinting this story from last year about my niece, The Underwater Ballerina, who turns 23 today, the same day as Ducky. Happy Birthday UB.

Yup. The Underwater Ballerina, who at four was the flower girl at our wedding, turned 22 yesterday. And she’s a gorgeous, accomplished, and talented young woman. Interestingly, she has the same birthday as Ducky (my sister’s daughter).

The Underwater Ballerina just graduated from college and she’s gonna be a marine biologist; we always knew whatever she did, she’d be a success. She was the most adorable four-year-old on our wedding day in July 1989.

And she took her job very seriously. Our floral designer gave her a white basket full of white rose petals and told her to throw the petals up in the air with abandon. She even demonstrated.

The Underwater Ballerina walked down the aisle (while my opera singer friend sang Schumann accompanied by her pianist husband) and threw the white petals up in the air with great enthusiasm just like the flower lady had told her to do.

The crowd went wild—they loved it. And maybe they laughed, too. But our little flower girl thought she’d done something wrong and she cried and cried. She cried through the ceremony until her mother felt compelled to take her out. I remember trying to listen to the rabbi while listening to our flower girl cry.

I think she still has that white basket with the dried white petals in it; a reminder of that big day.

She cheered up later and we have pictures of her dancing with relatives and having great fun during the reception. But there are a few shots of her sad, sad face during the ceremony. We tried to explain to her that the guests were laughing with her not at her. But that’s a hard concept to explain to a four year old (even a super, super smart one like she was).

I wonder if she still has that basket in her childhood bedroom. I remember seeing it once on a high shelf.

But she’s on to bigger things now. The Underwater Ballerina is a marine scientist, who is compassionate and smart with a great sense of humor and leadership qualities up the wazoo. We always knew whatever she did she’d be a great success. And we were right

Remember a few weeks ago I mentioned that I had never eaten at Flatbush Farm and wondered if  anyone like to join me for lunch?

Well, one OTBKB reader responded and we had a lovely lunch. But not at Flatbush Farm. The place does not serve lunch except on weekends. We met at the farm anyway and admired the bar sign which is BARN with the N blacked out.

Nice.

My Lunch Date suggested Miriam on Fifth Avenue but sadly that was closed, too. We ended up at Brooklyn Fish Farm, a place I love. I told him I’d been meaning to go in there because there’s a waitress in there that worked at Two Boots for years. She’s one of the great Park Slope waitresses and I’ve been meaning to find out her name.

My Lunch Date reminded me that he makes music podcasts. He’s also the person who turned me on to Amy Rigby’s site, The Little Fugitive a site I love because I was an Amy "Diary of a Mod Housewife" Rigby an back when that CD first came out.

My Lunch Date was kind enough to make a podcast of more recent Amy Rigby tunes, as well as a a mix podcast with Rigby, Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons and many more. I told him: "We have the same taste in music."

I asked My Lunch Date to share with OTBKB readers what he’s doing and tell them how they  can get some. Here’s the info he sent me.

Like many people, I have been making mix tapes for decades.  At the turn
of the 21st century, I moved from tapes to CDs.  Whatever the medium,
the way I would go about creating the mix was the same: find an idea (a
sound or a lyrical theme) and find songs based that idea that would flow
from one to the other.

About two years ago, it occurred to me that the way to overcome the one
idea limitation of the mix was to have a break between sets of songs. 
As a former DJ (at the University of Pennsylvania’s carrier current in
the dorms station, WQHS) I knew the way to create those breaks was to DJ
the mix.  And the idea of creating  one’s own show now had a title:
podcast.  So I went out and bought a stereo microphone, hooked it up to
my computer and in November 2005 created my first podcast, Best of
2005.  I did two more podcasts in 2006, including Best of 2006.

This year, I’ve had more time to devote to my podcasts and have done
four so far.  I expect that I will have done six by the end of the year
(and there will be a  Best of 2007).

My podcasts are available to members of the Idiots Delight Digest, a
group loosely organized around Vin Scelsa’s  WFUV radio show, Idiots
Delight.  Although this group discusses music, the topics can and often
do roam.  One of the latest topics was which team’s hat will Tom Glavine
wear on his Hall of Fame Plaque (the consensus was Atlanta, even among
Mets fans).

However, I have arranged for your readers to be able to sample my latest
podcast, cleverly titled August 07, at:
http://www2.bigupload.com/download_frame.php?id_file=46416C4B

I forget who My Lunch Date, the OTBKB reader I met for lunch at Flatbush Farm except it was closed and we ended up at the wonderful Brooklyn Fish Farm, told me about this piece on Andy Bachman’s blog. We were talking about the pros and cons of technology and the way that it can speed things up but not necessarily improve the quality of life. He also mentioned a new book he said is in the window of the Community Bookstore called "The Cult of the Amateur." I’m glad I searched out Andy Bachman’s post. Here’s an excerpt from Kaddish for Blackberry. Read more here:

That pesky little creature has left me. It stopped working, like ET’s
failing inner heart, moments before we boarded the plane to Israel in
early July. (Practically a sentient being in its own right, I think it sensed that
I was moving from denial to acceptance over the death of the idea:
being available 24-7. It’s just not sustainable for a guy like me.)