Here’s our pal Pete on the Park Slope Food Coop and why he quit and took the fair way.

Well, count me among those who just recently left the co-op. After 3 years, I finally had enough of the Soviet-style Communism masquerading as socialism (which OTBKB commenter Michael reminded us is rooted in the philosophy: to each according to their needs, from each according to their means).

The PSFC’s “love us or get out” attitude is hardly exemplary of anything resembling cooperative. I have been a supporter of sustainable agriculture for two decades. One of my best friends was executive director of the largest activist organization in the country for sustainable agriculture and even she told me that the PSFC hard-core were notoriously known as the Co-op Nazi’s – even in those liberal circles!

And oh yeah, on Fairway, first of all, you totally DON’T need a car – the F train to Smith and 9th and the 77 bus is a quick and easy route, and with no long lines AND FREE home delivery for orders over a hundred dollars, we have saved hours over the co-op life every week, AND don’t let anyone lie to you, the prices are totally comparable to the co-op’s, in some cases significantly cheaper, and they have ever-expanding organic sections, including beautiful organic meats and chicken. By adding the two local greenmarkets in Prospect Park on Wednesday and Saturday to our bi-monthly trips to Fairway, our food-shopping life has once again become pleasurable.

The bottom line is this: like most fascist regimes, the PSFC’s dogma has ended up superceeding its original mission, which in this case was to help local, small, organic farmers stay in business and help consumers obtain healthy food. I believe in sustainable agriculture as a way of life. I’m also very busy as a psychotherapist, writer and parent of two kids. Most other serious food co-ops in the country today allow members the option to work at the co-op and pay lower prices, or not work and pay higher prices. Who does that hurt? Reall

Willie’s Dawgs makes New York Magazine’s Cheap Eats list.

351 Fifth Ave., nr. Fifth St., Park Slope, Brooklyn; 718-832-2941
You would expect to find pedigreed hot dogs made from grass-fed cattle in a place like San Francisco, where the sustainable-agriculture movement is practically organized religion. In Nathan Handwerker’s backyard, it’s a little less likely. But as it happens, Park Slope’s bright, cheerful Willie’s Dawgs is the sole local purveyor of Let’s Be Frank, the brand started by Chez Panisse’s own “meat forager.” It’s top dog on a menu of alterna-franks like the skinless “Pedigree,” the poultry dog, the tofu dog, and the carrot dog, a whole root marinated in hot-dog spices. The best of the bunch is the homegrown “Mutt,” a Karl Ehmer all-beef number that comes swaddled in a house-baked challah bun. Excellent onion rings, too.

This Corteylou Road favorite made New York Magazine’s Cheap Eats list. Props to you.

The Farm on Adderley
1108 Cortelyou Rd., nr. Stratford Rd., Ditmas Park, Brooklyn; 718-287-3101
Some restaurants are instantly embraced by their famished neighborhoods, and so it was when this casually rustic spot opened last summer in Ditmas Park, a corner of Brooklyn where the Victorian fixer-uppers attract the sort of Manhattan expats who expect to find Cowgirl Creamery’s Mt. Tam on the cheese plate and crispy tofu with sweet corn on the kids’ menu. And so they do at the Farm, where seasonal ingredients are duly worshipped in preparations like housemade fettuccine with peas and pea shoots, and bluefish with corn and okra. To the place’s credit, there is also a serene little garden, a nice long bar where the “local and organic” motto extends to some of the beer and wine, and a respectable English-muffin burger that’s overshadowed by its world-class fries.

After a day at the Siren Fest, ABL had dinner at Po. How Civilized.

Po is a Cornelia Street Italian eatery started by Mario Batali that now has a post on Smith Street.

ABL enjoyed her meal immensely. Especially the appetizers.

Read more here. She knows her restaurants and she knows Smith Street. She’s a great blogger who’s been around for a long time. I love her take on things.

Brooklyn Paper had a story about her and the photo’s by Nathanial Harpaz are on the website.

So does Gowanus Lounge.

And Gawker.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

The Oh So Feisty One has been away at summer camp for more than a week and Smartmom hasn’t received a letter.

Not one friggin’ letter.

Frankly, Smartmom is worried and a little hurt. It would not be an understatement to say that she is the throes of a curiosity-induced cardiac arrest. She wishes she could be a fly on the wall of OSFO’s open-air cabin and get a firsthand look at her 10-year-old woodswoman — mosquito bites and all.

Smartmom knows that OSFO is probably not miserable. At the orientation, the friendly camp directors said that if a camper is terribly homesick for more than a day two, there will be a phone call home.

And that’s a call you don’t want to get on your iPhone. That’s for sure.

Fortunately no call came. But neither did a delightful little missive from OSFO gushing about her adventures in the woods of Vermont. Worse, Smartmom’s friend, whose daughter is at the very same camp, already got a detailed letter from her daughter that was practically Proustian in scope.

Smartmom wanted to scream with envy.

And it’s not because OSFO doesn’t have stationery or postage stamps.

Far from it. Before she left, Smartmom and OSFO addressed well over 30 stamped postcards and envelopes to friends and family.

“I think I’m going to be bored, so I’ll probably write a lot,” OSFO told Smartmom.

Clearly, this was OSFO’s way of battling her fear of going away from home for the first time. With these hand-addressed cards in her trunk, she could sustain a connection with those she loves.

Smartmom certainly didn’t expect OSFO to use all 20 of the Ugly Doll postcards or all 10 of the cheery yellow note cards with the handy multiple choice questions.

But one lousy note card. Is that so difficult?

So it’s been over a week without contact of any kind. And Indian Brook is not one of those camps that lets the kids send e-mails or gives parents access to a hidden camera.

“Unplugged and unforgettable,” that’s the camp’s motto and it also means rural and rustic. A wilderness camping experience, Indian Brook encourages simple living.

There’s even a non-sectarian Quaker element, which means that all campers and staff participate in a Meeting for Worship that is, according to the camp’s brochure, a time to reflect, pray, enjoy the birds, think about your parents…

It all sounds pretty great, right? So why has Smartmom heard nothing?

The first few days of camp, Smartmom certainly didn’t expect to get a letter. She and Hepcat dropped off their precious girl on a Sunday in beautiful Plymouth, Vermont. She was pretty tight lipped in the car but the night before the drive she’d let her apprehensions hang out to dry.

“What happens if I get homesick?” she asked Smartmom.

“You can talk to your counselors about it. If it’s really bad you can give us a call,” Smartmom said comfortingly.

“What happens if I hate it,” OSFO asked.

“We’ll come get you,” Smartmom told her.

“You know, I never really wanted to go to camp in the first place,” OSFO was getting worked up. “I said I was interested, that doesn’t mean I wanted you to SIGN ME UP FOR SOME CAMP.”

Her anger was mounting.

“I don’t even like sleep-over dates and now you’ve got me going away for two whole weeks,” OSFO snarled.

Smartmom assured her that Indian Brook is a very special place. She lulled her to sleep reading the Parents Handbook for the umpteenth time.

Knowledge is power and it seemed to bring some modicum of comfort to her frightened girl.

Smartmom made a point of not mentioning her own Alan (“Hello Mutha, Hello Fatha”) Shermanesque experience when she went to that hippy camp in Copake, New York. It was the summer of Woodstock and on the days of the festival, all the counselors abandoned the camp for some fun and frolic.

Smartmom wrote her parents a letter-a-day full of sturm und drang.

“I hate camp! Please come get me!”

Manhattan Granny recalls the sheer panic and gastric pain she felt when she got Smartmom’s pencil scratching.

“It felt like a note put in a bottle by a desperate prisoner,” Manhattan Granny remembers.

By the time she got Smartmom on the phone, things had improved. But Manhattan Granny was still a basket case.

So maybe it’s a blessing that Smartmom hasn’t heard from OSFO. Still, Smartmom has a laundry list of questions she’d like an answer to:

Have you gotten used to the composting outhouses (knows as “kybos”)?

Has the pregnant rabbit had her babies, yet?

Do you like your counselor?

Are you missing Teen Spirit, Ducky, Diaper Diva, your dad or even your mom?

Smartmom will just have to wait to get the news. Maybe today will be the day. Or tomorrow.

Then again, OSFO will be back in just four days. Smartmom can ask her all about camp as soon as gets off the bus on West 33rd Street in Manhattan.

Smartmom can hardly wait.

I was just checking on directions for Casa Mon Amour, where we’re having today’s Brooklyn Blogade Roadshow and I couldn’t help but notice all the rave review it has gotten from Yelpers. I can’t wait for lunch today. Everyone seems to love the owner, Beatrice.

I’m still not sure which G train stop to get off on. Can anyone help?

162 Franklin Street
(between Huron St & India St)
Brooklyn, NY 11222 (718) 349-1529

UPDATED 10:40 Friday night.

A large crowd of adults and children, some dressed as wizards, are lining up outside of the Community Bookstore in Park Slope waiting for the festivities to begin. Some are sitting on lawn chairs and some are reading Harry Potter books.

Hepcat reports that David Yassky is there dressed in a blond wig. "I don’t know if he is dressed as a wizard or he is just in drag," Hepcat says.  "The horses are going back forth. The riders are dressed as vikings or construction workers, I can’t quite tell. Helmets and hoods. That sort of thing."

Hepcat got a shot of Yassky and his family, as well as dozens of others. He set up his portable photography studio in from of the bookstore. Community Bookstore owner, Catherine, is in her owl costume.

OSFO just back from sleepaway camp is fast asleep on the couch in our living room. "You’re missing quite a show Hepcat said.

The store will open at midnight to sell the book. Advance tickets are required because the store has limited capacity. The owner and her staff have been working for weeks to create a magical party atmosphere. There is much theatricality planned, including two riders on horseback.

Tonight will be a big revenue night for the Community Bookstore, and other local bookstores. The store has been struggling financially in recent years. Things were beginning to look up even before this event, when many in the community banded together to create a viable business plan that would help the store survive in the longterm.

Tonight should be a much needed windfall for the store, which was featured in an article about local Harry Potter celebrations in today’s New York Times.

Hugh Crawford (AKA No Words_Daily Pix) will be taking pictures outside of the store of wizards and muggles alike. 

This from New York 1:

A new treatment center geared to help HIV-positive homeless women opened in Downtown Brooklyn Friday.

The Housing Works facility will offer day treatment, primary care, and dental services to patients free of charge.

Organizers and patients say that the center will help to improve the lives of underprivileged New Yorkers living with HIV.
“When the team came together we said we need to provide a top-notch place where women can feel at home,” said Dr. Marcelo Venegas of Housing Works. “So we really designed it to be a place that didn’t have that institutional feel.”

“As you know, Brooklyn is the epicenter of women of color and we are here to be their provider, their oasis, their safe haven,” said Rosalie Canosa of Housing Works. “It’s incredibly important.”

Hepcat and I wandered onto the grounds of the new Hotel Le Bleu on Fourth Avenue. A security guard named Wiley came out and in a very friendly way asked us what we were doing there.

He told us that the 48-room hotel will be open in a few days. He said it will be very nice and that the rooms are large. And there’s a restaurant and bar, too, He told us that the hotel is owned by a man from India. 

But boy is it pricey. It has nightly rates from $280.00 to $359.00.

I don’t envy Wiley sitting in that dark hotel all night on security duty. Hepcat took a great picture of the hotel. Maybe he’ll run it today.

Here’s a description of the hotel, which has a great view of the new apartment building on Fourth Avenue between 4th and 5th Streets. You may even be able to see MS 51 in the distance.

Experience the art of boutique hospitality at this all-new 48-room New York hotel located in the heart of Brooklyn? Just minutes from Manhattan, a haven of peace and privacy with luxuriously appointed guest rooms with modern features demanded of, by discerning travelers and globetrotters? comes hotel le blue.The compelling stark lines of hotel le blue are the perfect counterpoise to the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple. Making a bold dramatic statement of refined elegance, world class luxury, and crowned with the trendy restaurant and bar "Vue" on the roof which offers some of New York’s finest cuisines and spectacular views.hotel le blue? is the hallmark of luxury, style and glamour where guests are pampered to an extreme with specially designed ergonomic beds, orthopedic mattresses and topped with allergen free goose down comforters and Egyptian linens, for a perfect, restful sleep.

Funny story.

I met author Rudy Delson last night at a super fun apartment-without-a-garden-garden-party on Fourth Avenue. The building does have two hibiscus plants on their front stoop.

Rudy Delson’s novel, Maynard and Jennical, is coming out in the fall and he will be the featured author at the first Brooklyn Reading Works of the new season on Thursday, September 19th at 8 p.m.

We started talking and he told me a funny Gersh Kuntzman story. And since I love Gersh Kuntzman, editor of the Brooklyn Paper, and I love a good Gersh Kuntzman story, here goes. There are three chapters.

CHAPTER ONE

Rudy Gelson writes,

I once met Gersh Kuntzman. It was years ago, at the Park Slope Food Coop. He was working at the check-out register, and he bruised my bananas. I am certain however that he doesn’t remember me.

Rudy told me last night that when he complained to Gersh that he’d bruised his bananas Gersh said, “I like bruised bananas.”

CHAPTER TWO

About a year and a half ago, Rudy noticed that Gersh was the editor of the Brooklyn Paper. He enjoyed reading Gersh’s articles but he took issue with the fact that Gersh mentioned his book, Chrismakah. frequently in the Brooklyn Paper. Rudy wrote an email to Gersh, which Gersh insisted on publishing as a letter to the editor, lambasting him for his shamless self-promotion.

Okay.

CHAPTER THREE

More recently, Gersh used a woman in a bikini photograph to illustrate a story on new books by Brooklyn authors. The article listed Maynard and Jennica. Rudy had to chuckle. Now he was the one who was being shamelessly promoted in the Brooklyn Paper. With a woman in a bikini shot, no less. He writes: “Who but Gersh could put a bikini shot into the book review section of a free neighborhood weekly? Perhaps you, Boris Kachka?”

 
Hugh Crawford (AKA No Words_Daily Pix and Hepcat) and his traveling photo studio will be
set up outside of the Community
Bookstore tonight taking his FABULOUS
portraits of Harry Potter revelers. Wizards and muggles welcome.

He was there two years ago and those unforgettable pictures will be on display, as well. Prints of  pictures can be easily ordered.

 
  See you on Seventh Avenue between Garfield and Carroll.  If you’d like to see the pictures from two years ago,  go here.

Here’s our pal Pete responding to this week’s Smartmom in the Brooklyn Paper.

Hi Louise – I just read your column in the Brooklyn Paper about not hearing from OSFO since she’s been at sleepaway camp, and all I can say is – Congratulations! If your 10-year old is successfully on her way towards healthy separation and individuation, then you have done your job as a mother. When we are at our best as parents, we are temporary custodians of those developing beings we call children, and from day one, our job is to help them to be more and more able to live without us in the world – to make their own friends, establish their own values, express their own unique gifts their way. Fear not, Louise, and remember, having just spent a week alone on Block Island yourself, blissfully separated and individuated from your kids, co-dependency is not love, or as Sting said: “If you love someone, set them free.”
Peter Loffredo

Get a sampler of the new book, Walking Brooklyn, on a Bay Ridge walk this Saturday with author and OTBKB guest blogger Adrienne Onofri.

I have not yet begun to walk.

This Saturday, July 21, at 11 a.m., I will be leading a walk in Bay Ridge that commences at the park beneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge named for naval hero John Paul Jones, famous for saying and shouting, probably “I have not yet begun to fight!”

He never made it to Brooklyn, as far as I know, but I guess a naval theme was appropriate for a park facing the entrance to New York Harbor and situated just a block from still-active Fort Hamilton.

The walk is one of several offered this weekend as part of Lighten Up Brooklyn, Borough President Marty Markowitz’s health and fitness initiative. (You gotta love the logo: a tape measure around a bloated Brooklyn Bridge.) Other walks during the weekend tour Coney Island, Hasidic Crown Heights, the Marine Park nature area and more. Go to brooklyn-usa.org for further information.

There’s no charge, and everyone—Brooklynite or otherwise—is invited to participate. For the Bay Ridge walk, we’ll start by going around John Paul Jones Park to see its various monuments (military and otherwise), then head down to the biking/walking path beside the bay. This is one of New York’s great places for a stroll. You’ve got views of that tremendous bridge, the Statue of Liberty, Manhattan’s skyscrapers, even the rides of Coney Island and you can smell the sea air!

When I was writing Walking Brooklyn last year, I had to sidestep some barriers on this path, but the restoration is now complete on the Bay Ridge portion, so walking there is even more of a pleasure.

After a fitness walk of about a mile and a half, we’ll cross over the Belt Parkway (don’t worry: a pedestrian bridge is provided) and go in and out some residential streets of Bay Ridge. Much of this part of the walk is waterfront, if not waterside. We’ll see mansions old and new and visit Brooklyn’s other botanic garden on our way to the photo-oppy 69th St. pier.

Please join us! You’ll even receive a flyer good for a discount on Walking Brooklyn at the Community Bookstore and other shops. To get to the walk’s starting point, take the R to 95th St. or, from Park Slope, the B63 bus on 5th Ave. Enter John Paul Jones Park on 4th Ave. at 101st St. or Shore Rd.

The widow of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped, tortured, and killed five years ago, filed a lawsuit against Pakistan’s largest bank in Brooklyn federal court Wednesday.

In the suit, Marianne Pearl blames the company and more then a dozen alleged terrorists for her husband’s killing.

Read more at New York 1.

My friend who runs the C is for Cupid website has great news to share about C is for Cupid, the new dating service for people whose lives have been affected by cancer. Founded by survivors, the goal is to provide a comfortable and confidential environment for members to connect with compatible singles and friends.

There is a brief mention of C is for Cupid in this week’s Newsweek
article about another dating website for people with different
medical issues.

My membership has doubled in two days. Many younger
people are signing up who have/had cancer.