Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn

Maureen Dowd at her Best: Genius in the Bottle

Here is the NYT's Maureen Dowd at her smart/nasty/cutting/funny best; www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28dowd.html

Brooklyn DA Sets Up Real Estate Crime Squad

This caught my eye. It's in today's New York Times. Real estate crimes are up in Brooklyn: This is a job for Super Real Estate Crime Fighters!  Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes has set up a 12-member unit to battle crimes like fraud and deed forgery. Who knew it was so rampant?

With an array of real estate crimes, ranging from deed forgery to mortgage fraud schemes, adding to foreclosure rates in Brooklyn neighborhoods, the borough’s district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, says the time has come for a specialized unit to investigate and prosecute them.

The need for such an office has been building, Mr. Hynes said, announcing the new unit on Friday. As foreclosure rates have sharply risen in central Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Mr. Hynes’s office, with limited resources, has been forced to turn down real estate investigations, and instead has referred victims to civil court or relied on federal prosecutors, who generally concentrate on larger schemes.

Mr. Hynes said the new 12-member unit would be financed for two years with $875,000 in federal money and would help people like Levi Latham, 75, a Brooklyn retiree whose house was, in effect, stolen by a woman who took Mr. Latham’s personal information, a prosecutor said. After executing and recording a false deed, the woman is now listed as the owner of the house.

William Kristol on a Puppy in the White House

William Kristol may be the New York Times' ultra conservative columnist (boo boo, hiss hiss) but his column on Monday, GOP Dog Days?, was good. Read this excerpt:

In other words, this was a good Democratic year, but it is still a center-right country. Conservatives and the Republican Party will have a real chance for a comeback — unless the skills of the new president turn what was primarily an anti-Bush vote into the basis for a new liberal governing era.

Those were my thoughts when, a few minutes into his victory speech, just after midnight, Obama told his daughters, “And you have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the new White House.”

I gulped.

Not out of my deep affection for dogs, fond of them though I am. But because while we’ve all known that Obama is a very skillful politician, he hasn’t until now been a particularly empathetic one. Competence plus warmth is a pretty potent combination. Suddenly visions of the two great modern realigning presidents — Franklin Roosevelt (with his Scottish terrier Fala) and Ronald Reagan (with his Cavalier King Charles spaniel Rex) — flashed before my eyes. Maybe a realignment could be coming.

Obama was, naturally, asked about the promised-but-not-yet-purchased puppy at his press conference Friday. (If one were being churlish, one might say that it was typical of a liberal to promise the dog before delivering it. A results-oriented conservative would simply have shown up with the puppy without the advance hype.)

Obama commented wryly that the canine question had “generated more interest on our Web site than just about anything.” He continued:

“We have two criteria that have to be reconciled. One is that Malia is allergic, so it has to be hypoallergenic. There are a number of breeds that are hypoallergenic. On the other hand, our preference would be to get a shelter dog, but, obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me. So — so whether we’re going to be able to balance those two things, I think, is a pressing issue on the Obama household.”

Here, in a few sentences, Obama did the following: He deepened his bond with every dog lover in America. He identified with every household that’s tried to figure out what kind of dog to get. He touched every parent with a kid allergic to pets. He showed compassion by preferring a dog from a shelter. And he demonstrated a dry and slightly politically incorrect wit by commenting that “a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.”

Not bad. It could be a tough four or eight years for conservatives

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Colson Whitehead in the Times: Finally, A Thin President

Brooklyn's Colson Whitehad, author of John Henry Days, The Intuitionist and The Colossus of New York and the upcoming Sag Harbor penned a terrific Op-Ed in yesterday's Times. Here's an excerpt:

OVER the coming days and weeks, there will be many “I never thought I’d see the day” pieces, but none of them will be more overflowing with “I never thought I’d see the day”-ness than this one. I’m black, you see, and I haven’t gained a pound since college. I skip breakfast most days, have maybe half a sandwich for lunch, and sometimes I forget to eat dinner. Just slips my mind. Yesterday morning, I woke up to a new world. America had elected a Skinny Black Guy president.

Gov Paterson Recognizes Same-Sex Marriages From Elsewhere

This from the New York Times. Read more here.

ALBANY — Gov. David A. Paterson has directed all state agencies to begin to revise their policies and regulations to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions, like Massachusetts, California and Canada.

In a directive issued on May 14, the governor’s legal counsel, David Nocenti, instructed the agencies that gay couples married elsewhere “should be afforded the same recognition as any other legally performed union.”

The revisions are most likely to involve as many as 1,300 statutes and regulations in New York governing everything from joint filing of income tax returns to transferring fishing licenses between spouses.

Hating Park Slope: In the New York Times This Sunday

Hey, that article by freelance journalist Lynn Harris, who interviewed many of us two months ago for an article about Why People Hate Park Slope originally intended for New York Magazine, is in the Style section of the Times this Sunday.

Props to Harris: she did email to say that the piece would probably be in the Times this week. The great thing about Harris is that she stays in touch with those she interviews and lets them know what's happening with the article she writes.

That's a nice journalistic habit.

The Times' piece, called Where is the Love, explores the hatred that Park Slope evokes in some:

When I moved to the neighborhood in 1994, I promise you, Manhattanites did not think about Park Slope any longer than it took them to blow off a party invitation. But today, you mention Park Slope on a blog or even in conversation and, especially if the reference involves the word “stroller,” the haters lunge like sharks at chum.

How did it come to this? Most of the above could be said of just about any other neighborhood in our tidied-up, child-rearing-friendly New York City. Doesn’t the East Village have a Whole Foods? Hasn’t the Upper West Side become Short Hills?

How did Slope Rage become a meme unto itself, even among people who won’t take the F train below East Broadway?

We must take some hatred of Park Slope with a generous dash of salt (organic, artisanal, hand-harvested). Much anti-Slope invective is stirred up in comments on blogs, which are not known for universally trenchant insight (“Puke Slope!”) or for their warm embrace of, well, anything.

The article comes complete with a photo of a mom with a stroller taken at the Green Market at Grand Army Plaza. Quoted are many familiar names, including James Bernard (one of the Park Slope 100), who founded the magazine The Source and is on the board of the new Brooklyn Prospect charter school in Park Slope:

“This whole thing sounds like white people being annoyed by and jealous of other white people, which I find kind of funny,” said James Bernard, a union organizer and a member of the local Community Board 6. “I live in the Slope. I love it. I talk about it as much as anyone else does. But I founded a charter school near Brownsville and I don’t hear anyone talking about Park Slope over there.”

Also quoted are Slopers Suleiman Osman, an assistant professor of American Studies, who is writing a book about the history of gentrification in Brooklyn. Steven Berlin Johnson of Outside.In, and Josh Grinker of the Stone Park Cafe. No she didn't use any quotes from me. 

It's an article about a strange cultural phenomenon: the demonization of a neighborhood in a city full of neighborhoods that are fun to make fun of. I guess Park Slope is the current "it neighborhood" to hate. And people love to hate. They really do. 

In a world where there is so much to be angry about, it's funny that Park Slope should absorb so much NYC rage. But hey, it's got to go somewhere.

Front Page Story in the Times about Debbie Almontaser

This morning there's a front page article in the Times, Her Dream, Brandes as a Threat, about Debbie Almontaser and her thwarted effort to be the principal of the city's first school for children of Arab descent. Here's an excerpt:

Debbie Almontaser dreamed of starting a public school like no other in New York City. Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country’s elite colleges. They would be ready, in Ms. Almontaser’s words, to become “ambassadors of peace and hope.”

Things have not gone according to plan. Only one-fifth of the 60 students at the Khalil Gibran International Academy are Arab-American. Since the school opened in Brooklyn last fall, children have been suspended for carrying weapons, repeatedly gotten into fights and taunted an Arabic teacher by calling her a “terrorist,” staff members and students said in interviews.

The academy’s troubles reach well beyond its cramped corridors in Boerum Hill. The school’s creation provoked a controversy so incendiary that Ms. Almontaser stepped down as the founding principal just weeks before classes began last September. Ms. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor’s office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda.

Who Was J.J. Byrne?

The City section has an article by Alex Mindlin about the community effort to change the name of JJ Byrne's namesake park (at Third Street and Fifth Avenue) to Washington Park. Kim Maier, director of The Old Stone House is, of course, quoted.

“It’s always ‘Who was J. J. Byrne?’ ” said Kimberly Maier, executive director of the Old Stone House, a historical center in a 17th-century farmhouse in the little park.

Like many other local residents, Ms. Maier has supported a move to strip the park of the name of Mr. Byrne, a Brooklyn borough president elected in 1926 who died in office four years later. Instead, the park would be named Washington Park, as it was in the 1880s, when it was home to the baseball team that would become the Dodgers. That name is a nod to the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, in which British and American forces fought for control of the farmhouse.

Death by Blogging

An article in the New York Times on Sunday about the hazards of blogging following the death of two bloggers.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style

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San Franbrooklyn: The Connection Between the Two Cities

In Saturday's Style section of the New York Times, there's an article about the creative connection between San Francisco and Brooklyn. The Times coined the phrase San Franbrooklyn and commissioned a really cool illustration. According to the Times, there is there is "a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area."

Richard Florida, the author of “The Rise of the Creative Class,” which argues that urban renewal is sparked by high concentrations of high-tech workers, artists, gay men and lesbians, ranked San Francisco No. 1 on his “creativity index” and New York City No. 9. Although Mr. Florida did not break out data for Brooklyn, “anecdotally it has a large concentration of creative people who have moved from Manhattan and elsewhere,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I am confident if such data existed, Brooklyn would do very well.”

He added that the populations drawn to both areas by alternative art and music scenes, and by a tolerance for diversity, were looking for a “messy urbanism, a clash of different styles that Brooklyn still retains, that the East Bay still retains.”

Other communities across the country also fit this bill, but what Brooklyn and the East Bay share is proximity to more cosmopolitan centers — Manhattan and San Francisco — where the “creative class,” many of whom are freelancers, can earn a living.

“You can make money in both cities,” Ms. Levine said. “Can you make money in Portland, Ore.? It’s a cool city, it’s got lots of hipsters, but can you make money?”

Times' Reports that Economic Downturn May Delay Atlantic Yards Project

In the New York Times today, Bruce Ratner is quoted as saying that the economy could cause major delays and changes to the Atlantic Yards Project, originally slated for completion in 2009.

The slowing economy, weighed down by a widening credit crisis, is likely to delay the signature office tower and three residential buildings at the heart of the $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, the developer said.

“It may hold up the office building,” the developer, Bruce C. Ratner, said in a recent interview. “And the bond market may slow the pace of the residential buildings.”

Mr. Ratner, chief executive of Forest City Ratner, did not specify the kinds of delays possible, but suggested that construction could be put off for years. His comments are his first public indication that the darkening economy has slowed the ambitious project, spanning 22 acres at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues

Perhaps scariest of all, if economic woes cause Ratner to change the scope of the project this could happen:

Given the current environment, some critics worry that Mr. Ratner will negotiate for deeper subsidies, reduce the amount of low- and moderate-income housing included or eventually sell off portions of the site to other developers who could use their own, less expensive designs

Daniel Goldstein, leader of Develop Don't Destroy and the only resident still in a building on the AY site is also quoted in the article:

“We need leadership in the city and the state to face the music...The project needs to be reconfigured, rethought and renegotiated. The promise was affordable housing. It’s clearly been put on the back burner, while the arena has been moved to the front burner.”

PANTONE COLOR OF THE YEAR

The New York Times reports that Blue Iris is the Pantone Color of the Year. A spokesperson for the Pantone Color Instutute told the Times: “Blue Iris brings together the dependable aspects of blue, underscored by a strong, soul-searching purple cast. Emotionally, it is anchoring and meditative with a touch of magic."

LOCAVORE PICKED AS WORD OF THE YEAR BY OXFORD DICTIONARY

This from the New York Times:

When editors at the New Oxford American Dictionary recently announced that their word of the year was “locavore,” which means someone who eats locally grown food, they also became the very definition of publicity.

In the last few weeks Ben Zimmer, an Oxford University Press dictionary editor, appeared on numerous radio shows and on a syndicated public radio program to talk about the word contest. The selection of locavore also had 25 mentions in major newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post.

“There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary,” said Erin McKean, a lexicographer at Oxford. While publishers can rely on coverage for new entries in just-published dictionaries, some reference books go for as long as a decade between revisions. “We are constantly surveilling the language to see what new words people are coming up with,” Ms. McKean said.

HOW DO YOU SPELL PARK SLOPE: 400 YELLOW UMBRELLAS

A nice piece by Jake Mooney in the City Section called, 400 Umbrellas Spell Park Slope:

The program has a certain “only in Park Slope” feel to it. The neighborhood is, of course, home to a thriving food co-op where all 10,000 or so members have to work monthly shifts, and Catherine Bohne, the umbrella program’s organizer and owner of the Community Bookstore, says residents are always helping each other out. Once, she said, she found a bag of dog food on the sidewalk with a sign that read, “Perfectly good food, only my dog just doesn’t like.”

Not that the umbrellas are solely a charitable endeavor. Although they are partly a promotional campaign, one that has drawn a swarm of reporters bearing free publicity, the social experiment is what everyone wants to talk about. And here, so far, is the verdict: As of the other day, the Community Bookstore, at least, still had a box full of umbrellas — yellow ones, along with a green foldable and a black cane-handle that had mysteriously joined their ranks.

MANY MORE BLACK AND HISPANIC FIREFIGHTER APPLICANTS

The New York Times reports that the FDNY pool of black and Hispanic job applicants has more than doubled since 2002.

This comes two months after the Justice Department sued the city charging that the firefighter written entrance exam screened out a large number of blacks and Hispanics.

Now, 30 percent of the 4,000 applicants scoring highest on this year’s exam were black or Hispanic, compared with just under 14 percent in 2002.

There were also three times as many women in this year’s top 4,000.

PARK SLOPE NANNIES TALK TO THE TIMES

Did you see the front page article in the City Section about I Saw Your Nanny, a blog that's been around for more than a year?

"What happens is that a stranger, maybe a passer-by in the playground, witnesses a scene between adult and child that looks alarming. If the child is white and the caregiver is not, as is often the case in New York, the passer-by tends to assume that the caretaker is the nanny, not the mother."

I liked the part of the piece where the nannies got a chance to express their side of the situation.

"But day to day, being the subject of such pervasive examination can feel deeply unsettling. Back at J. J. Byrne Park, where some nannies have been decried as “obnoxious” and “cliquey” in ISawYourNanny postings, emotions ranged from fatalism to indignation.

“What are you going to do?” said a Jamaican nanny named Gwen. “Life goes on.”

"By early afternoon on that summer Friday, several nannies sat chatting on the benches, a gathering that a poster on ISawYourNanny derided as “the J. J. Byrne Bench Sitters’ Club.”

“Mostly there’s a group of us that get together,” said Joyce, a longtime nanny from Barbados. “And parents start gossiping. They describe what you wear.”

“We gather together in little groups because we look out for each other,” Joyce continued, stirring banana purée into oatmeal for the twin infant boys being cared for by Prudence Forde, the nanny seated beside her. With her other hand, Joyce gently rubbed the back of the boys’ sister.

"As for the term “bench nannies,” Joyce shook her head. “I ignore it,” she said. “Everybody’s got to sit down, and we sit on a bench.”

"Resentment is a common reaction to many of the complaints posted on the blog, like the use of cellphones. “Wait, what mother doesn’t talk on her phone?” Ms. Forde asked.

"As nannies are frequently several skin tones darker than their charges, it can be easy to identify them. Ms. Forde mentions that nannies are often automatically blamed when a child seems to be neglected. “When a child starts crying in the playground,” she said, “the first thing a person will do is strut over to us and yell, ‘Who’s taking care of this child?’ before asking the other parents.” But, Ms. Forde said, “it’s often one of theirs.”

"Another day, several nannies sitting on the park’s benches shared some complaints about their jobs: work hours that can extend from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., a pay rate in Park Slope of little more than $12 an hour, the expectation that they also clean houses and apartments, and requests that they work on Christmas. One nanny, from St. Lucia, recalled an interview during which the mother, a lawyer, refused to pay her on the books.

“‘Why is it so important to pay Social Security?’ she asked me,” the nanny said. “And this is who’s spying on me? Please.”

MORNING ANIMATION: GRAND CENTRAL BY JEFF SCHER

As part of Sightlines, a TimesSelect visual series, filmmaker Jeff Scher created a filmic homage to Grand Central Station and its commuters. It's quite beautiful. The music is by Shay Lynch.

The are other films by Scher at the Times'. The artist's portrait of his son, from birth to the age of four is also gorgeous. Music composed by Sam Bisbee.

Take a minute to enjoy.

Jeff Scher is a New York-based filmmaker, who defines himself not as an animator, but as a painter working in motion. He is fascinated by the human mind's ability to create the illusion of movement from disparate images. His montages are dizzying arrays of color, light, figures and forms that flit about like unruly thoughts, tricking the eye and revealing unexpected visual harmonies.

Scher gave up his pre-med studies for film while at Bard College in the mid-1970s. He still makes use of rotoscoping, an old animation technique in which film frames are blown up and traced individually onto animation cels. In Scher's case, he painstakingly hand paints and shoots each frame of film, sometimes substituting clay, paper models or found materials for his paintings.

His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Academy Film Archives, Hirshhorn Museum, Pompidou Centre, Musee d'Art Moderne, Vienna Kunsthalle and the Austrian National Film Archive.

 

MOVE OVER WILLIAMSBURG: THE NORTH SHORE OF STATEN ISLAND IS FOR HIPSTERS

According to today's City section, that is:

Even as New York’s hip young things invade and colonize neighborhoods near, far and out of state, Staten Island has stayed stubbornly uncool. It remains the forgotten borough; even the success of the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan did not remove the island’s seemingly impenetrable veneer of hiplessness.

Blame the former landfill. Blame Melanie Griffith, she of the Aqua Net hair and adenoidal voice who immortalized the stereotypical island lass in the 1988 movie “Working Girl,” until she ousted her mean boss (Sigourney Weaver) and lost her frizzy mullet.

But slowly that is changing. Within the past few years, a small but growing number of hip young things have begun staring in the face of the island’s lack of coolness and embracing it, to the delight of local boosters. A report released in the spring by the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy group, recommended denser development near the ferry to attract more young professionals and artists. But a good many are already there

HERBERT MUSCHAMP DIES: TIMES' ARCHITECTURE CRITIC

I admired Muschamp's writing and always enjoyed his personal and effusive style. On visiting Frank Gehry newly opened Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Muschamp had this to say in the New York Times. He was 59 years old and the cause of death was lung cancer.

After my first visit to the building, I went back to the hotel to write notes. It was early evening and starting to rain. I took a break to look out the window and saw a woman standing alone outside a bar across the street. She was wearing a long, white dress with matching white pumps, and she carried a pearlescent handbag. Was her date late? Had she been stood up?

“When I looked back a bit later, she was gone. And I asked myself, Why can’t a building capture a moment like that? Then I realized that the reason I’d had that thought was that I’d just come from such a building. And that the building I’d just come from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.”

"...What twins the actress and the building in my memory is that both of them stand for an American style of freedom. That style is voluptuous, emotional, intuitive and exhibitionist. It is mobile, fluid, material, mercurial, fearless, radiant and as fragile as a newborn child. It can’t resist doing a dance with all the voices that say ‘No.’ It wants to take up a lot of space. And when the impulse strikes, it likes to let its dress fly up in the air.”

RT

SUNDAY STYLE SECTION: BROOKLYN AND ITS CELEBS

An obnoxious non-story by Alex Williams in the Times' style section called "Brooklyn's Fragile Eco System" about Brooklyn and its cache as celebrity magnet.

In that, though, lies a tale of arriviste anxiety. What if Brooklyn’s recent cachet as the locus for what’s next is little more than a thin and fragile crust of chic, hiding the insecurity of people who constantly measure the social currency of their ZIP code by Manhattan standards?

The number of trendy boutiques, bistros and music clubs in Brooklyn may have spiked in the last five years, but its infrastructure of cool still represents only a fraction of that found in Manhattan. Its new identity is moored to a finite number of shops, restaurants, luxury condominiums and, yes, celebrities. If even one leaves, a void is created. Could the borough’s new status vanish as quickly as it ascended?

In recent years, Brooklyn’s pool of second-tier celebrity mascots (John Turturro, Rosie Perez, Norman Mailer, Steve Buscemi) has swollen and taken on a level of movie-star glamour, thanks to recent home buyers like Jennifer Connelly and her husband, Paul Bettany, Adrian Grenier and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard.

TIMES SAYS QUOTES ABOUT BERKELEY CARROLL WERE UNSUBSTANIATED AND SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN INCLUDED IN CITY SECTION ARTICLE

The New York Times' agrees with me that comments about drinking and drug use at Berkeley Carroll  (and at schools on the Upper East Side of Manhattan) were unsubstantiated and should not have been included in the article, Our Year Is the Most Competitive Year in the History of College Applications. Or Something Like That."

Last Monday I wrote: 

Did you see the City Section piece by David Helene, a 17-year old Packer student, who lives in Cobble Hill? Wonder what they thought of it over at Berkeley Carroll? I guess it's just one kid's opinion but it seemed pretty ridiculous to me. Wonder why the Times'  kept it in?

Well, the Times' is now saying that the quote SHOULD NOT have been included. I kinda knew that. Here's the Tmes' correction or something like that.

A first-person article last Sunday, based on a transcription of an interview with a 17-year-old who lives in Brooklyn and attends Packer Collegiate Institute, included comments by the teenager that there were drinking at the Berkeley Carroll School in Park Slope, and drug use at Berkeley Carroll and at schools on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Those remarks were unsubstantiated and based in part on hearsay, and should not have been included in the article.

MTA MAKES DEAL FOR CELL PHONES IN SUBWAY STATIONS

Once this deal goes through there will be barely any cellphone free places in NYC. This means, you can talk on your cell just about every where except, of course, when the subway car you're riding in in a tunnel.

Don't you love it when the F-train goes overground at Smith and Ninth and Fourth Avenue? It's a cacophony of cell phone rings and people talking, "Ma, I'm on my way home."  This from the New York Times:

All 277 underground stations in the subway system are to be wired for cellphone use, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced yesterday.

But riders may have to talk fast, because the subway tunnels will not be wired, out of consideration for riders who do not want to be stuck in a subway car full of chattering cellphone users. ...Transit Wireless, will pay New York City Transit a minimu of 46.8 million over 10 years, the agency said. The company will also pay the full cost of building the wireless network in the underground stations...

WATER POLO AT ST. FRANCIS IN THE TIMES'

St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights has a world-class water polo team. As the New York Times' points out it sure doesn't fit the profile of most top college water polo teams: It's not in California, it's not a military academy and it's not in the ivy league. St. Francis is a small liberal arts college with 2,200 students. Check out the article and the sexy pictures in today's New York Times:

St. Francis’s 15-man squad consists of three Americans, one Israeli, three Hungarians and eight Serbs, all with an eye on keeping St. Francis among the national elite. The Terriers are consistently ranked in the top 20 in Division I and made the Final Four in 2005, yet the college hardly fits the traditional mold of a water polo powerhouse.

AT SEVENTEEN: NEW YORK TIMES ON TEENS AND A PARK SLOPE PRIVATE SCHOOL

Did you see the City Section's piece by David Helene, a 17-year old Packer student, who lives in Cobble Hill? Wonder what they thought of it over at Berkeley Carroll? I guess it's just one kid's opinion but it seemed pretty ridiculous to me. Wonder why the Times'  kept it in. 

I don't go to Park Slope much. I have friend who live there but I think the kids who go to Berkeley Carroll are kind of cocky. The partying is also way more intense there than over here. They drink a lot more than we do, and I've heard that the drug use may be a little more.

I loved Jake Mooney's piece, Angst Amid the Artichokes, about the teenagers who work at C-Town on 9th Street.

Teenagers are everywhere at C-Town, which, in addition to being one of the neighborhood's larger and better-stocked grocery stores, is a teen-centered ecosystem of raised voises, boredom and text messages.

SUNSET PARK'S JOHNNY'S PIZZA FIGHTS PAPA JOHN

The New York Times' reports that a Papa John's pizza franchise is moving in next door to Johnny's Pizza, a fixture in Sunset Park for decades. The owner is especially upset because the original papa Johnny died a month ago.

Of all the spots the franchise could have chosen, why, he asks, did it have to be on the other side of the wall where two centurion busts stand guard above customers waiting for zeppoles or Sicilian slices?

READ MORE HERE.

TODAY IN THE CITY: NICE ARTICLE ABOUT CLINTON HILL/FORT GREENE

In the City section today, there's a piece about the small-town feel of Clinton Hill/Ft. Greene by Jennifer Bleyer (I did a double take there because the author of the Brooklyn blogging piece in the City section was Greg Beyer).

Architectural details like cornices, cast-iron columns, and brownstone sills and lintels have always spelled class in a city like New York. And now these small touches are being installed — or reinstalled — on a stretch of Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, a once-shabby strip that was a magnet for sailors and shipbuilders during the height of activity at the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard.

TODAY AT THE CITY ROOM: BLOOMIE, BLOOMIE, BLOOMIE

Lots of Bloomberg news at the City Room. Even some live blogging from yesterday's news conference. Have you checked out the Times new blog?

ATLANTIC YARDS OP-ED, FINALLY

Read the New York Times' Op-Ed about Atlantic Yards in the Staurday Times by novelist Jennifer Egan, who lives in Ft. Greene.

It's the first one ever. Can you believe?

Egan, a novelist, is the author of "The Keep" and "Look at Me" and is on the advisory board of Develop Don't Destroy. She does a great job of outlining the issues. I think her piece will make a big impression on Times' readers.

Norman Oder, of Atlantic Yards Report, had this to say: "Some 38 months after the Atlantic Yards project was announced, the first-ever national edition op-ed on the topic appears today in the New York Times. (One was published in the City section in November 2005.)

Here's an excerpt from Egan's essay.

The developer Bruce Ratner broke ground this week on his Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, despite an eminent domain suit over property he must raze to build a basketball arena for the Nets. This “preparatory work” is Mr. Ratner’s latest maneuver in a maddeningly effective campaign to make his instant city — a 22-acre swarm of 16 residential skyscrapers (and a 20,500-seat arena) that would create the densest population swath in the United States — look and feel like a foregone conclusion. READ MORE AT THE TIMES...

RECORD MART IN TIMES SQAURE STATION COMING BACK

Remember that cool record store that used to be in the Times Square subway station blaring latin music during rush hour (and other times, too)? Well, after eight years, it's coming back to the station. Just the other day I was reminiscing about that record store. I for one am glad it's coming back. Here's the story from the New York Times.

A lot of things have changed since 1999, when a legendary store that sold Latin music in the Times Square subway station shut down to make way for a major station renovation, but few things have changed as drastically as the music business.

So it is with a noteworthy combination of bravado, recklessness, nostalgia and faith in the future that the store, once a mecca of Latin music that drew aficionados from around the world, plans to reopen this spring after an absence of eight years.

The signs announcing the store’s revival appeared this month on a shuttered storefront inside the station, and to old customers who had never forgotten, it was like hearing a favorite song from long ago: “The return of Record Mart!” the signs trumpeted. “(That store in the subway.)”

PLAINCLOTHES POLICE OFFICER SHOT IN PARK SLOPE: HUSBAND OF ANOTHER OFFICER CHARGED

THIS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

A plainclothes police officer was shot while patrolling a brownstone-lined street in Brooklyn early yesterday, the police said, and the husband of another officer was charged with attempted murder.

 

Officer Jacqueline Melendez Rivera, the wife of the accused man, was charged with hindering prosecution and was suspended from duty. About 4 a.m. at Prospect Place and Sixth Avenue in Park Slope, the Police Department said, a man pulled up in a sport utility vehicle alongside a car carrying four plainclothes officers. He opened fire, hitting the driver, Officer Andrew Suarez. The officer’s partners shot back.

When the police went looking for the gunman’s car, a white Acura with bullet holes, they found it a little more than a mile away. Behind the wheel was Officer Rivera, a law enforcement official said, and she told the police that she was moving the car because her husband had parked it illegally. Officer Rivera and her husband live less than two blocks from the site of the shooting.

Officer Rivera, 37, and her husband, Jose Rivera, 31, were brought in for questioning, although detectives did not think she had been in the car during the shooting, a law enforcement official said.

Mr. Rivera was accused of attempted murder, defacing a firearm, criminal possession of marijuana and other charges, the police said. Besides being charged with hindering prosecution, Officer Rivera was accused of tampering with evidence, possession of marijuana and obstructing governmental administration, the police said.

Officer Suarez was in critical but stable condition, city officials said, and the shooting left a trail of shattered glass and bullets at Prospect and Sixth.

Officer Suarez and three other members of the department’s anti-crime unit were patrolling in an unmarked car when they locked eyes with people inside the Acura, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

“Initially there was a glance exchanged, but no words were exchanged,” he said.

Mr. Kelly, who with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg visited the injured officer at New York Methodist Hospital, gave this account of what happened next:

The Acura began tailing the unmarked car, and Officer Suarez, a policeman for three and a half years, pulled over. The Acura then drew alongside them, and its tinted passenger window slid down.

The Acura’s driver leaned across the passenger, and yelled, “You got a beef?”

Then the driver pulled out a gun and fired twice, just as Officer Suarez raised his arm in defense. A bullet pierced his underarm, just clearing his bulletproof vest, and tore across his back before lodging beneath his neck.

Then the Acura sped off, and the other three officers opened fire on it, firing 13 shots in all. One of the bullets went through the front and back windows of an unoccupied Subaru Legacy Outback parked nearby, ricocheted upward and was later found 20 feet up in a tree, the police said.

Bullets also pierced the Acura and shattered several of its windows, but no one inside was hit, the police said.

Officer Suarez’s colleagues then took the wheel of the police car and drove him to Methodist Hospital.

Helicopters buzzed overhead as dozens of officers descended on the neighborhood, taping off the site of the shooting and searching the streets for the Acura. It was spotted at Prospect and Fourth Avenues, with Officer Rivera driving.

Investigators also went to 33 St. Marks Avenue, where the Acura was registered, a four-story row house near where Officer Suarez had been shot.

Officer Rivera lives there with her husband and three young boys, neighbors said. Mr. Rivera and another man were seen being led from the house in handcuffs by the police shortly before dawn yesterday, neighbors said. The identity of the second man was not released. And another woman and three small children were also led out, neighbors said.

The police also went to the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Officer Rivera works, and took her guns from her locker. Investigators did not believe they had been used in the shooting, a law enforcement official said.

About 5 p.m. yesterday, the police said they found a 9-millimeter Ruger handgun, with one round in its chamber, in the bushes at the fence line in the backyard of 33 St. Marks Avenue. The gun had not been issued by the Police Department, the police said, and it was not yet known whether it was used in the shooting.

Yellow tape and police cars sealed off access to Officer Rivera’s house and neighboring homes into the evening yesterday, drawing curious stares from passers-by pushing strollers.

Neighbors were not sure how long the Riveras had been married but said they met about four years ago, salsa dancing at a club. Officer Rivera, whose two oldest sons are from a previous marriage, is pregnant with her fourth child and was recently overjoyed to find out the baby was a girl, neighbors said.

Mr. Rivera is on parole for first-degree assault, after having served four and a half years for shooting someone in the leg and the chest after an argument in Brooklyn, according to records from the State Department of Correctional Services. More details of that shooting were not immediately known.

Officer Rivera was taken to the 78th Precinct, and was being questioned there along with the two men believed to have been in the Acura, one of them her husband, the police said.

Millie Santiago, 58, a longtime neighbor, said Officer Rivera inherited the row house from her parents and rented out its upper floors. “She’s a good parent, she’s a good wife,” Ms. Santiago said. Officer Rivera is a veteran of the Persian Gulf war and has been with the Police Department for 13 years, the police and neighbors said.

Other neighbors said lately there had been friction on the street because Officer Rivera parked her car outside the house in front of a fire hydrant, with her Police Department permit displayed on the dashboard.

Officer Suarez underwent surgery yesterday, and was expected to fully recover, Mr. Kelly said. It was not clear whether the gunman initially knew he was firing at an officer, a law enforcement official said. Officer Suarez was the first New York City police officer to be shot on duty this year, Mayor Bloomberg said.

Ann Farmer and Kate Hammer contributed reporting.

 

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MAJOR CHIP BREAKTHROUGH AT INTEL

This excerpt from the New York Times:

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has overhauled the basic building block of the information age, paving the way for a new generation of faster and more energy-efficient processors

Mark Bohr, an Intel physicist who led the research, holds a 45-nanometer wafer using new metal alloys that led the insulation advance.

Company researchers said the advance represented the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago.  

The microprocessor chips, which Intel plans to begin making in the second half of this year, are designed for computers but they could also have applications in consumer devices. Their combination of processing power and energy efficiency could make it possible, for example, for cellphones to play video at length — a demanding digital task — with less battery drain...

FORD DIDN'T SAY DROP DEAD (BUT WE KNEW THAT)

I remember the headline very well. During the fiscal crisis in the mid-1970's, it was one of the great Daily News headlines. Ford to City: Drop Dead.

Back then we knew Ford didn't actually say, "Drop Dead." But the art of the headline is such that liberties can be taken. The headline did, however, express the essence of what Ford was saying.

And it really resonated with New Yorkers at that time.

The Times' reports today that many think that Ford actually said those infamous lines and it cost him the election in New York (Jimmy Carter carried New York State by a slim margin).

Here are the facts: On Oct. 29, 1975, Ford gave a speech denying federal assistance to spare New York from bankruptcy. The front page of The Daily News the next day read: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

Those were tough financial times for New York City. The city was broke and Ford's reaction seem to epitomize a general feeling that nobody cared about New York City anymore.

Ford apparently resented the way that the headline became a stand-in for what he'd actually said. “It more than annoyed me because it wasn’t accurate,” he recalled years later. “It was very unfair.”

According to the Times' "Ford's treasury secretary, William Simon, warned that bailing out NYC would amount to nationalizing municipal debt and rewarding local officials who lacked the will to stanch the inevitable hemorrhaging inflicted by bankrupt liberalism. (The investment banker Felix G. Rohatyn, recruited by Mr. Carey to rescue the city, would liken default to “someone stepping into a tepid bath and slashing his wrists — you might not feel yourself dying, but that’s what would happen”)."

The following demands were made to city officials: raise transit fares, abolish rent control, scrap free tuition at the City University. "This prompted Victor Gotbaum, the municipal labor leader, to complain that Mr. Simon barely believed in government at all, except for police and fire protection, “and he’s not sure about fire.”  writes the Times.

THE NEWLY ELECTED: FROM THE NY TIMES

The newly elected officials: from left, Eric Adams, 46; Hakeem Jeffries, 36; Darlene Mealy, 42; Yvette D. Clarke, 42; and Karim Camara, 35. Photo by Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times.

Brooklyn Record thoughtfully ran this picture and link to the story in the New York Times about the new generation of black politicians in Brooklyn.

In case holiday festivities kept you away from the Sunday Times, we wanted to share this story about the new, post-civil rights generation of black politicians in Brooklyn...

Continue reading "Politics in Central Brooklyn"

BELOVED PARK SLOPE BARTENDER DIES

This from the New York Times:

One of those New York City bar guides prints helpful little symbols to describe each spot, and beside the entry for O’Connor’s in Park Slope, there is a silhouette of a man diving into the water.

A dive bar. Patrick O’Connor, the owner, hated that label. He didn’t stand here all day, every day, running a cheap dump. And by the way, when his was the only place around for blocks and blocks, when the drug dealers outside outnumbered the old men on the stools, he didn’t hear anybody complaining.

“We don’t do much here,” said Mr. O’Connor’s son Joseph, 42, sitting at the bar’s dark wood. “What you do, you do well. Here, you get a good drink in a clean glass at a reasonable price. He hated the word ‘dive.’ ”

A good drink: Patrick kept the liquor lined neatly behind the bar. On the way out the door after closing time, he would dump fresh ice on the bottles of beer. Nothing colder on a hot day. He always used a shot glass to make drinks, so the customer knew just what he was getting. And on Sunday, it is worth the trip just to watch the 78-year-old bartender, Charlie Campbell of Ireland, make a bloody mary. His back ramrod-straight, he pumps the tumbler out and down, out and down, looking like Jack La Lanne with one of his health juices.

     

A reasonable price: Patrick once told his son, “Joe, I raised the price a nickel, and I took 50 cents of abuse.” The highest amount on the ancient cash register, still in use, is on a button marked $3. That’s what most everything costs.

Clean glasses: perhaps the most important part to Patrick O’Connor. “This place was like his garden,” said Kevin Kash, 38, a bartender. “He’d sit here and wash the glasses the way you’d bathe a child. He had newspaper spread all over the bar. He’d wash one and look at it, wash it, look at it.”

Patrick was born on Nov. 13, 1932, in Galway, and was a baby when the family moved to Brooklyn. His father, Dominick O’Connor, opened O’Connor’s Bar and Grill on Fifth Avenue, on a trolley line just off Flatbush Avenue, in 1933. The grill part was dubious. People came to drink. Patrick began working there as a boy, cleaning the spittoons on either side of the long bar, and later took the place over.

He changed next to nothing. The room snuffs out sunlight and replaces it with either abject gloominess and despair or a cozy, warm embrace, depending on how you feel about dark bars. That big moose’s head mounted on the wall? Patrick said it was the last moose in Ireland, and that his father shot it. Patrick said a lot of things.

“They tell you, never talk politics or religion in a bar,” said Mr. Kash. “Well, he thought politics was one of the only things worth talking about.” He had a saying, when he left for the day: “Keep smiling.”

He survived the hard times in the 1970s and into the ’80s in this way, talking and shining glasses and pouring honest shots of rye. He worked all night and into the morning, closing at 4 a.m. He could not afford a porter to clean the place, so he did it himself. He preferred to leave after sunup anyway, both for his safety and for the bar’s. He could not afford a break-in.

“He was like a farmer,” said Bart DeCoursy, 34, who used to tend bar at O’Connor’s. “A city farmer. It really was like a day-in, day-out thing. This was his.”

Patrick had six children. He and their mother divorced. “We had an absentee father,” Joe said. “He was killing himself. There was no money here. He’d come home and have a couple sandwiches and a couple cans of beer and go to bed.”

Joe took the day shifts at the bar with the old-man regulars. “They were depressing, depressing,” he said. “After 8 or 10 hours, you’d want to hang yourself. But when he came in at 6, the whole atmosphere changed. He lit the place up.”

Then the neighborhood came back. Patrick said he always knew it would. "He was right," Joe said. "He paid the price, but he was right."

Suddenly, it was not unusual to enter O’Connor’s and see something unfathomable a few years earlier: young customers in their 20s and 30s, and lots of them. Drawn to the jukebox, generally regarded as top notch, and the drink prices, the new face of Park Slope — generally smooth-skinned and white — began to outnumber the old men.

The cancer came about five years ago, starting in Patrick’s lungs. “Typical Irish,” Joe said. “He waited to go to the doctor. He thought he could take care of it himself.” He kept working. Patrick O’Connor died Oct. 8, a few weeks after walking out of his bar for the last time. He was 73.

His son gathered a few dozen of the regulars at the bar last week, poured Irish whiskey for everyone, and gave a toast: “He believed even the bad times were always a good time for good friends and good customers.”

Try to find a bar owner in the city today who spends every day behind the bar. It is easier to find a moose in Ireland. With Patrick gone, O’Connor’s cut its hours, opening at 5 p.m. on weekdays. Few even noticed. Most of the old regulars are gone, too. The prevailing belief at last week’s gathering was that wherever they were, they were all together, with plenty of clean glasses that would not stay clean all night.

“He’d say, ‘If I could have anything,’ ” Mr. Kash said, “ ‘I’d have a little tavern on the side of the road, and be a friend to all men.’ ”

PATTI SMITH BIDS FAREWELL TO CBGBs

PATTI SMITH was one of the first musicians to play at CBGB in the 1970’s.

Last night, she performed there for the last time. It was the club's final concert before it moves to Las Vegas for its after life as a Las Vegas attraction.

“I’m sentimental,” she told the New York Times and she stood on Bowery and pointed an antique Polaroid toward the club. More story at the New York Times.

DISGRACE: 600,000 CIVILIAN DEATHS IN IRAQ

A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war. This from the New York Times:

This is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a large margin of error.

The new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.

GIFT FOR THE GIFTED

Plans were announced yesterday by NYC education officials to standardize admissions to programs for gifted students by requiring applicants to take a reasoning test and to be assessed by teachers using a scale of classroom performance. This from the New York Times:

The plan is the latest step in an effort to bring order to a hodgepodge of some 137 programs citywide with varying admissions practices that critics have said allowed for favoritism and discrimination.

The test, the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, is published by Harcourt Assessment of San Antonio. The assessment of classroom performance is called the Gifted Rating Scales, a measurement system also published by Harcourt.

The new admissions standards apply to programs for gifted children in prekindergarten through second grade. The application process for the 2007-8 year will begin next month. In elementary schools citywide, there about 22,000 children in gifted programs.

The test, known as theOlsat, is widely used by school districts nationally. It has four components — verbal comprehension; verbal reasoning; figural reasoning, which measures nonverbal skills using pictograms; and quantitative reasoning. Students receive a total score and subscores.

The Gifted Rating Scales, or G.R.S., measures ability in six areas: intellectual, academic, motivational, creative, leadership and artistic talent. City education officials said that Harcourt had proposed that schools give two-thirds weight to the test and one-third to the ratings in admissions decisions, but that the details remained to be worked out.

Dona Matthews, the director of the Center for Gifted Studies and Education at Hunter College, called the Olsat “a good, tried and true test.”

“It has been around for a long time and has solid reliability and validity,” she said, “and it is tied to school success.”

But while she praised the city’s Education Department for using multiple criteria for admissions, Ms. Matthews said she had some reservations about the G.R.S. because of the possibility of inconsistency.

“Teachers vary tremendously in how good they are in making this sort of assessment,” she said. “A lot of highly gifted kids are not teacher pleasers. Teachers don’t like them, and they don’t necessarily give them good ratings on scales like that.”

Ms. Matthews said she was especially troubled by Harcourt’s proposal to assign a set percentage weight to the ratings. Instead, she urged the city to use a sort of sliding scale. A student scoring, say, above the 98th percentile on the test might gain admission to a program while those between the 90th and 98th percentiles would be judged further on their ratings.

City education officials said the new admissions process would have controls built in so that any large discrepancy between the test score and the classroom rating would generate additional examination.

The officials also said that Harcourt, as part of a five-year $5.3 million contract, would provide training for educators.

Officials also said that city translators would make the test available in Spanish, Urdu, Haitian Creole, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Bengali and Korean.

NORTH BROOKLYN IS COFFEE KING SEZ TIMES

Williamsburg coffee joints: Cafe Grumpy, Gimmel, the Oslo Coffee Company deemed best by New York Times' article. Comments?

Drinks at these shops are in a style that took root in the 1990’s in Seattle cafes like Espresso Vivace Roasteria and Hine’s Public Market. While the cafes thrived in the Northwest, New York was seen as a backwater among coffee geeks, a label proudly adopted by the scene’s premier Web site, www.coffeegeek.com.

Ninth Street Espresso in the East Village earned the first ripple of recognition for New York’s coffee scene when it opened in 2000. Since then a handful of other top-flight shops have opened, including three in northwestern Brooklyn: Gimme!; the Oslo Coffee Company, also in Williamsburg; and, most recently, Café Grumpy. Oslo opened a second Williamsburg branch last month; Café Grumpy is building a second location in Manhattan, in Chelsea. Baristas like Dan Griffin, who recently left the celebrated coffee spot Albino Press in Portland, Ore., will be setting up shop soon in the West Village.

SANITATION WORKER/HERO KILLED

This sad story from Crown Heights. A sanitation worker who caught a 4-year-old girl last year as she was thrown to safety from a burning building was shot in the head and killed early yesterday on a Brooklyn street, the police said. This is from the NY Times. ( John Marshall Mantel took the picture of Allen's shoes for the New York Times).

Damon Allen, 33, was once again trying to help others, the police and witnesses said, urging them to take cover from the crossfire of a gun battle that erupted around 2 a.m. in Crown Heights.

In homes and on streets across the neighborhood, thousands of revelers, some in costume, some playing steel drums, were celebrating J’ouvert, a celebration held every year on the eve of the West Indian American Day Carnival Parade.

“Nearly one year ago, Damon Allen was the city’s hero for saving the life of a little girl,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said to reporters at the parade yesterday. “Today he lies dead, the victim of an apparent random shooting.”

ATHLETES FOOT? COMMUNAL YOGA MATS MAY BE THE CULPRIT

Maybe yoga isn't so great after all. This from the New York Times:

GREG E. COHEN, a podiatrist at Long Island College Hospital, hears the same story a lot: women complaining about a flaky red bump or a persistent itchy patch on a foot. By the time he sees them, they’re embarrassed and horrified. A few years ago, Dr. Cohen, who also has a private practice in Brooklyn Heights, didn’t know what to make of it, but these days he doesn’t blink an eye.

“The first thing I ask is, ‘Do you do yoga?’ ” he said. As often as not, the answer is a resounding “yes.”

In the last two years, Dr. Cohen said, he has seen a 50 percent spike in patients with athlete’s foot and plantar warts. The likely culprit? Unclean exercise mats, he said.

Gyms have long been hothouses for unwanted viruses, fungi and bacteria, a result of shared equipment, excessive sweat and moisture in locker rooms. Many facilities provide disinfectant so clients can wipe down machinery, but they are often less diligent when it comes to exercise mats. It’s common to see staff members clean a stationary bike. It’s rare to see them disinfect a mat.

This is starting to worry many yoga practitioners who go barefoot on high-traffic mats. Half a dozen kinds of yoga-mat wipes are now sold nationwide, and new products like hand and foot mitts, to protect serial mat borrowers, have hit the market.

PARENTS TO SUE OVER CELL PHONE BAN

City parents are not taking the newly enacted cell phone ban sitting down. A citywide organization of parent association leaders plans to sue the city’s Department of Education to overturn a ban on students carrying cellphones in public schools. They are planning to file a lawsuit today in Manhattan, which will argue that the ban is unsafe because it makes it tough for parents to stay in touch with their children before and after school. Parents are angry that the schools are subjecting students to random x-ray scans and are confiscating cell phones.

ATLANTIC YARDS: LITMUS TEST FOR BROWNSTONE BROOKLYN

An article in Tuesday's New York Times asserts that the Atlantic Yards will be a major political issue in borough elections. This from the New York Times:

It will be months, if not years, before a single brick of the Atlantic Yards project is laid near Downtown Brooklyn. But as the fall election season draws near, the unbuilt, unapproved, multibillion-dollar development is shaping up as a major political issue in this corner of the borough.

"This is a litmus test for brownstone Brooklyn," said City Councilwoman Letitia James, whose district includes most of the Atlantic Yards site and who is perhaps the elected official most outspokenly opposed to the project. "But the issue is nonetheless important for all Brooklynites, whether or not you're a brownstoner, someone who lives in public housing, or you live in a condo."

   

Over the last two and a half years, the project's gravity has warped the political space nearby, as if a black hole had settled at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. It has bolstered some candidacies and bedeviled others here, where mostly white, affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope shade into the more diverse yet rapidly gentrifying confines of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights.