Author: Halden

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.↩

Checking in on the Wiliamsburgh Savings Bank Reno

02/16/2012 | Comment

The developer for the Williamsburgh Savings Bank renovation was at CB1 last night for a Landmarks approval, and Brownstoner has the details.

Things got a bit testy – and surreal – when the developer refused to admit that they were building an event space (it’s a museum!) or even had any plan to make money from the development. According to the Chief Financial Officer, they just haven’t worked any of that out yet.

The CFO did have the Landmarks proposal well in hand. The substance of the application to Landmarks was straightforward – so much so that it is not clear why it even requires a public review at LPC.

Bushwick BK is Back (I Hope)

02/14/2012 | 1 Comment

Bushwick BK is reincarnating itself as Bushwick News, a non-profit website to report on news, events and history at the other end of the Eastern District. To make it all work, they are trying to raise money through a Kickstarter.

What they are trying to raise – $40,000 – is ambitious, but Bushwick BK was nothing if not ambitious.I had this to say when Bushwick BK shut down last fall:

This is a loss – BushwickBK managed to be a lot more than a neighborhood blog. It had some great reporting, strong editing and a ton of content. That’s tough to maintain…

Or, as they say, “it’s real journalism”. And it was.

I hope it will be again, too. So get on over to Kickstarter and make a pledge. If you have any doubt of their seriousness, just look at the list of supporters they have organized for the swag (I’ll be on the Dereszewski/Schwartz tour myself) – this is not a spur of the moment thing (and from what little I know of the folks over there, if they say it needs $40,000, it probably needs $40,000).



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Domsey Development Site Up For Auction

Brownstoner reports that the former Domsey parking lot at South 8th and Kent is up for sale at a foreclosure auction. The property was rezoned ages ago, and development at the former used-clothing mecca started in 2008 and then stalled. $30 million, and it’s yours.