Brooklyn The Borough

What do Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, Annie Leibovitz and Keith Haring all have in common? Each artist has work up for sale at the 4th Annual Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM to us locals) Silent Auction.

BAM certainly plays an integral part in the Brooklyn art scene, and the auction, which raises money for BAM's various programs, raked in $237,500 last year. Artists from all over the borough have work for sale—which you can bid on on BAM's Web site—many from Williamsburg, Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. Bidding is open until April 13, when the closing reception will bring in the final bids.

Brooklyn has certainly always nurtured creative talent—nothing new there. The borough has increasingly become home to prominent names in the fine-arts community. While an afternoon spent in Manhattan's great museums or in Chelsea's galleries is certainly invigorating, poking around unconventional spaces that have sprung up all over Brooklyn can turn into quite the adventure. Brooklyn is an urban jungle peppered with art, inside and outside of the spaces that facilitate creativity.  read more »

It seems like every time you turn the corner these days you run into yet another new bar. This is especially true in the gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn and very much so in Prospect Heights. Time Out New York recently ran a page-long charticle on the heavy bar presence on Vanderbilt Avenue, the go-to strip for ProHo nightlife.

The eight-block avenue boasts restaurants, cafes and boutiques for moms and dads puttering around with their stroller-strapped kids during the day and by night there are no less than four drinking establishments and one on the verge of receiving its liquor license. Recently, my friends Adam and Dave joined me in hitting a few of my local spots, including the brand-new Weather Up and the six-year-old Soda.  read more »

It isn't often that New Yorkers get an intimate peek behind their neighbors' closed doors. Even more unusual is a peek inside the intimate life of our state's chief executive. But I digress.

As a child growing up in a 25-story filing cabinet for families and young professionals on West 53rd Street, I lived in apartment 10E. When trick-or-treating or selling my annual Christmas raffle tickets for school, I would get an intimate window into how my neighbors lived. We all have our domains, and regardless of how small they might be, they are ours. But what are we all doing behind those doors?

On March 5, the Center for an Urban Future and the Brooklyn Economic Development Corporation hosted a forum on the population boom within Brooklyn’s "creative crescent." The number of creative freelancers--artists, writers, designers, architects, performance artists, musicians, graphic designers and others--increased 33.2 percent from 2002 through 2005; now, roughly 28 percent of the city's creative freelancers live and work in the borough. The Brooklyn home is often more than just a place to lay our heads – it can often act as the genesis for our creative and professional lives.  read more »

If you live in Brooklyn, or any outer-borough really, I'm sure you've seen it before: the requisite post-work grocery bag getting lugged home on the train. Often it's the ubiquitous Whole Foods and Trader Joe bags bouncing along the platform awaiting voyages across the East River.

Recently, the City Council passed a bill – despite intense lobbying against it by food retailers – to issue street vending permits for vegetable stands in the city's poorer neighborhoods. It's clear to anyone living in the areas included in the measure – like my neighbors in Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant – that fresh, decent produce is not as readily available as it is in much of Manhattan. Cue that long trip home from Whole Foods.  read more »

As a teenager I spent a fair amount of time traversing New York City's urban terrain in search of live music. I was partial to punk. I spent a lot of time at Saturday punk matinees at ABC No Rio and the Dumbo art collective DUMBA. At 16, I marched down to the DMV to get a resident ID to prove to CBGB's Hilly Kristal that I was old enough to shove people to an orchestra of power chords.

I remember the devastation of Giuliani's ruling against dancing in bars and the death knell of advancing gentrification, the demise of the places I used to frequent (except for ABC No Rio, which managed to buy its squatted building from the city in the late 90's and is now planning a serious renovation). In a recent article for The Observer, Chris Shott described the debilitating regulatory environment that many music venues contend with now.  read more »

Though I spent three years living in Greenpoint, I often found myself shunning the local nightlife—aside from a few restaurants and my local watering hole the Pencil Factory—for cozy nights in on my quiet residential street. Especially during this time of year. But despite no longer residing there, I've recently found myself traveling north to Williamsburg and Greenpoint for a night out more often and apparently, I'm not alone!

On a recent Thursday, I headed to the Music Hall of Williamsburg to catch a few bands play. On my walk toward the venue, which stands just short of the East River, I bypassed the Thai restaurant Sea, now North 6th Street's bridge-and-tunnel capital. Patrons were falling out of the doors, the line for a table immense, while a DJ boomed hip hop to a crowd donning their Sunday (or Thursday) best. Similarly, up the street, Planet Thai was packed to the brim with people seeking a lounge, restaurant and bar feel all in one.  read more »

One of the major differences, generally speaking, between Manhattan and Brooklyn is the proximity you have to your neighbor. In Manhattan, residents may feel piled on top of each other in shoeboxes or filing cabinets, depending on your metaphor preference, but rarely will they ever get to know one another. In Brooklyn, residents tend to have more space and fewer neighbors, yet the proximity seems closer.

Brooklynites exist closer to the urban frontier.  read more »

Apparently it's quite controversial to discuss the experience of living in Brooklyn when it comes to the topic of race. A few weeks back, I dared to talk about it and received a lot of flack. But in my hood, Prospect Heights, and anywhere really, race, class and gentrification are heavy topics, and I'm not going to shy away from them.

After graduating college, I spent close to two years working in central Brooklyn politics, commuting south every morning from my apartment in Greenpoint to a state senator's office on Flatbush Avenue near Lincoln Place. I worked with families whose homes were in disrepair, mediating fights with landlords over HPD cases; and with community groups, landlords and community affairs police officers over drug-related crime. All the work merely put band-aids on a broken system. I often returned home in utter shock. Perhaps you've seen The Wire.  read more »

It's easy to feel helpless and vulnerable during your apartment search, tired of hoofing it from place to place, and being let down almost every time. On top of that, I was skeptical of my realtor, Angel, a 50-ish Asian woman who drives a Jaguar, when she first showed me the apartment I inevitably took.

Not unlike a character out of a real estate cartoon, Angel met me in front of a building she owns just down the street from the apartment she was renting me. She made it immediately clear how much of an over-sharer she is. “I rent my two-bedroom apartments for $2,000! You will get a good deal here!,” she squealed, before double-speaking. “I represent YOU! This is not my building, I work for the landlord!”

It was hard to know what was true and what was her poor attempt at salesmanship, or, even worse, if she was being dishonest. But, after seeing a few other places, I went ahead with it anyway. I needed a place, and my roommate, Will, had a strict deadline to get out of his place that was approaching in a matter of days. Angel was the only realtor showing us a decent amount of space at a reasonable price.  read more »

On a recent chilly night, I was bundled up and on my way to Boerum Hill to have dinner at a friend's apartment. As I walked down Washington Avenue the B45 bus pulled up next to me, and I hesitated. “Which would be faster, the train or the bus?” I thought. Before I could make a decision, the bus doors had shuttered. Luckily, the light at Atlantic and Washington was still red and I approached the bus and knocked on the door. The driver, a middle-aged African-American man, refused to open the door, gesturing to the next stop, three street crossings away, even though his bus was still idling perfectly in front of a designated stop. It was 15 degrees outside and I'll admit it, I felt like the driver was sticking it to me for being white.  read more »

As I briefly mentioned last week, amenities and good location are hard to come by, especially at the same time and at a decent price. While looking at an apartment three (very long) blocks off the Dekalb L stop, I noticed little signs of revival in the outstretches of Bushwick—the facade of a tenement building repaired, construction workers milling about in paint-splattered overalls with ladders. A sign that the tidal wave of Williamsburgian revival will soon fall upon it. However, thus far, it hasn't.

The apartment cost $1,600 a month, though the realtor—a kind Hasidic man who immediately explained his inability to shake my hand before offering his to my boyfriend—offered it for $1,550 when I winced at the price. Workers were coming and going over paper that had been set down on the floor to protect newly stained wood floors. Though it was on the first floor, everything was brand-new: kitchen cabinets, walls, moldings, doors, bathroom fixtures. It was clear that the landlord had put money into the place, but I could not justify spending even the discounted $750 per month on a (beautiful) room in Bushwick that I did not feel safe in.  read more »

Editor's Note: The Real Estate presents Brooklyn, The Borough, a weekly column by Observer staffer and native Manhattanite Nicole Brydson about her return to Brooklyn after nearly a year in Hell's Kitchen.

For three years I lived in Greenpoint, the northern Polish colony of Brooklyn. Though I wasn't part of the first wave of gentrification, the wheels of which were long turning--fast--my indigenous neighbors didn't necessarily seem thrilled with the influx of youthful college graduates. But, over the time I spent living there, the process completed itself. Greenpoint, close to Williamsburg and now home to hip bars, natural markets, galleries, brunch spots, fashion-forward boutiques and even a book store, became the convenient and affordable choix de la jeunesse.  read more »