In the spirit of encouraging a free exchange of ideas, The Brooklyn Paper makes this space available to our readers.
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By Adam F. Hutton
Williamsburg Waterfront: The preservationist group that fought to landmark the Domino Sugar refinery and other industrial sites along the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront has changed its name to more accurately reflect its mission.
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By The Brooklyn Paper
Borough President Markowitz wants you at his Camp Brooklyn fundraiser on Nov. 15.
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By Susan Rosenthal Jay
Parenting: All the action for you and your kids!
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All the important meetings you should be going to.
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By Geraldine Ribollido
Bay Ridge: How are those new muni-meters doing on 86th Street?
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By Adam F. Hutton
DUMBO: Disgruntled non-union doormen, porters and maintenance workers took to the street in front of their DUMBO condo building to complain that they’re being cheated out of money and benefits by the company that runs the 33-story, all-luxury tower. But the president of the management company fired back this week, saying that his workers are paid the same — if not more — than union workers.
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By Adam Rathe
Brooklyn Bash: The Brooklyn Arts Exchange hosted its seventh annual “BAX 10 Arts and Artists in Progress Awards,” honoring 13 individuals who have made significant contributions to the local arts community, on Nov. 1 at the Prospect Park Picnic House. Over cocktails, GO Brooklyn caught up with BAX members and award winners and asked them to reminisce over the first award that they ever received. Â
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By Matthew Lysiak
Bay Ridge: Two legislators’ lawsuit against the MTA was dismissed this week, but there’s still a chance that the agency will have to fix the traffic on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge during the ongoing repairs.
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By Zachary Kolodin
Coney Island: Mayor Bloomberg (and his would-be successor, Speaker Christine Quinn) journeyed to the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Wednesday to unveil a $15-million historical center that will celebrate the Navy Yard’s illustrious role as a ship-building Mecca during World War II, when it employed 70,000 people.
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By Juliana Bunim
Books: Put down that Starbucks, get decked in your edgiest duds and head to Williamsburg’s Ad Hoc Art on Nov. 14 for a faux focus group celebrating the release of Anne Elizabeth Moore’s new book “Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity.”
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By Dana Rubinstein
Park Slope: Just three months after Seventh Avenue Books in Park Slope announced its demise, its neighbor just doors away, Park Slope Books, has confirmed that it, too, is closing.
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By Juliana Bunim
Everyday, about seven million New Yorkers spend almost $9 million on city subways and buses, but our guess is no one has any idea what happens to all that dough. For the first time, the New York Transit Museum is offering up all the answers in their latest exhibit, “Show Me the Money: From the Turnstile to the Bank.”Â
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By Adam Rathe
Waiting in the Wings: GO’s guide to what’s new in Brooklyn theater.
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By Ariella Cohen
Carroll Gardens: Two bartenders get honored for heroism by the 76th Precinct.
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By Harry Cheadle
Fort Greene: Two All Hallows Eve revelers had an ugly night, as they were jumped by a pair of perps who were handing out punches instead of candy. Plus all the other crime news from Fort Greene and Clinton Hill’s 88th Precinct.
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By Dana Rubinstein
Williamsburg: A night on the town turned into a nightmare for a 23-year-old woman when she returned to her South Third Street home from a South Williamsburg bar early on Nov 3. Plus all the other crime news from Williamsburg and Bushwick’s 90th Precinct.
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By Gersh Kuntzman
Park Slope: It could have been Batman, the Tin Man, or even that guy dressed as a banana — but now cops are hunting for the costumed creep who stole a woman’s laptop computer during her Halloween party. Plus all the other crime from Park Slope’s 78th Precinct.
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By Michael Giardina
Bay Ridge: A woman got burned twice in one day —Â first by the tanning salon she was patronizing and then by the thug who stole her purse while she was taking in the artificial daylight at the 86th Street salon on Nov. 3. Plus all the other crime news from Bensonhurst.
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By Adam Rathe
Breaking Chews: We’re dishing up Brooklyn’s latest food news.
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By Matthew Lysiak
Bay Ridge: A 15-year-old boy was robbed at gunpoint in front of his 62nd Street home on Nov. 2. Plus all the other crime news from Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights.
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By Dana Rubinstein
Greene Acres: Our columnist delves into the high-priced produce at Fresh Garden, a new organic bodega.
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By Tom Gilbert
Beside the Point: Our columnist picks his best (or is that worst?) Halloween haunted houses.
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By Matthew Lysiak
Yellow Hooker: Our columnist discovers the secret to killing the superbug: communication.
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By Wendy Ponte
PS … I Love You: Our columnist has a problem with a mean ass tree.
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By Ariella Cohen
Brooklyn South: Our columnist gets behind the call for a restaurant atop the Smith–Ninth Street subway station.
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By Deirdre Donovan
Theater: It was with trepidation that I confronted “The Seagull” at Brooklyn College in Midwood. Director Mary Robinson had bravely taken the cavernous space of the Gershwin Theatre and created a theater-within-a-theater on its proscenium stage. Would Chekhov’s gloom survive in such lovable smallness?
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By Mike McLaughlin
Politics: Irate Brooklyn politicians are pulling out the stops to prevent the MTA from raising mass transit fares next year.
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By Juliana Bunim
Heights Lowdown: Our columnist hates the smell — but loves the taste — of those damn gingko nuts.
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By Tina Barry
Dining: “If we thought places like this would open, we might have stuck around longer,” my husband said. He was referring to Il Torchio, an elegant new eatery that opened on Myrtle Avenue.
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By Leon Freilich
Perspective: The poet laureate of Park Slope, was so inspired by his neighborhood’s appearance on the list of best neighborhoods in the country that he created this week’s poetic offering, “A Hope for the Slope.”
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By Louise Crawford
Smartmom: Smartmom’s uncle died last week — but should she take Teen Spirit and the Oh So Feisty One to the funeral? And therein lies another great Smartmom psychodrama!
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By Adam F. Hutton
Williamsburg: Nathan Lichtenstein was born and raised in the Hasidic community in Williamsburg, but when he returned to his boyhood home to start a business a few months ago, he didn’t get a warm welcome from neighborhood’s ultra-Orthodox Jews.
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By Adam Rathe
Cinema: Park Slope’s Southpaw is the site for an intimate evening of film and literature with the Baumbach family.
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Letters: Our mailbag is filled with missives about our bike-riding editor (from his mom!), plans for the Gowanus Canal, our outrageous headlines, the Monitor Museum in Williamsburg, a Park Slope day-care center in a Kafka-esque nightmare, Smartmom’s new biggest fan (he’s a shrink, what a surprise!), and the need for more trains in Downtown Brooklyn.
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By Zachary Kolodin
Parents all over Brooklyn were no doubt scratching their heads over the city’s new progress report cards —Â “How could PS 107 get an ‘A’ while PS 321 got a ‘B’?” some Park Slope parents muttered; “And what’s with that ‘C’ for PS 8 in Brooklyn Heights?” others groused — but the grades should not be taken as the final word on school quality, the Department of Education said this week.
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By Gersh Kuntzman
Politics: Community Board 6 District Manager Craig Hammerman earned our coveted “Press Release of the Week” award for a bizarre exchange of e-mails with, well, it’s not entirely clear with whom.
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By Adam F. Hutton
Transit: Congestion pricing was the hottest public issue when Mayor Bloomberg announced the traffic-reducing initiative this summer, but only about 100 people showed up for a public hearing on the issue in Downtown Brooklyn last week — and 20 of those were elected officials.
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By Gersh Kuntzman
Bay Ridge: A councilman wants to dig a subway tunnel to Staten Island!
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By Zachary Kolodin
Atlantic Yards: Tenants in a building slated to be torn down to make way for Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards ran for their lives last Wednesday as bricks fell from the building’s facade — the second time in the last three months that a Ratner-owned building suffered a partial collapse during demolition.
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Construction Update: Work continues on Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards mega-project — and even though the state hasn’t appointed its promised ombudsman to oversee construction work (186 days and counting!), Empire State Development Corporation minions are getting increasingly good about filling us in on what’s going on in the project footprint.
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By Mike McLaughlin
Atlantic Yards: A coalition of local officials is demanding an independent security review of the Atlantic Yards mega-project because the state’s development agency can’t be trusted to put the public safety first.
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By Daniel Goldberg
Dance: For its final show on its first U.S. tour, the Iceland Dance Company will make its New York City debut with Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday. GO Brooklyn’s Daniel Goldberg caught up with Artistic Director Katrin Hall to discuss modern dance, how American audiences react to Icelandic art and what exactly we can expect from the Scandinavian troupe.
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By Dana Rubinstein
Politics: Controversial former Councilman Noach Dear trounced Republican James McCall for a Civil Court seat on Tuesday. Not bad for a guy who didn’t campaign and was opposed by rank-and-file liberals.
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By Mike McLaughlin
New details emerged about the closing of the Smith and Ninth subway station in 2010, including a promise by transit officials that the beleaguered station will get “a complete rehabilitation” to fix the crumbling platforms, leaky roof and dimly lit staircases.
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By Dana Rubinstein
BAM District: The centerpiece of a world-class arts district that’s going up around the Brooklyn Academy of Music will be built by a local developer, The Brooklyn Paper has learned.
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By Adam F. Hutton
Downtown plan: Architect Karl Fischer got one step closer to building his dream hotel tower Downtown last month after V3 Hotel Management bought the VIM building on Duffield Street for $9.5 million.
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By Adam F. Hutton
Williamsburg: This 10-story condo tower soaring over Richardson Street in Williamsburg finally has a name. Counterintuitive though it may be, the developer is calling the dark-colored tower Luminous.
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By Mike McLaughlin
Carroll Gardens: A developer presented a plan for big buildings along the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, but Community Board 6 wasn’t impressed.
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By Adam Rathe
Music: A review of “The BQE,” Sufjan Stevens’s new work, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
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By Dana Rubinstein
Downtown plan: Downtown Brooklyn’s biggest booster said this week that the development the area will experience in the next five years —Â adding more than 14,000 apartments, 1,800 hotel rooms and 1.6 million square feet of office space — is happening faster than some of the neighborhood’s basic infrastructure can handle. But Downtown Brooklyn Partnership President Joe Chan said he and his staff were on top of it.
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By Gersh Kuntzman
Brooklyn Angle: Our columnist gets loaded — and cranks out the best drunken art of his career.
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By Zachary Kolodin
Park Slope: Flatbush Avenue stalwarts Mooney’s Pub and Royal Video are facing imminent eviction by their common landlord — and many see the loss as further evidence that Park Slope is becoming more generic.
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By Ben Popper
Music: It is easy to find a place where humans play music. The venues for robots, on the other hand, are few and far between. Luckily, the LEMURplex in Gowanus has just opened its doors, so Brooklyn has a space where the public can play interesting instruments, and the instruments can play right back. Â
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By Mike McLaughlin
Carroll Gardens: A Red Hook bar that was written up last month by the city Health Department after one of its bartenders used his bare hand — horrors! — to place a lime inside a bottle of Corona is now using tongs to stay on the right side of the law, even as its customers call it a sell-out to the bureaucrats.
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By Carrie Laben
There are invaders pouring across the Canadian border, and Homeland Security is doing nothing to stop them. They are fearless, acrobatic, and easy to ignore unless you’re wary and alert. They could be anywhere — in any park, in any schoolyard, in any garden. There could be one lurking outside your window right now, looking in with a dark and beady eye.
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By Gersh Kuntzman
Atlantic Yards: Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sued Frank Gehry — the visionary behind Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards — claiming that his three-year-old building on the Cambridge campus is already falling apart.
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Editorial: The city’s plan to crush Joe Sitt’s plan for a Coney Island Xanadu raises a lot of questions.
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By Dana Rubinstein
Coney Island: Mayor Bloomberg on Thursday brushed aside developer Joe Sitt’s plan to turn Coney Island into a Las Vegas–style playground on the Boardwalk — while proposing his own, remarkably similar plan.
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