Yet another coffee shop in the neighborhood – this is notable for being (I believe) the first permanent retail in the old Austin, Nichols & Co. Warehouse (184 Kent). 184 Kent has opened a couple of pop-up shops in its Kent Avenue retail spaces over the past few months, but this one is here to stay.
Pudge Knuckles Now Open
Ex-Brooklyn Bar Owner Sues Over Dumped Booze in NYPD Raid
Remember that raid on Coco66? Turns out the cops had the wrong place (but the right owner).
Street Sign Snafu Designates Drab Greenpoint Warehouse a Landmark
In addition to being ugly, the new mixed-case street signs are wrong.
(Ironically, the “drab warehouse” at the southwest corner of Greenpoint & West is part of the Greenpoint Terminal Market site, which, prior to the fire that destroyed many of the historic structures on the site in 2006, some people wanted to have designated as a landmark. I don’t think this particular warehouse would have made anyone’s “To Save” list, though.)
Coming to McGuinness Boulevard: R7 Zoning?
Seeing as this is the only block on the west side of McGuinness from Meeker Avenue to Clay Street that is not currently zoned R7, a better headline for Ms. Heather would have been: “Coming to the Rest of McGuinness Boulevard: R7A Zoning”.
(This is the only block on the west side of McGuinness that has historically been zoned for manufacturing use. The rest of the west side of McGuinness has been zoned for residential use since 1961, and was given an R7A designation in 2008, as part of the larger Greenpoint/Williamsburg Contextual Rezoning. Because rezoning the site would have required going from M to R, it could not be included in the 2008 rezoning, which left all use categories in place.)
A New Generation of Street Signs
Floating Berry
Photo: NYT
David Dunlap goes deep on the new mixed-case street signs that you see going up all over the city:
“Clearview’s [the typeface on the new sign] primary mission is to improve on the legibility of the standard alphabet used for traffic signs, known officially as the FHWA series but colloquially as Highway Gothic. …In discussing its policy, the highway agency said there were demonstrable gains in legibility when mixed-case Clearview letters appeared on a reflective surface called microprismatic sheeting.”
Safety, schmafety, I still say the mixed-case signs are ugly.