Mieszko Kalita, deli owner and star of this BBC piece on Greenpoint, talks “artists”:
They’re definitely not illegal immigrants.
(Note to BBC – how about making your videos embeddable?)
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Jardin Going Rental
Jardin (née Urban Green), the development that takes up the middle of the block of North 5th/North 6th and Bedford/Berry is repurposing itself yet again, this time as luxury rentals.
For a development with three very big things in its favor (location, location and location), this project has been particularly star crossed. It went into the ground at least 5 years ago this month, spent at least two years completely stalled, and then was revived as Jardin this past summer.
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A Garden is Soon to Grow in Greenpoint
The Java Street Collaborative is planning a community garden on a vacant city-owned property on Java between West and Franklin. The catch is that this is HPD-owned property, which is already planned for a small affordable housing development: “We just want to see what we could do with it until that time,” said Stella Goodall of the Collaborative.
You can read more about the Collaborative here.
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Sewer Diving on South 6th Street
Urban explorer Steve Duncan goes spelunking in the sewer tunnels under South 5th Street west of Kent Avenue (this is where the city has been installing a new bladder system to control CSOs – not in Bushwick, as the Gothamist headline says).
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The Inferiority Complex of the Williamsburg Bridge
Scientific American, ca. 1903 (by way of Ephemeral New York):
As a matter of fact, the (Williamsburg) Bridge is an engineer’s bridge pure and simple. The eye may range from anchorage to anchorage, and from pier to finial of the tower without finding a single detail that suggests controlling motive, either in its design or fashioning other than bald utility.
Which is what makes it so great.
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From Alaska, Great Concern for Central Park
Legislators in Alaska are trying to make a point:
In the interest of preserving an already-compromised sliver of urban wilderness, state legislators are asking the federal government to take over Central Park.
State legislators in Alaska, that is…
It urges the feds to “declare Central Park to be a wilderness area and to prohibit any further improvement or development of Central Park unless authorized by an act of Congress.”
Since most “East Coast elites”, particularly the deep-pocketed ones who live on Central Park, would probably support development restrictions in the park, that point is probably going to be lost on a lot of us.1
1 Wikipedia must have been down that day, but Alaska legislators might be interested to know that Central Park is a completely man-made construct that is already a locally-designated Scenic Landmark, as well as a National Historic Landmark. No, Congress doesn’t control development in Central Park, but the park is unlikely to see any development until well after every drop of oil is sucked out of ANWR.↩
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Police Finally Reveal Embarrassing File in Cycling Death
This is so awful (and so pathetic):
Forced by a looming Freedom of Information Law deadline, on Friday the New York Police Department finally told the mother of Mathieu Lefevre what it knows about the cycling death of her son last fall.
The documents released directly contradict the initial version of events put out by police, and suggest an investigation so sloppy that the likelihood of getting justice for Lefevre’s death is scant.
Contrary to initial reports (by the police), the truck that killed Lefevre failed to signal the turn that took the cyclist’s life, and then dragged the bike itself for a couple hundred feet. Shattering the CSI myth, NYPD investigators couldn’t even take photos of the crime scene – they couldn’t get the camera to work. Crime scene evidence, including blood on the bumper of the truck, was lost, pretty much ensuring that the driver can’t be prosecuted (or, for that matter, exonerated). The video that shows all this wasn’t found until two months after the accident, and then only after the family of the victim pressured the police to do a complete investigation.
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A Q&A with a ‘Daily News’ Crime Reporter
The Awl interviews Daily News reporter Kerry Burke (a Sweetwater alum):
I deal in other people’s agony. I do. You can’t candy coat that. But if you can’t live with that, you shouldn’t be in this game. I’m not some nice person from a nice place. I’m not. I do my damndest to be a decent man and an honest reporter.
He hasn’t changed, either.