Month: February 2012

Is This the End of Williamsburg Nightlife?

Short answer: no.

Metropolitan’s liquor license is resting on tenuously safe ground. The community board can only make recommendations to the State Liquor Authority — they don’t have the actual power to take away a bar’s booze.

Somewhat longer answer: Metropolitan’s liquor license is very safe (despite the fact that most of the patrons quoted in the article pretty much admit the place is a bad neighbor) – SLA has stated categorically that a liquor license is just like a driver’s license, perpetually renewable unless the license holder engages in some act of malfeasance (criminal activity, not paying (enough) excise taxes).

East River Ferry: Perks on the Horizon

02/24/2012 | Comment

Metro Focus interviews the CEO of the East River Ferry:

Ridership last week saw 1,500 riders per day. You use the word drop only in comparison to a robust level of ridership over the summer. It’s interesting how people choose to characterize the numbers. We are very impressed with how commuter ridership has grown through the winter.

Ridership is certainly down from the summer (duh), but it would be interesting to know how it compares with projections before the winter. Anecdotally, there are a lot more people riding the East River Ferry in the winter than ever rode the Water Taxi (which had fewer stops and much more limited schedule). But the East River Ferry is also caught in a bit of a catch-22 – they have reduced the number of boats in the winter months, so service is only hourly during the day, and half-hourly during parts of the morning and evening rush. That makes it much harder to just “jump on the ferry” to get somewhere.

As to the perks on the horizon – beer. You heard it here first:

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New Public School at Roberto Clemente

02/24/2012 | 2 Comments

arbor.jpg

A Child Grows in Brooklyn has details on the new public school that is opening in place of the former PS 19 Roberto Clemente school on South 3rd between Keap and Rodney. The new school will be the Brooklyn Arbor School (I think DOE was calling it PS 114) at the Roberto Clemente Campus (hopefully this means the Clemente is staying, not being phased out).

According to ACGiB, the Arbor school will be a magnet school, open to students citywide, but with a preference for students from District 14 (PS 84 is a magnet school too). Enrollment has been extended through 16 March.

City Cuts Out East W’burg, G’point From Bike Share

02/23/2012 | Comment

The Brooklyn Paper reports that the city’s proposed bike share program omits “bike kiosks east of Bushwick Avenue and McGuinness Boulevard, where an estimated 30,000 of transit-starved residents live”. Despite the typically breathless Brooklyn Paper headline, this is not news. In fact, the plan all along (as shown in the map at right) has been to limit the pilot program to lower Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn and parts of North Brooklyn.

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October 2011 map of bike-sharing phase in
Source: The Atlantic Cities

So yes, transit-starved residents of East Williamsburg and the eastern reaches of Greenpoint will not have access to bike sharing on their block until phase 2 of the program. Nor will residents of the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, the Bronx, Queens, Red Hook, Sunset Park, Crown Heights, Flatbush, the South Slope, Bushwick, East New York and one or two other neighborhoods.

It’s not clear if the phasing is driven by the vendor (Alta) or the city, but it does seem to be a factor of the initial number of bikes in the program – 10,000 bikes – and a 2009 City Planning study that determined the optimal number of bike slots per station – 24. With 10,000 bikes, there is only capacity for 600 stations.

Where’s Here’s Williamsburg?

02/23/2012 | Comment

What happened to Here’s Williamsburg? It was going great guns for a few months, but I just noticed that nothing has been posted for almost a month. (Here at Brooklyn11211, month-long gaps are not unheard of, but we don’t make any pretenses of professionalism!)

How Long Have You Lived Here?

Greg Hanlon has a lengthy and thoughtful piece on the controversy over co-locating a Success charter school in JHS 50, and last week’s hearing on the same subject. As I said a few days ago, there are strong and passionate arguments on both sides of the debate, and they deserve to be well-reported. Hanlon (as usual) does that – delving into the issues and motivations on both sides of the issue.

Occupy Baby

This is beautiful. Welcome Mila, and congratulations to Beka and Jason.

Huge Turnout Over New Williamsburg Charter School

I started to write a quick link to this Times SchoolBook article last Friday, but got distracted. Since then, there have been 26 comments posted, almost all of them thoughtful and passionate on the subject of co-locating a Success Charter school at JHS 50 on South 3rd Street. And almost of all of them opposed to the idea. What’s interesting about the comments is that they run about 10 to 1 against the co-location, which, as I started to write on Friday, is about the ratio of locals against and for the co-location at last Thursday’s DOE hearing on the issue.

The problem is, you wouldn’t know that from reading the article – and you particularly wouldn’t know it from looking at the photo accompanying the article, which shows a group of Success supporters bedecked in orange T-shirts. Nowhere does the article mention that most of the supporters were brought in by bus from Harlem and the Upper East Side1. Nowhere does the article mention the ratio of supporters to opposition (3 or 4 to 1; an order of magnitude or two higher if you just count local residents). Nowhere does the article mention that the opposition included many parents from the Northside, Greenpoint and elsewhere in the broader community (who, if they took a bus to get there, paid the MTA for the ride).

As I started to write on Friday – and as the comments to the article since then make abundantly clear – there are good arguments on both sides of this issue. But you wouldn’t know that from reading this article.

1. In the comments, a Times editor says that the paper asked a Success spokesperson about the busing in of supporters – the spokesperson “could not say how many buses Success used”. Sorry, NYT, but that is just lame.↩