If you weren’t around on New Year’s Eve or weren’t paying attention, you might want to check out our year-end coverage. Here are the links:

· GL’s Top Ten Brooklyn Stories of 2008
· 2009 Will Change Brooklyn’s Development Vocabulary
· GL’s 2009 Brooklyn Deathwatch: Five Rotting Corpses???
· Thanks to Our Readers and Contributors in ’08

[Photo for GL courtesy of Meg Groome]

Our photographer writes: “I walk by the guy selling books on 7th and Flatbush all the time. This morning the guy was gone but the construction guys were there, they seemed to be watching his stuff. When I took a picture they laughed at me and asked me if I liked the upholstery.”

We’re not sure what you call this area. It’s Sixth Avenue right off Flatbush Avenue. Is it Park Slope, technically? ParkBush? Prospect Slope? Flat Slope? In any case, we usually pass by horrid messes on the street without giving them a second glance. But this one in front of the now shuttered Royal Video on Sixth Ave. just off Flatbush did catch our eyes. Nice.

Though our neighbors at Greenwood Cemetery may be known for their green parrots, Prospect Park is also an ornithologist’s destination.  Over the past one hundred years, more than 270 species of birds have been spotted in Prospect Park. This Saturday from 8 AM to 12 PM Prospect Park will host a walk to honor the early days of the Brooklyn Bird Club, its first birders, and the community of birders they have inspired. Presented by the Prospect Park Audubon Center & the Brooklyn Bird Club. Meet at Grand Army Plaza’s Stranahan Statue at 7:50 a.m.

—E.C. Stephens

[Photo courtesy kadanwa/flickr]

We found this little gem on Craigslist and thought we’d share. It’s about what someone did in 2008 vs. what they want to 2009. We believe that it has meaning, if not wisdom:

2008 confessions, accomplishments/2009 resoulutions
Last NYE I was with a Jerk, now I’m alone. Which one is better?
2008:
1- New Apartment
2- Crashed my car twice
3- New Car
4- New Boyfriend
5- Jerk exboyfriend screwed with my view in relationships
6- Meaningless sex
7- More meaningless sex
2009:
1- Quit smoking
2- No more meaningless sex
3- Be a better/happier person

Runner Up for 2009: New Years Resolution: No More Scat Porn

We’ve already noted Mulfchfest, which will take place next weekend, but the Sanitation Department will also be recycling trees left at curbside. Here’s a bit from their email:

Sanitation Commissioner John J. Doherty announced that the Department will begin its annual Christmas tree curbside collection and recycling program on Monday, January 5, 2009. The program will run through Friday, January 16th. Residents should remove all tree stands, tinsel, lights, and ornaments from holiday trees before they are put out at curbside for removal. Trees must not be placed into plastic bags. Clean, non-bagged Christmas trees that are left at the curb between Monday, January 5th and Friday, January 16th will be collected, chipped, and made into compost. The compost will be processed and subsequently spread upon parks, ball fields, and community gardens throughout the city. In January 2008, the Department collected over 160,000 discarded Christmas trees.

The Parks & Recreation Department will be hosting Mulchfest 2009 on Saturday, January 10th and Sunday, January 11th from 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. at more than 80 sites throughout the city. To find citywide locations, visit the Parks & Recreation website at www.nyc.gov/parks. The citywide service
allows New Yorkers to drop off their holiday trees at designated parks for mulching and event attendees can pick up free mulch. All lights, ornaments, and decorations must be removed from the trees prior to drop-off.

And so, the holiday season officially ends until Labor Day.

[Photos courtesy of Jim Kiernan]

[Photo for GL courtesy of Meg Groome]

Plenty of people showed up for the unique Brookyn tradition of freezing one’s ass off on New Year’s Day. Members of the Polar Bear Club went in the water. Other people, like contributors Meg Groome and Deborah Matlack froze taking pictures of them. A cold, good time was had by all.

[Photo for GL courtesy of Deborah Matlack]

[Photo for GL courtesy of Deborah Matlack]

A small group turned out in Coney Island yesterday to protest redevelopment plans. Contributor Lornagrl writes: “Protesters braved the freezing cold weather this New Years Day for a Save Coney Island Demonstration. It was just a few store fronts down from Ruby’s Bar, which was opened for business, serving beer and other drinks and had bagels and carrot sticks at the bar. The number of demonstrators were just a hand full compared to the Polar Bear Swim. Dianna Carlin spoke and announced that Sitt has not renewed her lease for 2009 evidently for her outspokeness and her refusal to sign a confidentiality agreement. She pointed out that some business have been offered lease renewals for double or even triple the price. This option was not offered to her.”

[Photo courtesy lornagrl/flickr]

[Photo courtesy of ethersong/GL Flickr Pool]

[Photo courtesy of Josh Derr/GL Flickr Pool]

The photographer writes of this photo: “Left over picture of the left over snow. The photo was taken last week, but with snow in the forecast, it’ll likely look like this tomorrow. You can see a slight reflection in the frame from shooting through my window, safely warm inside.”

Well, it’s finally here… the end of 2008. Time to celebrate!!! If you didn’t get that big Christmas bonus (or you did, but you already spent it all), are cutting costs, don’t feel like going out to Time Square, the bars or the parties, but you don’t want to just stay in – don your coat, hat and gloves and head on down to the New Year’s Fireworks at Grand Army Plaza. From 11pm to 12:15am, there will be entertainment, warm refreshments and sights galore, with a fabulous fireworks to kick off the new year, of course promptly at midnight.

Best locations for viewing the fireworks include: anywhere in Grand Army Plaza, inside the Park on the West Drive, and along Prospect Park West between grand Army Plaza and 9th Street. By train: 2 or 3 to Grand Army Plaza station; Q to 7th Ave. Station (Flatbush Ave.). By bus: B-41, B-71, B-69. Grand Army Plaza

And, it’s always a nice display.
—Vaduzuvant

There is no way to end what has been a very tumultuous year for us except to thank our hundreds of thousands of dedicated readers, our supporters and, especially, all of our contributors. Some of those who send us superb material prefer to remain anonymous, and we respect their wishes. You all know who you are and you have our anonymous thanks. Look to that list on the right, however, and you will find the names of people who consistently have supplied us with excellent items and photos: Dan Bennis, Miss Heather, E.C. Stephens, Marie Viljoen, Jean Kahler, Lauren Fairbanks, JP Pagan, Lornagrl, F. Jasmin Adams, Vaduz Uvunt, Vanessa Raymond, Eat It, Graziella Radici, Nate Kensinger, Adrian Kinloch, Deborah Matlack, Gary Mirabelle and Meg Groome. One name that recently disappeared from that list is our friend Max Casey, who was a key part of GL and who is dearly and deeply missed and who always will be. Extra special deep and heartfelt thanks are due to E.C. Stephens and Vaduz Uvunt, who came to us when we were ready to throw in the towel and literally helped us keep GL going. We love you both for you hard work and kindness. Kudos also to Dan Bennis who has been unflagging in doing our concert calendar, and to Deborah Matlack, whose photos never fail to make us smile. And thanks from the bottom of our hearts to Miss Heather, whose unflagging and true friendship are far more valuable than any contribution should could ever make–and those contributions are damned good too. There are other people who contribute through our photo pool, like Rubys Host and Jack Szwergold, who might as well be contributors. All of these people give of themselves from their hearts, because they’re sure not in it for the money. And for that, they have our deep and most sincere thanks. Onward.

Brooklyn Bridge Walk into the New Year! Dr. Phil’s New York Talks and Walks is presenting guided tours of the City Hall area and across the Brooklyn Bridge. Multiple walks will start tonight between 10:15 PM and 11:15 PM and ending at midnight.

NYC’s best tour guides will lead you around the City Hall area and the Brooklyn Bridge to learn little known facts about the 19th century’s greatest technical marvel. Free prizes — tee-shirts, postcards and other gifts included that show up whether you prepay by credit card or pay cash on the spot.> Party and play on the Brooklyn Bridge. Enjoy free refreshments for the early birds! – snacks and hot apple pie — tea, or hot chocolate and upon request hot coffee. If history repeats itself, fireworks will be visible from Central Park, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey as well as the Empire State Building light show.

Meeting Place is Popeye’s Chicken, 143 Fulton Street between Nassau Street and Broadway on top of the Fulton Street subway station. The cross street is Fulton. You can register on-site starting at 9:45 PM. Cost: $60 cash; $50 credit card. Telephone (888) 699-2550 to speak to a live person or go-on-line NYCwalks.com. Note: I don’t believe Dr. Phil will actually be in attendance. Which is a shame, I have a lot of 2008 kvetching to do.
—E.C. Stephens

Last year, we went out on a limb and predicted the Gowanus Whole Foods project wouldn’t happen. It hasn’t. Yet. This year there are oh-so-many projects that one can predict will be scaled back or do the Dance of Death. Here are a few to chew on:

1. Atlantic Yards. We think there is a good chance most of the project will choke on its own excess, including the arena, because of the credit crunch. Unless, of course, Forest City Ratner succeeds in getting a taxpayer bailout to make it happen. If the arena does happen, we predict a crappy Prudential Center-like structure that would be built at half the cost of Frank Gehry’s work. So, maybe it’s not an entirely dead and rotting corpse, yet, but the thing is already on life support.

2. The New Domino. Although we hear rumors that there is financing for this multi-billion project on Kent Avenue in Williamsburg and the plan is to phase it in over a decade, we’re not looking for a groundbreaking. We think this one is sunk for some time to come. A project of this scope should never be approved by the city without required infrastructure to handle the population influx, but more important, who in their right minds would finance this Titanic of Residential Projects?

3. Toll Brothers Gowanus. The project will be approved, but never built. The firm’s finances are tanking and they will likely be among the ones looking for a government bailout. Who will finance a risky project on the Gowanus Canal? No one. Dead. Dead. Dead.

4. Public Place. It may be built, but not on the timetable that is being envisioned. National Grid will plead financial hardship on the cleanup and the city’s sea of red ink will help sink it. This one is a frighteningly toxic dead duck for years to come.

5. Gowanus Whole Foods. The firm is looking for a development partner and it will not build its store underground to avoid public review. Will anyone put financing together to develop this site in 2009? Will Whole Foods be in a position to open many new stores–especially high cost ones–in this deep recession? We’re skeptical. We’d bank on one in Williamsburg first.

What a difference a couple of years makes. When we were wrapping up 2006, we were calling it the year Brooklyn changed forever. Atlantic Yards had been approved. The Williamsburg construction boom was underway. Industrial landmarks all over the borough were threatened.

Those are not the kinds of things we expect to be talking about in 2009. No, phrases like “dead projects,” “developer blight,” “developer bankruptcy,” “foreclosure” and “abandonment” come to mind. Two years ago we thought a good real estate crash was the only thing that would save Brooklyn from ill-planned, unwise overdevelopment. We think we were right. It’s just that the crash happened a year too late. Landmarks were lost and projects representing the worst in poorly planned overdevelopment obtained financing and got underway. Neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Prospect Heights will bear the scars of this insanity for the next 10-15 years. We are talking about abandominiums. Empty lots that uglify the landscape and threaten public safety and neighborhood quaility of life. Foreclosed buildings that will molder. Retail spaces that will stay empty. And individuals who we said two years ago needed psychiatric treatment to pay $750,000 or $1 million for Williamsburg apartment that will now depreciate by 30-50 percent as the market reaches equilibrium. Enjoy holding on to those apartments until 2015 or 2020 to break even folks.

In the meantime, elected officials will point fingers at each other and at city planners in a disingenuous exercise that allows one to say that, for instance, the Williamsburg-Greenpoint rezoning allowing 30 story buildings and thousands of new residents made sense, but it’s the city planners and agencies that failed to follow through on schools, transportation, police and fire protection, etc. It reminds one of the old movie line about “Gambling? I’m shocked.”

Responsibility for this disaster that will afflict our Brooklyn neighborhoods certainly rests solidly with the Bloomberg Administration, but it also lies with the City Council Members who were their enablers and the city planners who played the game along with them. It rests with a Borough President who never met a bloated project he didn’t like or found a landmark worth preserving. It rests with the greedy buyers who thought a market would rise forever. It rests with developers who built projects that were only possible due to the foul and corrupt financing from institutions that taxpayers have been forced to bail out.

The only silver lining is that this disaster was limited to certain areas and did not have time to damage the vitality of every Brooklyn neighborhood. But from Williamsburg to Sheepshead Bay and Greenpoint to Brighton Beach, we will bear the cost of greed and planning and political failures that future generations will look upon with disgust. We would pay good money to be able to see how Michael Bloomberg, Amanda Burden, Marty Markowitz and slimy developers who brought us travesties like the Original Finger Building or the Toll Brothers overly dense and ugly-as-sin Northside Piers will be looked upon in fifty years. Our prediction: with disgust and disdain.

Here is our selection for the Top Ten Brooklyn Stories of 2008:

1) The Boom Goes Bust. Parts of Brooklyn–Downtown, Williamsburg and Greenpoint–to name a few, will turn out to be Ground Zero of the spectacular Development Crash of 2008. The city’s awful failure to plan for growth will be replaced by its failure to deal with the wrecked urban landscape of abandoned and bankrupt projects that its policies encouraged.

2) The Atlantic Yards Meltdown. Who could have predicted that by the end of 2008 the discussion would center around whether the mega-project would ever be built? During the year we saw talk of a “stall” and a “halt.” There was a dramatic scaling back of Miss Brooklyn. The timetable for building affordable housing slipped. Landscape architect Laurie Olin left the project. And Architect Frank Gehry laid off people working on the project. Our prediction: Developer Bruce Ratner will have difficulty obtaining financing for a nearly $1 billion Gehry arena and the arena will either be scraped or a new version from an off-the-rack firm for $500 million will be built. There are also significant odds the entire project will be canceled if the tanking Nets are sold and go to Newark. We now give the project odds of 50-50 at best. And, by “project,” we mean an arena surrounded by seas of parking. A pox on the officials that allowed demolition to go forward and decimate part of Prospect Heights, including destruction of the historic Wards Bakery.

3) The Coney Island Mess. From beginning to end, the city’s attempt to redevelop Coney Island has been an embarrassing, amateurish and short-sighted mess. The behavior of developer Joe Sitt is beneath contempt, but not far behind is that of the pubic officials who have failed to plan for an interim period of 5-10 years when NOTHING may happen in Coney. By allowing egotistical dreams of grandiosity to rule the day, the city may have guaranteed frightful mediocrity, if not ruin.

4) The IKEA-fication of Red Hook. Our big blue-and-yellow friend opened in June, changing the look of the Red Hook waterfront forever. The addition of the waterfront esplanade was a nice touch, but the overall impact still leaves that part of Red Hook feeling like Paramus. Fortunately, the nightmare visions of congestion and out-of-control traffic did not materialize.

5) The Kent Avenue Boom. The tree planted with rezoning in 2005 has borne fruit and Kent Avenue in Williamsburg has now morphed from a wasteland to 30-story towers. These are neighborhood transforming developments. Will they tank or thrive?

6) The Saving of 184 Kent. One has to love irony. The historic Austin Nichols Warehouse, which the City Council insisted on de-landmarking, is being preserved thanks to a developer using historic preservation tax credits. Irony, anyone?

7) The Flatbush Avenue Boom. The row of luxe residential projects going up are changing the skyline–Toren, Oro, Avalon Fort Greene and others. Again, will these projects thrive or turn into disasters?

8). The Survival of Admirals Row. If the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp. had its way, Admiral’s Row would no longer exist. Yet, the crumbling buildings are still there and an obscure Federal agency is trying to determine whether they should be saved. This is one case where we hope and pray the Feds stick it to the city and make them preserve an important part of American history.

9) Death of Red Hook Waterfront Redevelopment. The stevedores, as it turned out, managed to throttle the city’s grand plan to build a massive mixed-use development in what we’ll call the Columbia Waterfront District. Good riddance.

10) The Gowanus Renaissance. Depending on one’s perspective and the issue this is either a good thing or a bad thing. Clubs are opening. Hotels are being built. The Toll Brothers project on the Canal is likely to be approved and a major rezoning will be done, now linked to a downzoning of Carroll Gardens. Meanwhile, the Whole Foods projects is stalled and may still sink into the toxic muck in which it would be built. Will any of this amount to anything? Probably not for another decade or so when another boom cycle starts.

[Photo for GL courtesy of New York Shitty]

We end our 2008 Street Couch Series with a grand finale worthy of New Year’s Eve. It has the couch. It has the church building built in 1953. And it has the graffiti that says “fuck.” Perfection for the final hours of what has been quite a year.

Brook Vin, the new wine bar on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope near Tenth Street, is getting ready to open, as the window says “Soon.” It will be operated by the same people that own the wine shop across the street. There was some original concern by neighbors that outdoor seating would cause noise during warm weather months.

[Photo for GL courtesy of Meg Groome]

Appropriately spare, we think.

Ouch. We hate when that happens. We planned to run this pic we shot the other day anyway, but then we found an AP story on Crain’s about how parking in Park Slope bites the big one, people smashing up your nothwithstanding. The gist of the story is the when alternate side parking was suspended this summer a DOT study found 98 percent of the spaces taken both before and during the suspension. Here are some excerpts:

Rules or no rules, it’s still hard to find a parking space in one of Brooklyn’s most crowded neighborhoods. That’s according to a New York City study on the effects of a suspension of alternate-side parking regulations in the borough’s Park Slope section. Most motorists have to move their cars several times a week for a few hours to allow the streets to be cleaned. The city suspended the rules in Park Slope between mid-May and mid-July to replace the street cleaning signs. The city Department of Transportation study found that 98% of the parking spaces in the neighborhood were taken, both before and during the suspension of regulations…

As for the car above, well, the way it got screwed had nothing to do with alternate side parking. The good news is that at least nobody torched it.