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The Brooklyn Paper / Julie Rosenberg

Last year's umbrella initiative in Park Slope inspired this year's borough-wide local buying effort.

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The Brooklyn Paper / Joe Marino

Borough President Markowitz is pointing the way towards a local shopping initiative this holiday season.

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Talk about retail therapy.

The city economy has come down with pneumonia, but on Wednesday, Borough President Markowitz will propose a treatment: start shopping — but do it locally.

Markowitz hopes to encourage nearly 300 merchants in a borough-wide “Buy in Brooklyn” effort that will include discounts and other incentives starting on the so-called “Black Friday” after Thanksgiving and continuing on weekends from Nov. 23 through Dec. 21.

In exchange, the small business owners would get a push from Borough Hall in the form of a shopping guidebook and, possibly, ads in area newspapers.

It is unclear how much in taxpayer dollars Markowitz will spend on a project to keep taxpayer dollars in Brooklyn. A spokesman did not come up with the figure in time for our Web deadline.

Whatever the cost, Markowitz said it was worth it because buying locally is imperative.

“Shopping local keeps Brooklyn thriving — you could say, a Brooklyn patron is a Brooklyn ‘patriot,’” he said. “Shop, eat, drink and enjoy the holiday season in Brooklyn. Take a family stroll down Brooklyn’s lively thoroughfares, and you’ll find every gift on your holiday list and have a delicious meal to boot — at a great price with a ‘Brooklyn bonus.’”

When shoppers buy goods locally, a large portion of the money stays in the community, explained Catherine Bohne, the founder of the original Park Slope-based “Buy in Brooklyn” campaign, which started last year and inspired Markowitz’s larger effort this year.

In the original program, shopkeepers in Park Slope handed out “Buy in Brooklyn” umbrellas when it rained. Umbrella-takers were expected to return the bumbershoots to other stores once the downpour stopped, but it didn’t exactly work as planned; Bohne said this week she is ordering more because many people took the umbrellas home (though that was fine by her because the logo-covered umbrellas are their own marketing strategy).

That effort led to other projects, including a special winter shopping night with discounts and late hours, and Seventh Avenue restaurant tour.

Supporting the local business is exactly what is needed this holiday season, said Bohne, who owns the Community Bookstore in Park Slope.

“It’s [important to shop locally], but it just feels all the more urgent in this upcoming economic climate,” she said. “In Brooklyn, our lives [of residents and shop owners] overlap, and the public space of the city is in a lot of ways largely the retail space. We’re all intertwined that way, and there’s all sorts of value added to local stores that support you, too.”

©2008 The Brooklyn Paper

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