Sunday is the last day for the beloved vendors at the Red Hook Ball Fields to serve up food this season. If you’ve never been or if you want another fix, today and tomorrow are it. The future of the enterprise is up in the air. The vendors have been under siege all year. First, from the Parks Department, which has threatened their very existence with a permitting process that has yet to play out, and then, from the Health Department, which has demanded some expensive upgrades. We love the vendors. We have stated our position many times and our feeling that the city should do backflips to keep this vital cultural institution in place rather than taking steps to wipe them out. When the season rolls around next year, however, Red Hook will be a very, very, very different place. The Ikea will be open, attracting up to 50,000 cars to the neighborhood every week and the parks where the vendors work will be in the middle of thousands of cars going to and from Ikea every weekend. If you haven’t been, go today or tomorrow. Even if the vendors are there next year–and we will be outraged if they are not–it will be a very, very different scene. That part of Red Hook won’t so much be a community as a place that people from all over the city drive through to get Ikea furniture.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Anonymous // Oct 20, 2007 at 1:56 pm
And what’s wrong with that?
Get some furniture, get some great food. Park @ Ikea, walk to the ballfields.
Move on.
Stop whining.
2 Anonymous // Oct 20, 2007 at 4:12 pm
good riddance, that place gave me the runs last sunday!
3 RedHook // Oct 20, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Actually, the problem is that Mayor Mike and his henchman Daniel Doctoroff love putting giant IKEAS and malls into areas where there were thriving ethnic markets. Witness the Bronx Terminal Market, witness the “coincidental” pressure from the Parks Department and the Health Department in Red Hook on the vendors there, right around the time IKEA is coming.
Believe me, I know, there is no such animal as the Health Department deciding after 17 years that there is suddenly a “problem” with the vendors at the ballfields. Doesn’t happen. They’ve been ordered to make those people go away.
Condo developments that are called parks, massive density luxury building projects that are called “public arena and affordable housing” and so on… these are all a legacy of Dan Doctoroff under the approval of Mayor Mike.
That’s “what’s wrong with it.”
4 Anonymous // Oct 21, 2007 at 10:35 am
Ah, the conspiracy theorists are out there again.
Will the black helicopters land on the grassy knoll near the ballfields?
Will your tin hat pick up WBAI?
That and more …
5 Anonymous // Oct 22, 2007 at 12:18 pm
If you’re not skeptical of the city’s actions surrounding private developments like Ikea or the arena, then you’re either a naive idiot or an asshole -or both.