Ditmas Park

"The Q is a solid train. And Ditmas Park is our amazing, affordable, tree-lined little secret (shh!). But please don't let south Brooklyn turn into Williamsburg! It's lovely as it is without hordes of Facebook-addicted, angsty, post-college types in skinny jeans! Keep it quiet and nerdy--much better that way." ["Brooklyn, The Borough: Can the Q Be the Next L?"]

The "chief insitgator and CEO" of Ditmas Park's Vox Pop cafe, Sander Hicks, is looking for partners to take his cafe national, the Brooklyn Papers reports. An excellent investment opportunity--if you think there are 170 other neighbrohoods in the country that would go for "Halloween masks of unpopular presidents"--to say nothing of 9-11 conspiracy books. -Matthew Schuerman

The last installment of Curbed's 2005 awards came through this afternoon. Rather unscientific reader polling seems to make Prospect Heights the neighborhood of the year for readers of the real-estate Web log, unseating last year's champion, Fort Greene.

The neighborhood, which is on the other side from Manhattan of every other Brooklyn neighborhood your friends live in except Ditmas Park, won the Curbed Cup in a landslide, beating out trendy Dumbo and Manhattan's own Lower East Side.

But the author admits that some local zealots may have piled on to give the neighborhood its 37 percent share of the 400-some-odd votes.

And there's plenty of internecine Brooklyn mudslinging in the comments.  read more »

Not making the top four (only they are itemized), even among Curbed's rather sophisticated readership, are neighborhoods like Nolita, Williamsburg, Chelsea, and last year's beauty queen, Fort Greene.

- Tom McGeveran

It's been a while since anybody picked up the shrinking alt-alt weekly, but the Sun has news today that the current regime at the New York Press has been replaced by my friend and Ditmas Park neighbor Harry Siegel, an occasional Observer columnist.

The Press, if you've read it in the last year or two, has been modeling itself after a demented, occasionally brilliant, Moscow weekly called the eXile; the nihilism didn't work as well in this somewhat better-functioning democracy, and the paper wound up being totally irrelevant, except when it offended Anthony Weiner.  read more »

Given the quotes in today's story, the new regime seems to be something of a Russ Smith restoration. Siegel, a Brooklyn native and holder of the world's last, thickest Brooklyn accent, ran the Sun's editorial page for a while and is the founder of the eccentric, interesting New Partisan Web site. He's smart and serious, and despite being to the right of most New York political types, knows his way around city politics, being the son and collaborator of Giuliani analyst Fred.

Harry also holds the distinction, as I recall, of forcing the generally anti-regulatory Sun into strict enforcement of the smokefree workplace rules.