Look – Brooklyn Artisan

Chalk It Up: A Union Hall That Invites You In

January 4, 2013 by Anne Mollegen Smith 2 Comments

You might think that Union Hall is where labor union members turn out for job calls. But not here. This Union Hall is on Union Street, as in "Union vs. Confederacy," and as the billiards suggest, it's a place you're invited to hang out. (Brooklyn Artisan photo pool)

You might think that Union Hall is where labor turns out
for job calls or votes. But not here. This Union Hall is on Union Street,
as in “Union vs. Confederacy,” and as the colliding bocce suggest,
it’s a tavern that invites you to hang out. (Photograph by Brooklyn Artisan Photo Pool)

CHALKBOARDS ARE A TIME-HONORED PRACTICE IN THE FOOD BIZ. Think of bistro menus propped on bentwood chairs in Paris, think of kosher deli listings on overhead blackboards while everyone’s shouting out orders, think of chalkboard easels outside restaurants along the streets and avenues of Brooklyn. Chalkboards can be as quick ‘n’ easy or as glamorous as the establishment requires. (Starbucks, for instance.)

After all, unlike print on paper, all you need to change an entrée (or adjust the prix fixe) is a moist bar cloth, and presto! The slate is as erasable as an iPad. The original tabula rasa. A little inspiration, a little colored craie (French talc stick), and the board becomes an invitation to express yourself or your business’s image. To quote your favorite philosopher or reference your favorite comics. To DIY or yield to your betters. In general the medium is fluid rather than stiff, friendly rather than formal; compare the above with the same Union Hall‘s logo at right.

From time to time over the next few weeks, Brooklyn Artisan will be sharing what we’ve seen through our lenses, with comments or not – mostly just letting the chalkistas speak for themselves.

Filed Under: Chalkboard, Community, Food/Drink, Look, Uncategorized Tagged With: artisanal signage, blackboard, bocce balls, Brooklyn, chalk art, chalkboard, Union Hall

Chalk of the Town: Starbucks Shows How It Fits Right In

January 3, 2013 by Anne Mollegen Smith 1 Comment

DOUBLETAKE: Before coffee, waiting in line, staring at the chalkboard in the
Slope Starbucks, it took me a full minute to see that among the brownstones were
two house-brand coffee bricks. (Photograph by Brooklyn Artisan Photo Pool)

Filed Under: Craft/Design, Look, Uncategorized

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

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

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.

Filed Under: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Look, Uncategorized Tagged With: 12 Days of Brooklyn, 12 Views of Brooklyn artists, 440 Gallery, Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal, Ella Yang, EPA rating, EPA Superfund site, Gansevoort, Gowanus Creek, Henry Gritten, Meatpacking District, New York Superfund site

12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN: Good Porches Make Good Neighbors

December 13, 2012 by Anne Mollegen Smith 1 Comment

Day Eight • 12 Views of Brooklyn

Photograph by Joy Makon. See Who’s Who.

BROWNSTONE BROOKLYN, PEOPLE SAY – never mind that some of the rowhouses are brick or limestone, or interrupted by modern condos of concrete, glass and steel and the occasional larger pre-war apartment buildings. In mind’s eye, the long blocks between avenues have a rhythm or regularity that overcomes the variations. One can call the roll of neighborhoods: Albemarle Place, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Clinton Hill, Crown Heights…all the way up the alphabet past Prospect Park South and Sunset Park to Windsor Terrace, where among the low-rise blocks are two jewels: Howard Place and, seen here, Fuller Place. Thanks to careful stewardship by the Fuller Place homeowners, the line of contiguous front porches is as pristine as this new-fallen snow.

Filed Under: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Look Tagged With: 12 Days of Brooklyn, 12 Views of Brooklyn, Brooklyn neighborhoods, Brownstone Brooklyn, front porches, Fuller Place, Joy Makon Design, Windsor Terrace

12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN … And Some Are Rainy

December 12, 2012 by Anne Mollegen Smith 1 Comment

Day Seven • 12 Views of Brooklyn

Etching by Eric March in an edition of 25, at the Park Slope Gallery.

Etching by Eric March. Edition of 25, at the Park Slope Gallery.

OF COURSE THE STEEPLE IS FAMILIAR. If you’ve ever commuted out of Brooklyn and back to the Seventh Avenue stop on the B/Q line, then you know this view looking south on the avenue. But it takes the artist’s eye and the etcher’s touch of Eric March to show the delicate beauty of a moment when you or I would likely be preoccupied by wet shoes. Even if this particular spire is not on your route home, then almost surely you have one of your own, or two, for Brooklyn lives its nickname as “the city of churches.” How horrifying when the tornado of 2010 attacked not just our trees but our steeples, shaking their bricks and stones, rattling their slate roofs, shackling them to scaffolds for months and months. A few were even removed rather than rebuilt – like yanking a tooth – and still others were humiliatingly reduced. Of course we personalize these losses: Thrilling as the new towers of downtown Brooklyn may be, we know in our souls they are impersonal, godless, compared to our neighborhood steeples. (See Who’s Who.)

Filed Under: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Look, Uncategorized Tagged With: artist Eric March, Brooklyn "city of churches", Brooklyn steeple, contemporary etching, Eric March etching, Park Slope Gallery, Rainy day scene, September Rain Seventh Avenue

12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN: Why ‘Chanukah House’ is Dark in 2012

December 11, 2012 by Anne Mollegen Smith Leave a Comment

Day Six • 12 Views of Brooklyn

(Used by permission of the homeowner)

DANIEL TEITELBAUM GIVES THE HISTORY of the exuberant decorations on his family’s house. “The miracle of Chanukah is supposed to be publicized. That is why Jews all over the world light their menorahs in the windows or doorways of their homes where people passing in the street can see it. We have just taken it a step further.” When their daughter was two years old, “We started with a single dreidle made out of wood and strung with white lights. We then added blue lights that we put up together with white lights around our home. From that time on we tried to add something new every year.” The renown of the house in Mill Basin has grown. “In 2006, we were presented with a proclamation from Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz naming our home, the official Brooklyn Chanukah House.” (More about this in our Who’s Who.) This year is sadly different: “Due to Hurricane Sandy the Brooklyn Chanukah House is not able to put up its display. We suffered significant damage to our home and the repairs will not be completed before Chanukah. We apologize for this and wish to thank everyone for their messages of support. We will be back next Chanukah better than ever. Chanukah Sameach.”

Filed Under: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Look, Uncategorized Tagged With: 12 Views of Brooklyn, Brooklyn Chanukah House, Daniel Teitelbaum, Hanukkah Brooklyn, Hurricane Sandy damage, Marty Markowitz proclamation

12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN: Diversity Is in Our Cultural DNA

December 10, 2012 by Anne Mollegen Smith Leave a Comment

Day Five • 12 Views of Brooklyn

THE GREAT 20TH CENTURY ANTHROPOLOGIST DR. MARGARET MEAD observed in one of her magazine columns in the late 1960s that the only true citizens of a culture are the children born into it, not the adults who have created it. You have only to see a three year old with an iPad to get her point. The self-consciousness of the peace movement of the 60s, of affirmative action, of busing and political correctness have made a difference. Out of that tradition comes this panel of a larger mural. The little girl has a peace symbol on her shirt; the little boy’s shirt says, “Shalom. Salaam. Adios” – all of them versions of Peace and go with God. Society’s problems of racial and religious intolerance have not been solved, but they’ve certainly been shrunk. The signature for the artist (s) for this multi-panel mural in Park Slope, on 8th Street and the corner of 6th Avenue, is not on the wall; the message is everything. (More from this mural in Who’s Who.)