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)
Chalk of the Town: Starbucks Shows How It Fits Right In
January 3, 2013 by 1 Comment
Happy 2013 to Brooklyn Artisans (and Small Batch Producers Everywhere!)
December 31, 2012 by Leave a Comment
To welcome 2013, some dazzle’s the thing, so we added this bit of skeuomorphic bling.
‘Twas the week before Christmas, and all over the place,
Brooklyn artisans were producing at a furious pace.
The labels were ready, as nice as you please,
Santa’s sack stood open, for packing with ease.
Distribution was simple, down the chimney’s a breeze!
We thank the farm markets, the Smorg’ and the Fleas
For bringing us tasters of pickles and cheese,
And honor all sippers of egg creams and brews
Not to mention our local distillers’ own booze.
We salute thee, St. Fedex and brave UPS,
Whose overnight services make us feel blessed,
And Avery Labels so our products look dressed!
With letter-press greetings and paperless mail,
Arduinos, 3D printers and the newest craft cocktail,
The New Year’s exciting, but first – time to rest!
Latest word: Brooklyn-artisan.net will be back in action January 3.
Joy’s Best of Brooklyn, December 28, 29, 30
December 27, 2012 by 2 Comments
PART TWO
The Team at Brooklyn Artisan is thankful for:
Here’s Part Two of our list. What are you thankful for? We’d love to know. Share with us on Facebook, email, or leave a comment.
^ Getting to see and play around Natural History, the complex, visually striking stick sculpture by Patrick Doherty, at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Created to be temporary, yet having lasted well over a year, it will be dismantled on December 31 because wear-and-tear and numerous storms have finally broken it down. (Photograph, taken in February 2011 is courtesy of One Little Star.)
Families who’ve donated tons of toddler toys to the Underhill Playground in Prospect Heights
The passing stranger who saw our keys hanging in the lock and kindly put them through the mail slot.
Seemingly unlimited energy and creativity in fundraising for Sandy restoration efforts.
ReStore Red Hook is one such effort, formed to raise at least $5,000 for neighborhood small businesses still reeling from Sandy. Their cookbook, All Hands On Deck, a $15 e-book download, is a collection of well-loved recipes selected from the tightly-knit community. Recipes include home/made’s Flourless Chocolate Torte, Pumpkin Almond Cake from Baked and Lobster Mac & Cheese from Red Hook Lobster Pound. “People put everything they had into their restaurants,” said Monica Byrne, a ReStore Red Hook co-founder whose restaurant home/made and its basement storage was flooded during the storm. This project gives a glimpse into what makes the businesses and the people running them so special. Purchase and download here.
Bergen Bagel for what they do best: bagels.
^ ^ ^ ^ Bagel fight! Terrace Bagels for what they do best: cinnamon-raisin bagels.
Pete Hamill, the former Shabbos goy at Park Slope Jewish Center in the 1940’s, for reading “The Gift of the Magi” at the Brooklyn Holiday Book Fair at Old Stone House.
Our Chemex coffeemaker for its timeless design. No other carafe or coffeemaker matches the elegance of pouring coffee from this glass spout. Ours is circa 1980; the rawhide tie gets replaced every few years.
MTA.info/nyct for keeping us up to date after Sandy flooded the subway tunnels.
Neighbors who’ve turned sidewalks and stoops into free libraries.
December 31 at 11:59:59pm. (Photograph: Prospect Park Alliance/Paul Martinka.)
New Years celebrations in the nabe:
* Fort Defiance. EVE: an evening with Master of Mixology Charles H. Baker, Jr. DAY: Southern brunch with Coca-Cola ham, biscuits, lots more. Yes, reserve. Red Hook.
* Fireworks in Prospect Park at Grand Army Plaza. Thank you Marty.
* Run. EVE: Brooklyn Road Runners sponsors a 5K in Prospect Park at 11:15, complete with glow necklaces and fleece hats for registrants. DAY: Prospect Park Track Club’s 20th annual Harry’s Handicap Race at 10am. One loop of Prospect Park, followed by potluck brunch, coffee, bagels with a great group of runners and friends. It’s been awhile, but we’ve run this one at least ten times, and it’s always a hoot.
* Walk over the Brooklyn Bridge with Dr. Phil. Philip E. Schoenberg, Ph.D., that is. His annual walk is a chance to party and play on the Bridge, complete with fireworks viewings, refreshments, prizes, and lots of chances to pick up little-known facts from one of NYC’s best tour guides.
This kitty via NYC Food Truck Association
and This > “A home without a cat—and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat—may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?”—Mark Twain. Quote and photograph from Home Again, a series of global photographs defining the idea of home, from the blog of photographer Steve McCurry.
Kings County Hospital ER for taking care of 140,000 of our sick and injured every year.
Saint Augustine Roman Catholic Church for their remembrance of World Aids Day.
Everyone in the surf, on January 1, 2013. (Photograph from the Coney Island Polar Bear Club.)
Coney Island for an amazing summer with beach walks, Nathan’s, Grimaldi’s pizza, and Tom’s. We’ll be back next summer no matter what. And come January 1 at 1pm, we will be (only) observing the annual New Year’s Day Swim by the Coney Island Polar Bear Club. Happy Happy Joy Joy—so glad to hear the swim is on!
Sally Gil’s work FW1, part of 440 Gallery Small Works Show.
Gorilla Coffee for even a stroll-by creates a caffeine high.
Ella Yang for allowing us to showcase her Brooklyn-without-irony paintings: see Day Four from our 12 Days of Brooklyn posts. Ella is a member and exhibitor at the artist collective 440 Gallery where the 8th annual Small Works Show is currently on. Juried artwork is no larger than 12” and represents a strong Brooklyn artistic presence. Great things come in small packages indeed. Park Slope. Through January 6, 2013.
Holidays at Fort Defiance. (Photograph by
Basia Hellwig/Brooklyn Artisan Photo Pool.)
3rd Ward and all the other co-working spaces that help give cred and shelter to the artisanal work being done here.
Mixologist and Fort Defiance owner
St. John Frizell for sticking it out.
*
*
*
If you missed Part One, catch up here.
Joy Makon curates Brooklyn Artisan’s Craft & Design coverage and creates the weekly Best of Brooklyn lists.
Send items for listings to brooklynartisan@joymakondesign.com
Joy’s Best of Brooklyn, December 21, 22, 23
December 20, 2012 by 1 Comment
PERHAPS WE’RE STARTING A NEW TRADITION FOR BROOKLYN ARTISAN, a review of all that’s been good and interesting in the past few months for our fledgling blog. At the least, this is a Best of Brooklyn listing of what we’ve been thankful for—the people, places and events that have made us stop and think, smile, and go wow, look at that. So for the next two weeks, the team will be sharing their thanks for the things that make small-town Brooklyn, as my neighbor Helen calls it, so great. In the mix, we’ll post some timely end-of-year events. If Outer Brooklyn creeps in, we’ll understand too. What are you thankful for? We’d love to know. Share with us on Facebook, email, or leave a comment.
PART ONE
The Team at Brooklyn Artisan is thankful for:
The lights in Dyker Heights. Say what you will, but the lights stop traffic
and stop us in place too. Shorewalkers, a group dedicated to seeing the world
at 3 miles per hour, is having a free meetup on Saturday at 5:30 to view the lights.
A 4 mile route is planned, but you can always do a shorter distance.
You’ll probably be on sensory overload anyway. Check the website for details.
(photograph: nycgo.com/Marley White)
Sahadi’s for renovating and reopening and turning us on to cumin once again.
Stroller Moms and Dads of Park Slope for their work and donations to help Sandy victims.
Landlines and Rotary Dials. Don’t misunderstand, we ♥ our twee iDevice. Sometimes we enjoy picking up a receiver and hearing the other person.
More Brits in Brooklyn on Saturday: Holiday Artisans Fair at The Monro.
Park Slope. 2pm-7pm.
Fleisher’s Meats for letting us taste real beef.
The G train for coming back so we can get to BAM easily again.
← The footie in Bklyn → The Tottenham Hotspurs have a home in Kings County at Black Horse Pub. Oh when the Spurs go marching in!
Egg creams, panettone, black-and-white cookies for the 5 lb weight gain. NOT. (Better: our thanks to the staff and volunteers at the Park Slope Armory for running the emergency shelter for Sandy evacuees. We’re glad, too, that the Armory YMCA has reopened and we can work off the holiday excess.)
In our opinion, we are thankful that The Double Windsor has surpassed Farrell’s as the neighborhood fixture.
The small businesses on our stretch of Prospect Park West that have made our life sane: Argyle Yarn Shop (new, filled with gorgeous yarn, yum!); DUB Pies (where the Paul Auster movie “Smoke” with Harvey Keitel and William Hurt was filmed); The Double Windsor (no Farrell’s competition here); Windsor Shoes (the best little shoe store nobody knows about); United Meat Market (for showing us what a butcher shop is all about and for keeping up with the changing neighborhood demographics); and even the sometimes unpredictable Enzo’s (brickoven pizza and a drink is always fine by us.)
Our generousity. Photographs and ephemera from The Santa Claus Association,
circa 1913, is on display at The City Reliquary. For 14 years, this NYC-based philanthropic
group answered letters to Santa and distributed gifts to over 28,000 children.
Williamsburg. Through February, 2013.
American Express for promoting Small Business Saturday. (Kudos to NYC Dept. of Small Business Services for their campaign too.)
Learning how to brew our own beer. Bitter & Esters will teach all the basics on Saturday at their Brewshop 101: Home Brewing Essentials class. Prospect Heights. 4pm-6pm.
Barclays Center (grudgingly) because the the traffic’s not as bad as we feared.
Brad Lander because he’s such an involved and innovative Councilmember.
Lisa Jenks for designing her coveted jewelry collection in Brooklyn!
THIS: Weigh Your Priorities. Most startups are focused on growing faster. That alone would not make us a great company. We realized we had to focus on three things: love, growth, and foundation. —Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb (as quoted in Fast Company)
An upgrade to our Jewish Christmas celebration of Chinese food and a movie. Mile End’s menu of DanDan Noodles with Spicy Lamb, Dry Rubbed Chicken Wings, Smoked Bluefish Toast, and more, plus BAM or Cobble Hill Cinema nearby practically makes us giddy. If only Schmulka Bernstein was still around.
Park Slope Gallery for encouraging Eric March’s beautiful artwork of Brooklyn cityscapes.
All-natural Gingerbread House Making. No corn syrup for us, only dried fruit and natural candy, as guided by the team from The Farm on Adderley. This Sunday, build your brownstone at Hootenanny Art House in Park Slope. Next Thursday, have lunch and build a manse at The Farm in Ditmas Park.
The return of Patsy Grimaldi. The king of coal-fired, NY-sired pizza is back with Juliana’s Pizza and is better than ever. We went opening day, and will go again!
The fact that Brooklyn is practically a brand name. We are well-represented at the
Grand Central Holiday Fair in Outer Brooklyn.
Stay tuned for Part Two next week.
Joy Makon curates Brooklyn Artisan’s Craft & Design coverage and creates the weekly Best of Brooklyn lists.
Send items for listings to brooklynartisan@joymakondesign.com
12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN: And There Shall Be Trees
December 16, 2012 by 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.
12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN: Not Your Grandmother’s Dumbo
December 15, 2012 by 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.
12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN: Reflecting on the Gowanus
December 14, 2012 by 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.
12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN: Good Porches Make Good Neighbors
December 13, 2012 by 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.
12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN … And Some Are Rainy
December 12, 2012 by 1 Comment
Day Seven • 12 Views of Brooklyn
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.)
Brooklyn Artisan 
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