Here’s an appeal that we are thrilled to run because it’s so, so important. The Fresh Air Fund, the nonprofit organization that’s been providing summer vacation programs to millions of disadvantaged New York City children, is again looking for loving families and volunteers who are willing and able to open their hearts and homes, and give positive experiences to more children this summer. Won’t you please help? We’re talking seriously good karma here in addition to showing decency that most people never approach. Of course, they’re also accepting donations. For more information, to donate and to become a Fresh Air Volunteer for a child, visit the Fresh Air Fund.
—Vaduzuvunt

And, now, we present our weekly restaurant review from our friends at Eat It: The Brooklyn Food Blog. This week’s feature is the River Cafe:

I have celebrated a few major milestone birthdays (16, 21, my Mom’s 50th) at the River Cafe (1 Water Street, at Old Fulton St., 718-522-5200) and have always had a lovely time. It’s a perfect spot for special occasions & celebrations or just for a unique treat. I hear they had record numbers on Valentine’s Day for dinner (so much for doom and gloom restaurant reports) and while I’ve eaten dinner there a number of times, I was lucky enough to be taken this past weekend for Brunch for the first time. You enter through their long cobble-stoned driveway on Water St. and follow it as it coils around until the end where you’re greeted by valets. Once you step through the front door, it’s as if you’ve arrived at a dark flower shop. HUGE bouquets of sweet-smelling flowers are everywhere, including palm fronds and more tropical looking plants. Framed maps and old newspapers line the dark wood walls and you’re asked for your coat before you’re directed through yet another set of doors into the main dining room to be seated. It’s then that you first get to take in that view in all it’s glory. The skyline of lower Manhattan is framed by the big windows along the water. The Brooklyn Bridge extends out over the river in it’s colossal beauty and the boats of all shapes and sizes zip up and down through the water.

Numerous staff mill about, attending to your every need. There seems to be a separate waiter for each unique job (water, bread, appetizers, drinks, mains, menus, etc.). We were seated along the wall side by side, facing the dining room and the water. The menu listed about 15 options of appetizers and main courses and is Prix Fixe ($55 for Brunch). We had a Pear Salad with Goat Cheese Fondue, Smoked Rainbow Trout, Omelette with Black Truffle Cheese & Lobster Tail and Chicken Pancetta with Stuffing. Click here for photos!

We have no comment, other than laughter.

[Photo for GL courtesy of Deborah Matlack]

For those who don’t know, there are still trains and train tracks on First Avenue in Sunset Park. This pic comes our wide-ranging photog, Deborah Matlack. She writes, “I had occasion to be on First Avenue in the 40’s, and got this shot of a Union Pacific caboose in the track area. Everything is fenced in, I don’t remember fencing years ago.”

· PLG Leads in Speeding Cars [NYDN]
· Education Secretary Visits Brooklyn School [CityRoom]
· Atlantic Yards Construction Update [No Land Grab]
· Chop Chop at 289 DeKalb [Brownstoner]
· DOB on Scene at Neglected 194 Columbia Heights [BHB]
· Grammar Gods to Save Temple Block Buiilding [McBrooklyn]
· S’Up at 85 Driggs [New York Shitty]
· Brooklyn at 35,000 Feet [I love Frankin Avenue]
· Checking Out Carroll Street [FNY]
· Land of Displaced Bookstores [Lost City]

We’ve been noticing more and more Bumper Badgers lately, to the point where it seems like every freaking car we see parked in neighborhoods like the Slope has one (because no one will surrender to the reality that their bumper is getting f’d up whether they like it or not). Yet, where there are tons of Bumper Badgers there is also likely to be Bumper Badger theft. And so it is. From Brooklynian:

I went out to my car this morning and noticed my Bumper Badger had been cut off at the straps! Why would someone take it off? Is there some black market for these things?

Well, we don’t know except that people might be trying to make a statement, but there was this response that amused us:

did someone then scratch your bumper? The 15 y/o in me has always wanted to hold a bumper badger up with one hand, while keying their bumper the other. I’m a big fan of beat up ’92 Corollas.

Up next, Bumper Badger anti-theft alarms!

Why have we posted this slideshow? Well, first off it show nearly an entire city block in Downtown Brooklyn where buisinesses have closed. Why? Because the properties have slowly been sold off for a huge project called Avalon Willoughby West that will tentively be 60 stories tall. Brownstoner has been following the development of this story brilliantly, most recently with renderings of what would go here. Avalon Willoughby West would be a residential and commercial development of about 800,000 square feet. These properties are now owned by Avalon Willoughby West LLC according to Property Shark. We run these photos to show that a kind of slow ethnic cleansing of Downtown Brooklyn is taking place as huge parcels that once housed mom and pop businesses that catered to people of modest means are being wiped out. Some have moved. Most have simply gone out of business. This is, of course, part of the city’s official plan for the neighborhood. They call it redevelopment, naturally, and something that will create a new and thriving Downtown. What we see are empty streets and the horrifying possibillity that if this development isn’t financed and entire city block that was thriving will become an empty wasteland for years to come. (This will mess with the plans of other developing hotels and rental towers.) Guess we won’t be getting invited to any receptions at the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership anytime soon.

A rendering of the possible new world ahead.

It’s probably not another day full of smiles at the world headquarters of Robert Scarano Architect in Dumbo. Today’s Daily News reports that Brooklyn’s most controversial architect has been fined for a project in Williamsburg that badly damaged an adjacent building. An except:

A notorious Brooklyn architect accused of faking plans to skirt zoning laws has now been fined for failing to make proper inspections at another site, city officials said. Robert Scarano was slapped with $2,800 in fines last month by the Environmental Control Board over shoddy excavation work last year at 170 North Fifth St. in Williamsburg, which damaged an adjacent building, officials said. Department of Buildings officials said Scarano only did two inspections at the site during a 10-month period in 2007, instead of the required seven. DOB inspectors also found excavation work at the property under Scarano’s oversight undermined a building at 602 Driggs Ave.

Mr. Scarano’s lawyer is appealing the fine and saying Mr. Scarano is a “scapegoat” in the North Fifth St. problem.

[Photo courtesy of Jennifer Dunne/GL Flickr Pool]

We usually like to start the day with “hard news” or “news” kind of post. Well, this morning, friends, this is news. The witch hazel is starting to bloom in Prospect Park. This can only mean one thing: winter will soon be drawing to an end. Yes, we know these things happen on a schedule. We don’t know if it’s going to be a sad or a happy spring, but we do know that this terrible and sad winter is almost over.

Another shot to warm the heart, ahead.

This comes from an often racist and anti-semitic blog called Angry New Yorker. It is published anonymously, of course. Anonymity is a sort of cancer that is increasingly afflicting blogging and eating away at it on both the blogging and comment end of things. If you hate us, you’ll love this. If you like us, you’ll dislike the author of this ignorant post (which was simply intended as a joke about graffiti). Oh, by the way, he calls President Obama, “$chwartze.” And leaves his own comment on his own blog that “The Jews get all the money.” So, in a sense it’s an honor to get some crap from this hateful creep. But, please, Mittah Ang-wy, take little ‘ole us on a tour of all those scawy places we’re too stupid to know about so we can blog about them too. Or, would you be to afwaid to actually let yourself identity be known so you’d be forced to stop spewing your anonymous bile? Hating everything is sooooo 1970s, dude. Calling the President a “schwartze”? You damn better well hide behind your mommy’s skirt of internet anonymity.

The long forgotten, yet important, post-punk band Magazine with ex-Buzzcock Howard Devoto letting the light pour out of him. “Time flies. Time crawls. Like an insect. Up and down the walls.”

[Photo courtesy of nifty pete/GL Flickr Pool]

In case you’ve missed it, we’ve started up our Twitter feed. Please follow us. Our posts are there and as time goes on there going to be more off-the-cuff and personal stuff. In other words, we’re going to be using it to communicate with you off the blog. Tweet. Tweet.

The BCC just sent out another announcement that they’re extending the deadline for nominations of the 9th annual Building Brooklyn Award to the end of the work day of Thursday, 3/12. So yay… you still have a lil time to nominate your favorite Big Bob Scarano or Hot Karl Fischer or Lean Mean Gene Kaufman building for special recognition. To feed into the frenzy, go to the Building Brooklyn Awards site.
—Vaduzuvunt

[Image courtesy of New York Public Library]

Here’s our good, old Ninth Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal as it appeared in 1940.

[Photo courtesy of Best View in Brooklyn/GL Flickr Pool]

Per our photographer, who creates the wonderful Sunset Park-based Best View in Brooklyn blog: “5th Avenue, across from Sunset Park. Its friend, the backless, black office chair, is a few feet down the block.”

This video is from the first performance in May of 2008 of a group then known as Dixie Fried, recently changed to Puss N Boot (there was another Dixie Fried out there). They’re a covers band country and alt country, and they’re doing this for fun (they all have other more regular music gigs). This clip shows them doing the Johnny Cash song Cry Cry Cry. The members are Brooklynites Sasha Dobson (rhythm guitar and vocals) and Catherine Popper (bass and vocals). Their lead guitar player, who takes the lead vocal here, currently is living in Manhattan, use to reside in Williamsburg and according to Brownstoner is on her way back to Brooklyn. Even though she cut her hair short at the beginning of 2008, you’ll recognize her (but if you don’t, it’s Norah Jones).
—Eliot Wagner

It says: “And so we beat on boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Boy, ain’t that the freaking truth.

Here’s one of our weekly features from the Center for the Urban Environment (CUE). This week’s interview is with Tom Fox, President of New York Water Taxi.

CUE: Where are you from originally?

Fox: Flatbush, Brooklyn. I lived there until about two years ago—except for a few years in both Vietnam and Washington DC.

CUE: When did New York Water Taxi open for business and what lead you to start up the venture?

Fox: Originally in 1997, but the initial service had the wrong boats, was undercapitalized and failed so I started over in 2002. I had spent 25 years building parks, a number of them along the New York City waterfront. While working on the creation of the Hudson River Park, I realized that you couldn’t move easily north and south along the waterfront. As the first president of the Hudson River Park Conservancy, I approached the ferry operators in the harbor to ask if they would be interested in operating an intra-city transportation service and they all said “no.” So I started the business at the age of 50 when my wife told me that it was time for me to get a real job.

Read more of CUE’s interesting interview with Tom Fox, ahead.

Make of it what you will. Going through Owls Head Park and on to the 69th St Pier with a 40 MPH tail wind.

[All photos courtesy of Miss Heather]

The horror show you are looking at is 126 India Street in Greenpoint and could serve as a textbook example of developer blight that is increasingly out of control in some of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the early 2000s development boom. You know, before Mr. Housing Bubble’s funeral. It’s supposed to be a four-story building with eight units designed by 5H Architecture & Design. We’re very excited, of course, by the improvements it’s already made to India Street and can only imagine the delight of the people who worked hard to buy their homes or are paying high rents to next to developer blight. There is a Stop Work Order on the job, but it’s because of the big gaping hole in the fence allowing access to the demolition site. It looks like the site was abandoned long before DOB arrived and told them to fix the fence. (Which, of course, they haven’t done.) We hate to keep harping on this, but what you are seeing is the wave of the future in Greenpoint, Williamsburg, the South Slope, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy and other neighborhoods that were particularly slammed by the boom. Check out the full gallery, because there’s a partially demolished building accessible to anyone in the neighborhood. Another death or serious injury waiting to happen.

Blight me, big time, ahead

· Take a Dump or Whatever for 15 Minutes at GAP for a Quarter [NYDN]
· Condo Plans Collapse [TRD]
· Checking on 892 Bergen in Crown Heights [Brownstoner]
· New york Foundation for the Arts Moving to Dumbo [DumboNYC]
· A Downtown Brookyn Survivor [Lost City]
· Sean Casey Animal Rescue Did Amazing Work in 2008 [Kensington Brooklyn]
· Was Your Car Parked at Fifth Ave. and 34th? Oops. [BVIB]
· Subway Changes at Newkirk Ave. [Ditmas Park Blog]
· Play Date from Hell [Kensington Stories]
· Cute Ducklinkgs, Birds and Stuff [AYITP]
· Litchfield Villa Naked [Here is Park Slope]

[Photo for GL by Steven Skollar]

WTF? First, Hotel Le Bleu was lit up in blue like a nighmare vision of a Latvian bordello designed by a Karl Fischer protege where they decided that the red and pink of Amsterdam is too gauche. And now? That is the m*therf*cking Holiday Inn Express on Union Street. That’s right friends. In a fit of what can only be jealousy (or perhaps an episode of psychedelic drug-induced insanity) the freaking Holiday Inn is now lit up in blue. It doesn’t appear the rooms have blue ights like Le Bleu, but still. (Attention City Planning: In rezoning Gowanus limit a single color to one hotel only. So, if Le Bleu has blue. Make Holiday Inn go pink. And Fairfiled Inn go purple. Etc. These are certainly heady days in our Gowanus Hotel District, which is what we call the area hit by the Gowanus Hotel Boom. Of course, where there is boom, there is bust and some of these rooms may be renting for $30 for three hours by Q4 2009 and all the lighting may be red, but that is putting the cart in front of the horse. The view down President Street, below, is especially interesting, because it shows the almost complete Super 8 on Third Avenue and the corridor where two hotels are planned. (Or might have been planned before, you know, the financial market hit those little bumps in the road back in September and October. Us, we never fail to laugh when we see tourists emerging from the Comfort Inn Brooklyn Bridge in Gowanus, look around and seem, well, a little surprised at our beloved Gowanus. We’d suggest yellow for the Comfort Inn or perhaps just tagging the whole place up.

Oh, Park Freaking Slope, also producing so much drama. (Well, producing emails that transmit drama that we choose to copy and paste. This one is about having neighbors upstairs with a rock and roll band. And, we’re not talking TV on the Radio here. We mean a tween band, which is a Park Slope specialty and might even evolve into a bizarre sub-genre of music someday. Here’s the email from Park Slope Parents:

I live in an 8 unit building. There is one family in the building who has daily band practice.(drums symbols electric guitar) They claim to play onlt 2 hours a day 7 days a week. 4 till 6. This is usually the case, but not always. When not playing drums they play the piano intermittenly through out the day and evenings. I have tolerated the piano lessons for 5 or 6 years without complaint. But the drums and guitar are unbearable at any hour/ I cannot read sleep watch TV or live. I have tried discussing this with the parents. They believe that since this happens at reasonable hours its ok? I work at home. Please help. Suggestions comments?? Thank You . PS I live a quiet life. No one has ever complained about me.

It’s always the quiet ones that get screwed the worst. One might suggest trying to appear slightly deranged when dealing with the dear Slopians above–not so deranged as to attract the authorities but pretending to be deranged enough to make it appear that you have it deep within you to snap, go berserk and go on a rampage.

A while back, Thor Equities announced that it would have a flea market called “Flea by the Sea” in summer 2009 on the big empty lot it owns on Stillwell Avenue, between the Bowery and the boardwalk. (The lot is empty because he demolished all the rides and attractions two winters ago.) Last summer it briefly hosted carnival rides, which he would presumably put on the Astroland property this years. Hence a full, empty city block. Yesterday a tipster passed along an email that has gone out to members of the Afro-punk community. Here it is:

Hi guys, We would like to share this 0pportunity with all of you: “Coming in May, a totally new and exhilarating experience will be coming to Coney Island – a magical and festive place to eat great food, hang out, and see and be seen, and of course, SELL YOUR FANTASTIC MERCHANDISE!! Flea By The Sea is a revolutionary approach to the conventional flea market. With thrilling rides, games,live entertainment, and unprecedented million-dollar advertising campaign letting every New Yorker know Coney Island is going to be hotter than ever this spring! So if you’re looking for a new way to have fun in the sun, and make some money too, nothing will beat the Flea By The Sea..or as we like to say…fuggettabout!! TO FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN PARTICIPATE
CALL 8 8 8.940.8 8 81 OR WRITE FLEABYTHESEA@GMAIL.COM…We would like to share this 0pportunity with all of you.

So, let’s see, an Afro-punk Flea by the Sea with “an unprecedented multi-million dollar advertising.” This promises to be even better than last year’s Summer of Hope.