Zum Schneider closed in 2020, but is now doing a “pop up” beer hall on Sundays and Mondays at Rosarito Fish Shack. I can’t wait.
East Village Beerhall Zum Schneider is Back … and in Brooklyn
Mugs Ale House to Reopen as Meg’s Ale House
The rebirth of a mother Northside classic. Here’s hoping that this is a good thing.
How To Support Local Restaurants and Bars During The Covid Crisis
From Greenpointers, a very helpful list of Greenpoint (& Williamsburg) restaurants and bars, including who is (remotely) serving what and when, and – very important – GoFundMe links to support laid off staff. Help them out.
Food Market Coming to North #rd Street
Noticed something odd on the CB1 public hearing agenda for next week [link is to a non-searchable PDF]: three applications for the same address, 103 North 3rd Street. Odd, huh? Unless it is a food court, which it turns out it is. The North 3rd Street Food Market is apparently a thing. And it looks like Carnal, one of Smorgasburg’s regular vendors, will have a stall there. The other two applications are from “Jaja Brooklyn” and “LJ North 3 LLC”, neither of which are up on the SLA website.
Rye is Closing Next Saturday
I certainly didn’t get there enough.
Skinny Dennis
Coming soon to the former Barberry/Zipe Zape spot:
The location has operated as a bar since 1939… “These walls have been watching people drink for 70 years,” Mack rhapsodized at the bar’s opening last night. “We’re keeping them for a new generation.”
This bar also used to have a fantastic Deco bar from 1939. Unfortunately, one of the recent owners (but not these guys) tore that out.
PS – no relation.
Beer Here – September Liquor License Applications
Community Board #1 – new liquor license applications
The above is a map of the 34 new applications for liquor licenses that are on the agenda for Community Board 1 at its September 12th public hearing (click on the dots to find out the information on each application). This month’s agenda has 98 liquor license applications in total, including renewals, license changes, etc. – a particularly large number because the board hasn’t met since June (actually, the number of new licenses is not that large, considering it covers three months of applications – perhaps we have reached the alcohol saturation point?).1
1 I put this together mainly as a way to play with CartoDB (the pop-ups work a bit better if you go directly to the CartoDB map, rather than trying to click around in the portal above); all of the information is from the CB1 agenda for the September meeting – errors or inaccuracies may be my fault, may be their fault or may be the fault of the various filters and encoders the data had to go through to get this map. In other words, trust, but verify (as soon as CB1 posts the September agenda).
Also, if you are looking at a world map (rather than one of Williamsburg and Greenpoint), you’ll have to zoom in manually. Some browsers (Safari, e.g.) seem to do it automatically, others (pretty much anything else I’ve tested), not so much. Sorry.Problem seems to be solved – must have been something with CartoDB.↩
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).
Williamsburg Residents Fight Bar
A club owner whose Lower East Side hotspot features an ice cage for chugging vodka and promises of free shots if you get naked is trying to bring the party to Williamsburg – but neighbors are battling his plans… Neighbors say they’re used to bars in the neighborhood, but are spooked because of how over the top his other joint is.
Over the top doesn’t begin to describe Mehanata. And from what I hear, SLA agrees – sources there say that the Lower East Side venue has multiple liquor license violations against it.
The plan for Williamsburg Manor is for a restaurant and “radio studios”, and the owner promises that his Brooklyn outpost will be much classier than his Manhattan shit show (but fret not Williamsburg, the plans presented to CB1 included an “Ice Cage”). Not surprisingly, he made very similar promises to the community board in Manhattan:
According to a letter from Community Board 3 in Manhattan, [the owner] originally claimed Mehanata would be a restaurant with daytime workshops and studio space, but hasn’t served food since 2007.
Too bad – the food looks so appetizing.
War on Street Life
Community Board #1’s “war on brunch” has now officially became news last week, having been picked up by both WNYC and the New York Times. Credit for originating the story belongs to Aaron Short at the Brooklyn Paper. Too bad they let a catchy headline distract them from the real story (and no, it’s not about gentrification, though that’s a catchy headline too).
Sadly, these planters – civic though they may be – are
probably illegal.
The big story here is that the “war on brunch” is really a crackdown on street life. The Community Board, upset at a few bars and restaurants, has chosen to use a hatchet instead of a scalpel. Restaurants and property owners are getting summonses and warning letters about sidewalk benches, sidewalk planters and the like1. As with dining al fresco before noon on Sundays, these targets of the Community Board’s ire are actually the kinds of things that make a neighborhood more livable and more enjoyable.
There is a reason why city planners obsess over things like bench heights, and it goes all the way back to the great neighborhood advocate Jane Jacobs herself. Street life, be it seniors sitting on a bench or patrons waiting for a seat at an insanely popular restaurant, makes for better neighborhoods and better communities (or, as Holly Whyte put it, you can measure the health of a city by the vitality of its streets). Outlawing benches and planters isn’t going to make Pies ‘n’ Thighs any less popular (or any less good), though it will mean that more people – not less – are standing around waiting for a table and clogging up the sidewalk.
To be clear, all this wonderful street furniture is also illegal. But using laws against sidewalk furniture to go after a broad swath of businesses is a stop-and-frisk approach to a very specific problem. If the problem is that certain restaurants are flouting the laws about sidewalk cafes and creating an actual nuisance, go after those restaurants. If neighbors have specific complaints, the Community Board should (and traditionally has) acted as a broker, talking to the owners and the residents to work out a solution. If that doesn’t work, then use the relevant city agencies to crack down on the specific troublemaker.
In the long run, trotting out arcane, outdated blue laws is not an effective approach, if for no other reason than that it turns the target into a victim and the enforcer into a bully. The story now is not that some number of restaurant owners are breaking the law and creating a community nuisance, but rather that the Community Board, through City agencies, is using outmoded, ticky-tacky laws to bully a whole business sector (and in the process sweeping in private citizens who have rogue planters, benches and other contraband street furniture (lawns!!) in front of their houses). Ironically, the perennially bad neighbors on the nightlife scene haven’t been impacted by the crackdown, and may not be – most of their sidewalk cafes are legal, and they don’t open before noon on any day.
A nice place for seniors to sit or a public nuisance?
(Probably the latter – this bench looks to be on private
property
In other developments, Councilman Steve Levin is promising to introduce legislation to rescind the ridiculous prohibition on sidewalk eateries before noon on Sundays. Given that many of the neighborhood clergy – including Ann Kansfield of Greenpoint Reformed Church and Monsignor Calise of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel (and a member of CB1) – have gone on record saying that Sunday morning eateries are not a threat to their religious observance, this is a good thing. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail on the bigger issue of the street furniture crackdown too.
1. It would be wonderful if this was the biggest issue facing our neighborhood – have we solved all our problems and are now ready to focus on this?↩