2012 December – Brooklyn Artisan

12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN: And There Shall Be Trees

December 16, 2012 by Anne Mollegen Smith Leave a Comment

Day Eleven ♦ 12 Views of Brooklyn

Photograph by Joseph Caserto. See Who’s Who.

IT HAPPENS SO SUDDENLY. ONE DAY YOU TURN A FAMILIAR CORNER and – voilà! there you are in the midst of an evergreen forest! The pine scent is intense, the prickly branches reach out to you, it’s heady and exciting: Christmastime, Christmastime! Soon you realize your brain is being bathed in or battered by holiday music. O Tannenbaum jostles Rudolph the Red….Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah (preferably sung by k. d. lang) co-exists with Handel’s Messiah (preferably one you can sing along with in a church). You’ve shopped and staggered home to wrap. The tree lights are on. Who’s got the tape? Grandmother makes her annual joke: No packing in the peekages! Stockings are hung by the fire or maybe just draped over the back of the couch. When emotion overtakes you, it often comes by stealth – at the midnight service when a pure young voice sings the first notes of O Holy Night, or after the stockings have been emptied and the wrappings are in tatters and the family holds hands to give thanks over the turkey dinner. Or maybe it’s private, when you step outside to remember childhood celebrations and the people who loved you who now are gone and you silently thank them for the year you got the bike of your dreams and forgive them for the Christmas of the Scratchy Socks and Really Stupid Sweater. Take a deep breath, smell the pine wreath, give in to it all – and laugh a little as Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer from a car passing in the slushy street chimes in with your iPod, “Good King Wenceslas looked out/On the feast of Stephen/When the snow lay round about/Deep and crisp and even….” Here’s to 2012 and another fine Christmas.

Filed Under: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Look Tagged With: 12 Days of Brooklyn, 12 Views of Brooklyn, Joseph Caserto

Bring Back the Soda Fountain!

December 15, 2012 by Bruce Campbell 1 Comment

Day Ten • 12 Sips of Brooklyn

P&H Soda syrups for sale at The Brooklyn Kitchen. From left, Ginger, Lovage, and Hibisicus

dec15 HOW DID SODA GET TO BE PUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1? There was a time when the soda fountain was the shining emblem of wholesomeness and American values. Wasn’t that the place where The Beaver could go and conduct his heart-to-heart talks with dad Ward Cleaver? But here in New Bloomberg City 2012, that talk might land Ward with a referral to child protective services. Or at least pointed looks from the local moral guardians.

The Beaver’s brother Wally working at the soda fountain in a “simpler” America

Hard to be a soda entrepreneur these days, with City Hall intimating that your product ranks with cigarettes and racy magazines in the corruption of the kiddies. On the other side, the big guys, the Pepsis and Cokes of the world, have been laying down heavy fire in their war on limiting soda sizes. It’s frankly hard to know which side to root for in that struggle. May both sides lose.

Things look far rosier to Anton Nocito, whose dream was to open his own soda fountain but who along the way became a fabricator of artisanal soda syrups. P&H Soda Co. started about three years ago when Nocito sold sodas at the now-defunct Greenpoint Market. Customers and stores like The Brooklyn Kitchen expressed interest in the syrups, so Nocito obliged. Then he taught classes on making syrups and landed on the Martha Stewart Show teaching Martha herself to make Cream Soda. In that appearance, he certainly doesn’t come across like a corrupter of youth.

P&H syrups are all natural and come in exotic flavors like Lovage, Hibiscus and the old stand-by Ginger. From the humble start in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, the product is now available in stores across the country, including in Georgia, Massachusetts and California, as well as on menus in restaurants and bars as far afield as Florida and Minnesota. A list of locations is available on the P&H Soda Co web site.

Locally, Nocito likes to get out to venues like the New Amsterdam Market to share special fabrications that can’t be bottled “because we don’t use preservatives, so the flavor tends to fade too quickly.”

Small-batch soda is getting to be an active market in Brooklyn, with Brooklyn Soda Works and Q Drinks making their own products focused on natural ingredients. Brooklyn Artisan will follow all the developments with interest.

As for his original dream, Nocito remains steadfast: He wants to “open a soda fountain with all natural sodas and a menu consisting of locally sourced ingredients. The manufacturing of the syrups definitely sent us in another direction and we’re currently trying to get back on track with our original goal.”

With any luck, The Beaver will be there for more heart-to-hearts, and not have to sneak around with back-alley natural sodas.

P&H Soda Co.

Brooklyn Soda Works

Q Drinks
718-398-6642

Photograph (top) by Basia Hellwig. Date stamp typographic design by Joy Makon Design. The font is American Typewriter, by Joel Kaden and Tony Stan, ITC, 1974.

Filed Under: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Food/Drink Tagged With: 12 Days of Brooklyn, 12 Sips and Tastes, 12 Sips of Brooklyn, Anton Nocito, Brooklyn Soda Works, cream soda, ginger, Greenpoint, hibiscus, lovage, Martha Stewart, P&H Soda Co., Q drinks, The Brooklyn Kitchen, Williamsburg

The New Corner Grocers

December 15, 2012 by Basia Hellwig 1 Comment

Day Ten • 12 Tastes of Brooklyn

Charcuterie and cheese plates, often with products from small local grocers, are offered up at Brooklyn’s wine and brew bars. This one at Brooklyn Winery.

WITH SO MANY ARTISANAL FOOD MAKERS in Brooklyn, it’s good to also find some wonderful small grocery stores where you can buy their small-batch products. These are the anti-supermarket—you really want to call them shops because they often conjure up the feeling of a village shop where customers and proprietor greet each other by name. The selections in these diminutive stores are carefully chosen (dare I say curated?) from producers that the proprietors often know personally. They’ve tasted the cheese, or the salumi, or the sauces or pickles and they like them! And they want you to have them (for a price). I was on the hunt, recently, for salumi and cheeses and meze for a holiday gathering.

I’d already bagged my baba ganoush at Sahadi’s and some soppressata and Italian cheese from D. Coluccio & Sons (above), a store and importing/wholesale business that’s been around for half a century. (Like Sahadi’s, it has been an anchor in its neighborhood bringing hard-to-find artisanal and specialty products to a discriminating audience.) Now I’m ready to explore some of the small grocers.

Beth Lewand and Chris Gray opened Eastern District two years ago to bring their favorite beers and cheeses to Greenpoint. The shelves are stocked with plenty of local products, but the store sources farther afield too. The cheese selection will keep you there for half an hour trying to decide.

Mmmm….what to take? Great choices at Eastern District.

Salumi comes from such respected producers as Olympic Provisions in Seattle, Creminelli in Salt Lake City and Charlito’s Cocina in Queens. I sampled Charlito’s salumi earlier this summer at Smorgasburg. Charlito (Charles Samuel Wekselbaum), who was raised in a Cuban-American household, draws on the curing traditions of Spain and uses 100% pasture-raised heritage breed pork. (Check out his fig salumi, too.) Each week, there’s a different cheese/beer pairing at Eastern District, with rotating beers on tap (and growlers to take some home).

When you open the door of Bedford Cheese Shop, the pungent aromas of cheese hit you. This is a good thing. The cheese descriptions are witty, the staff helpful (they’ll always offer tastes). Salumi comes from small-batch producers.

Brooklyn Cheese Shop, established in 2003

Bedford Cheese Shop, established in 2003

The whole shop is inviting, with shelves stocked with the best of Brooklyn and beyond. At a second branch on Irving Place in Manhattan, Bedford Cheese now offers classes. Next up, on December 19: whiskey styles and their cheese counterparts.

A.L.C. Italian Grocery is a gem of a store in Bay Ridge that has been open less than two months. Owner Louis Coluccio grew up in the specialty food business (he is one of the sons in D. Coluccio & Sons). Now, for his own store, he aims to combine “the best of Italian products and the best of local products,” he told us when we visited last week.

The selection is meticulous and beautifully displayed. You’ll find Parmacotto Salumeria Rosi and smoked pancetta from Leoncini (both Italian) as well as Brooklyn Cured and Mosefund Farm meats.

Italian and Brooklyn products share the shelves at A.L.C. Italian Grocery.

Tastings happen often, sometimes twice a week; today was prosciutto—“Genuine prosciutto is made of only four ingredients: hand-selected legs of premier pigs, salt, air and skill.” A.L.C. Grocery is also working on some evening classes at the shop with select producers, which they hope to announce in early January.

Eastern District
1053 Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint
718-349-1432

D. Coluccio & Sons, Inc.
1214 60th Street, Borough Park
718-436-6700

Bedford Cheese Shop
229 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg
718-599-7588

A.L.C. Italian Grocery
8613 3rd Avenue, Bay Ridge
718-836-3200

Photographs by Basia Hellwig. Date stamp typographic design by Joy Makon Design. The font is American Typewriter, by Joel Kaden and Tony Stan, ITC, 1974.

Filed Under: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Food/Drink Tagged With: 12 Days of Brooklyn, 12 Sips and Tastes, 12 Tastes of Brooklyn, A.L.C. Italian Grocery, Bedford Cheese Shop, Beth lewand, Brooklyn Cured, charcuterie, Charlito's Cocina, cheese, Chris Gray, Creminelli, cured meats, D. Coluccio & Sons, Eastern District, Greenpoint, Louis Coluccio, Mosefund Farm, Olympic Provisions, prosciutto, salumi, Smorgasburg, Williamsburg

12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN: Not Your Grandmother’s Dumbo

December 15, 2012 by Anne Mollegen Smith Leave a Comment

Day Ten • 12 Views of Brooklyn

From the Brooklyn Roasting Phog. See Who’s Who

IT’S FUN TO MONITOR THE REAL-ESTATE MONIKERS for neighborhoods – especially the Edsels among them, like the failed attempt to brand WesChe. It conjured up English dog breeds or stinky cheese rather than the intended Chelsea-beyond-Tenth-Avenue. Some say it all started in the late ’60s with WestBeth, the early West-of-Bethune Street loft conversion for artists’ residential use. But it came to sound like a Laugh-In rerun, as if Dan Rowan has crossed the East River into Outer Brooklyn and is trying to orient himself with a broker’s map. Rowan: Wait, Soho, isn’t that in England? Dick Martin: No, it’s SOuth of HOuston. Rowan: Houston, isn’t that in Texas? Martin: No, say HOWston, don’t say HEWston. R: Well, then, for NoHo, shouldn’t that be NoHow? M: No way. R: Tribeca, was that a Native tribe like our Canarsie and Gowanus? M: No, TriBeCA is the Triangle Below Canal. And besides, Gowanus wasn’t a tribe, it was the name of the sachem of the Canarsees, the local group of the Lenape. (Long pause.) R: You Manhattanites make up stuff just to confuse people. In Brooklyn, our neighborhood names have history and dignity: Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Vinegar Hill, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights. M: With all those hills and heights, you Brooklyns must (rolling eyes) really like being high. Maybe that explains why you have a neighborhood called – heh heh –Dumbo. R: That’s an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, a historic district that recognizes Brooklyn’s hard-working industrial past. Martin, holding hands beside his head and flapping them like wings, annoyingly: Nothing to do with Walt Disney’s 1941 movie? Rowan stares, shakes head and exits stage left to the R train, proud to be a bridge-and-tunnel person.

Filed Under: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Look, Uncategorized Tagged With: 12 Days of Brooklyn, 12 Views of Brooklyn, DUMBO

The Comforts of Tea

December 14, 2012 by Bruce Campbell Leave a Comment

Day Nine • 12 Sips of Brooklyn

Michael Shannon of Bellocq Tea Atelier brewing tea so visitors can taste.

TAXONOMY, CLADISTICS, SYSTEMATICS, PHYLOGENETICS—so many ways to group and divide living things. Darwin famously sundered the world into “lumpers and splitters”: those who are happy with the general gist, and those who are obsessed with specifics.

The tea trade is one where splitters can run riot: green or black, white or yellow, oolong or pu-erh—all the varieties of Camellia sinensis that have descended through 3,000 years of recorded history. But even within those broad categories, there are nuances piled on subtleties, geography and climate, blends and additives, methods and styles of preparation. Japan and China have elaborate and precise rituals of preparing and serving tea that can last for hours. Even the pragmatic English have woven the drink into their culture and mythology.

Bellocq Christmas blend in its silver plate caddy

Visit Bellocq in Greenpoint during their limited shop hours and you immediately recognize that here be tea splitters. The neat rows of silver containers with the bold yellow and white labels signal that tea is taken very seriously in these precincts. Yes, you think, this is what a tea shop should be. It is a transport to a quiet and calm that seems centuries and leagues away from the busy streets of North Brooklyn 2012.

It can be a bit daunting. I admit I remain a bit of a lumper and my knowledge of tea is an inch deep and an inch wide, but I stand in awe of the level of awareness and sophistication about the product that is evident at an emporium like Bellocq.

On the day we visited, co-owner Michael Shannon presided in an unhurried manner that was helpful and deeply informative. He brewed tea and explored the intricacies of sourcing teas to avoid the hucksters and scams that abound in that market. He methodically poured samples while revealing a refined sense of the aesthetics of his product. He cracked open canisters to appreciate the aromas while speaking in the same calm fashion about the frenzy the business endured when it was recently cited in O, The Oprah Magazine as one of Oprah’s favorite things. An hour at Bellocq is as warming and refreshing to the spirit as the product they sell.

PS Coffee Tea N Spices in Park Slope is a different cup of tea. This store might appeal more to the lumpers among us. Stacks of boxes, cans and jars filled with teas and tisanes and infusions jostle for attention with spices and coffees. Here you feel awed less by the depth of tea esoterica and more by the breadth of stock in a little space. When asked how many teas the store carries, the manager responds, “Two hundred”, which I suspect is a conservative guesstimate. This is a diverse collection, with the old-fashioned packaging of Ty-phoo hard by the elegant boxes of Republic of Tea. I am certain you can find your heart’s desire, a tea for every condition of the spirit. But I like it because most of the time I remain a lumper: “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”

Bellocq Tea Atelier
104 West Street, Greenpoint
800-495-5416

PS Coffee Tea N Spices
368 5th Avenue, Park Slope
718-768-5561

Photographs by Basia Hellwig. Date stamp typographic design by Joy Makon Design. The font is Rockwell, by Morris Fuller Benton and Frank Pierpont, Monotype, 1934.

Filed Under: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Encore, Food/Drink, Uncategorized Tagged With: 12 Days of Brooklyn, 12 Sips and Tastes, 12 Sips of Brooklyn, Bellocq Tea Atelier, Greenpoint, Michael Shannon, O The Oprah Magazine, Park Slope, PS, PS Coffee Tea N Spices, tea

Kwanzaa: A Journey with Queen Nur; A Documentary Airs

December 14, 2012 by Anne Mollegen Smith Leave a Comment

BROOKLYN OBSERVES KAWANZAA IN MANY WAYS, both public and private. Since interest in the new celebration peaked in the 1990s, it remains a part of Brooklyn’s holiday season. Starting Dec. 26, many Brooklyn families set out a special table at home and light the kinsara candles to commemorate the seven principles of Kwanzaa.

Professional storyteller Queen Nur

On Monday, Dec.17, at Long Island University’s Kumble Theater, in morning and afternoon programs master storyteller Queen Nur will take her audiences on a journey through the seven principles of Kwanzaa in story, song, call and response, dance and drumming. Queen Nur (that is her professional name: privately, she is Karen Abdul-Malik) has practiced her storytelling arts at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in the New York City parks programs, and many places around the country, including the Walt Whitman Cultural Arts Center in Camden, NJ. She received her B.S.from Northeastern University and has taken post-graduate courses in African-American Studies and Folklore at Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. She now teaches Storytelling at Rutgers Camden’s Artist/Teacher Institute.

The Black Candle Kwanzaa documentary

Kwanzaa, a secular celebration of African heritage intended to codify and strengthen values for the American black community, was established in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, a black nationalist activist-turned-scholar who earned a Ph.D. from the University of California/Los Angeles, with a dissertation titled Maat, the Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics. Dr. Karenga now chairs the Africana Studies Department at California State University, in Long Beach.

Karenga figures in The Black Candle, a documentary about the origins of Kwanzaa narrated by Maya Angelou that was premiered last month on the Starz channel (on-demand TV) and will be shown again on Dec. 26 and 30.

Filed Under: Community, Uncategorized Tagged With: African heritage, Kwanzaa, Maulana Karenga, Queen Nur, The Black Candle

Flavors from Afar, Right Next Door

December 14, 2012 by Basia Hellwig 2 Comments

Day Nine • 12 Tastes of Brooklyn

Sahadi’s has been on Atlantic Avenue for 64 years.

SO MANY OF THE TASTES OF BROOKLYN—and we haven’t even scratched the surface here—have arrived with the waves of immigrants that grew the city into what it is today. Irish and Germans escaping famine or revolution at home—along with Brits and more than a few New England merchants and makers—had already made Brooklyn the third largest city in the U.S. by 1860. Then in the late 1880s came Russian Jews, Italians, Poles and Scandinavians, exploding the population and adding to its diversity again. By then, Brooklyn manufactured more goods than almost anywhere in the nation. The Great Migration brought Southern Blacks; Puerto Ricans arrived to work in the needle trades and cigar factories. Today, there are vital Caribbean and African-American and Chinese and Arab and Italian communities, just to mention a few. So you know where to go—right?— to get the very best patties or black cake or sufganiyot or sweet potato pie or dim sum or baba ganoush. Just head to a neighborhood and ask a local.

Tower of Takeout: makings of a party for less than $20

As times and economics change, ethnic enclaves blossom in a neighborhood and then fade and reappear in new neighborhoods. And always, they bring with them, and leave behind, the tastes of home—grocery stores, restaurants, food trucks. In more than a few cases, the grocers, of necessity, become importers—how else to get the beloved artisanal ingredients their customers need to make the handcrafted recipes that have been passed from generation to generation?

Sahadi’s Importing Co., with its retail grocery on Atlantic Avenue and a warehouse in Sunset Park, is just such a place. Charlie Sahadi’s father, Wade, came from Lebanon in 1919 to work in his uncle’s food business, established in 1895 in Little Syria (or Little Lebanon—Syria and Lebanon were part of the same country at the time) in lower Manhattan. In 1941 Wade decided to start his own business in Brooklyn, moving to the Atlantic Avenue location in 1948. “So I can’t take any credit,” says Charlie, far too modestly. “I was four at the time. But my brother and I, and now my children also, have kept it going. We’re in our 64th year.” Much of the Atlantic Avenue Arab-American community has moved to Bay Ridge or beyond now, and a thriving Sahadi’s welcomes crowds of multi-ethnic lovers of nuts, dried fruits, spices, olives, cheeses, breads, prepared foods (see above), olive oils and shelves and shelves of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern delicacies.

Olives and baba ganoush from Sahadi’s, in bowls by potter Claire Weissberg of Claireware.

This is the perfect place to go foraging if you’re pulling together drinks and bites for a crowd. The tower of takeout pictured above—from bottom: baba ganoush, Mediterranean olives, tabouleh, hummus, Moroccan picholine olives—came to all of $17.65. The baba ganoush is made with nothing but eggplant, tahini, garlic and lemon juice; the hummus with chick peas, tahini, garlic, lemon juice and water, the chef tells me. Yes, they have chefs because the food is prepared in their kitchens. The tabouleh is more parsley than bulgur, as it should be, and comes out of the kitchen bright green, freshly made.

Since I recently visited Claire Weissberg of Claireware: Urban Folk Pottery in her studio in Gowanus and purchased two beautiful little bowls, seen above, with olives and baba ganoush, I’m ready for my crowds. Well, I may need a few more bowls.

Sahadi’s
187 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn Heights
718-624-4550

Claireware
543 Union Street, Gowanus
718-875-3977 (call before making the trip)

Photographs by Basia Hellwig. Date stamp typographic design by Joy Makon Design. The font is Rockwell, by Morris Fuller Benton and Frank Pierpont, Monotype, 1934.

Filed Under: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Food/Drink, Uncategorized Tagged With: 12 Days of Brooklyn, 12 Sips and Tastes, 12 Tastes of Brooklyn, Arabic food, Atlantic Avenue, baba ganoush, Brooklyn Heights, Charlie Sahadi, Claire Weissberg, Claireware, ethnic food, Gowanus, hummus, Sahadi's Importing Co, Sunset Park, tabouleh, Urban Folk Pottery, Wade Sahadi

Wednesday Night at the Movies: Soda Fountain Series

December 14, 2012 by Phil Scott Leave a Comment

NEIGHBORHOOD MOVIES DISAPPEARED FROM THE BIG APPLE in the 90s, bankrupted by mega-Loews showing this week’s poorly acted action films in eye-splitting 3D. Forget about finding old-timey silent movies that have stood the test of time and reached across language barriers, except late at night on Turner Movie Classics. And except at the Brooklyn Farmacy & Soda Fountain.

Strange? Maybe not. Ben Model, silent film curator and accompanist and the evening’s host, says the earliest movie theaters were converted storefronts like the wonderfully preserved turn-of-the-last-century Farmacy. Wednesday night was the last in the Farmacy’s 2012 soda-fountain film festival, and by the time the show was about to begin, the place was packed with people in their 20s, begging one another for their tables’ empty chairs, sitting on the step where the almighty pharmacist used to hold court, leaning against the soda fountain, and slurping down their famous chocolate egg creams and hot chocolate.

The show Model assembled consisted of four comedy shorts, each 20 minutes in length (or 2 reels long), each converted from flammable acetate to 16 millimeter film (which, he explained, once were mailed to private homes, shown in parlors, then returned—a service much like Netflix). Then decades later each was converted from 16 millimeters to DVDs like the kind sent out by Netflix, and exactly what we would be watching. Before the movies started the Farmacy’s Gia Giasullo warned everyone that fountain service would be suspended during the movies, and then the lights went down.

Charlie Chaplin’s silent short Behind the Screen kicked off the festival. The print, crisp and clear, shows the hero’s antics as an assistant at a movie production company, with typical Chaplin slapstick. The next, Buster Keaton—the Human Medicine Ball, Model labeled him—was up with The Goat, featuring a mistaken identity and police chases galore. Then it was Good Cheer, a sentimental Hal Roach comedy featuring The Gang (sort of a prototype of Our Gang), an archetypical bunch of tenement-dwelling kids who wonder if Santa Claus really exists. This print was poor, but it was a lesson in film preservation, and how acetate film stock decays when the original is not copied to a more permanent material. A huge percentage of silent films have been lost, mostly because there’s no profit motive. (By the way, according to Good Cheer, Santa’s the real deal.) The last on the bill was arguably the most hilarious: Big Business, a rare Laurel and Hardy silent two-reeler (most of their movies were talkies), and a portrayal of Reciprocal Destruction: The pair’s attempt to sell a Christmas tree starts with an irate would-be customer clipping the tree’s top and ends with his house and their car reduced to rubble.

After the show Model took a couple of questions from the audience, and said that like most accompanists back in the day, he doesn’t play by a score. Fascinating stuff for the film buff, and a cheap date for the twentysomethings: the night at the movies was free. If you’re lucky, you can get to go next year.

Executive Editor Phil Scott often writes about travel and aviation.

Filed Under: Community, Encore, Food/Drink, Uncategorized Tagged With: Behind the Screen, Ben Model, Big Business, Brooklyn Farmacy & Soda Fountain, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Gia Giasullo, Good Cheer, Laurel and Hardy, silent films, silent movies, The Goat

12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN: Reflecting on the Gowanus

December 14, 2012 by Anne Mollegen Smith Leave a Comment

Day Nine • 12 Views of Brooklyn

Painting by Ella Yang. See Who’s Who

TWO KEY WORDS ASSOCIATED WITH THE GOWANUS CREEK CANAL are “toxic” and “sky.” Extra emphasis on the first came with reports of the woman’s body pulled out of the canal on Tuesday and immediately whisked off to Methodist Hospital, no more said about her condition. News accounts recapped the well-deserved EPA Superfund rating of one of the nation’s most extensively contaminated water bodies. True, all true, enough to make you gag . But the – literally – upside of our canal is the amount of open sky over both the waterway and the low-rise, mostly industrial buildings that line it. That is just how the light over the old downtown (in what we call Outer Brooklyn) Gansevoort Meatpacking District used to be, before high-rise development began to – again, literally – cast its shadows over what had become a “hot” area. The eternal urban tradeoff. While the debate over canal clean-up continues, it’s good to take some time before change comes to Gowanus to admire the big sky and its reflections. The landmarked Carroll Street bridge is a possible vantage. Help in seeing what you’re looking at comes from Ella Yang, whose painting is surely one of the most appealing representations of a Gowanus water scene since Henry Gritten‘s in 1851.