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Re: Brooklyn people
Atlantic Yards project - alive and well.
Not canceled by any means - sadly.
Atlantic Yards project - alive and well.
Not canceled by any means - sadly.
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Re: Brooklyn people
My neighborhood - frighteningly, slowly but surely, Clinton Hill/Ft Green, turning into a little "Park Slope".
Gen - remember I told you we went to look at those Myrtly Avenue condos a few weeks ago - the studio and 1 bedrooms for 6 and $700k ... not pretty.
I've lived in Clinton Hill for years - the wave of change the past 4 years - startling.
There's already 2 "Connecticut Muffins" on Myrtle Ave.
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Re: Brooklyn people
Yuri wah wrong wid connecticut muffin
dem usually have free wireless if yuh evah need it
mi know wah yuh mean. the trader joes ovah yahsuh juss send up the housing prices by 15%
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Yuri_</div><div class="ubbcode-body">My neighborhood - frighteningly, slowly but surely, Clinton Hill/Ft Green, turning into a little "Park Slope".
Gen - remember I told you we went to look at those Myrtly Avenue condos a few weeks ago - the studio and 1 bedrooms for 6 and $700k ... not pretty.
I've lived in Clinton Hill for years - the wave of change the past 4 years - startling.
There's already 2 "Connecticut Muffins" on Myrtle Ave. </div></div>
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Re: Brooklyn people
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Yuri_</div><div class="ubbcode-body">My neighborhood - frighteningly, slowly but surely, Clinton Hill/Ft Green, turning into a little "Park Slope".
Gen - remember I told you we went to look at those Myrtly Avenue condos a few weeks ago - the studio and 1 bedrooms for 6 and $700k ... not pretty.
I've lived in Clinton Hill for years - the wave of change the past 4 years - startling.
There's already 2 "Connecticut Muffins" on Myrtle Ave. </div></div>
Clinton Hills, huh? I lived in the same area on Washington Ave. between Willoughby and Myrtle. Left there in 1987 but paid a few visits down there on my visit to N.Y.Comment
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Re: Brooklyn people
Ah rite - seet deh ... likkle moas wha Stahbux soon opin.
Two, two's - wha Gap!
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Gen</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Yuri wah wrong wid connecticut muffin dem usually have free wireless if yuh evah need it
mi know wah yuh mean. the trader joes ovah yahsuh juss send up the housing prices by 15%
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Yuri_</div><div class="ubbcode-body">My neighborhood - frighteningly, slowly but surely, Clinton Hill/Ft Green, turning into a little "Park Slope".
Gen - remember I told you we went to look at those Myrtly Avenue condos a few weeks ago - the studio and 1 bedrooms for 6 and $700k ... not pretty.
I've lived in Clinton Hill for years - the wave of change the past 4 years - startling.
There's already 2 "Connecticut Muffins" on Myrtle Ave. </div></div> </div></div>
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Re: Brooklyn people
I'm on Washington between Dekalb and Willoughby.
Not for long tho.
Soon leave gahn.
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Mutty</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Yuri_</div><div class="ubbcode-body">My neighborhood - frighteningly, slowly but surely, Clinton Hill/Ft Green, turning into a little "Park Slope".
Gen - remember I told you we went to look at those Myrtly Avenue condos a few weeks ago - the studio and 1 bedrooms for 6 and $700k ... not pretty.
I've lived in Clinton Hill for years - the wave of change the past 4 years - startling.
There's already 2 "Connecticut Muffins" on Myrtle Ave. </div></div>
Clinton Hills, huh? I lived in the same area on Washington Ave. between Willoughby and Myrtle. Left there in 1987 but paid a few visits down there on my visit to N.Y. </div></div>Comment
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Re: Brooklyn people
Wow! one block over. I used to live in this house:
Made this man on the corner of Myrtle and Washington rich living on Chinese food:
and used to attend this place of wor**** on the corner of Washington and Lafayette:
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Re: Brooklyn people
Yuri have you checked out Nelson George's retrospective on the black bohemian scene of FG/CH in the late 80s/90s?
everytime somebaddy talk bout what it was like back in the day me feel fe man those were beautiful days..aye sah
did you ever shop at VJ Jones?Comment
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Re: Brooklyn people
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">April 5, 2009
New York Observed
Strangers on His Street
By NELSON GEORGE
ON a recent unusually mild Saturday, I strolled around Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and, perhaps because of my respectable salt-and-pepper goatee, several folks asked me for directions. An affable white couple on bikes wanted to know how to get to Williamsburg; a young hipster asked me which way to the Alibi Club, the Pratt Institute hangout. I got a burger at a new spot on Lafayette Avenue and contemplated the passing parade.
I’ve been gentrified, and while I’m not as mad as hell, I’m not entirely comfortable as an artsy, graying black man of 51 when I walk the streets of the neighborhood where I’ve lived half my life.
There are plenty of men and women pushing strollers, all of them white. Lots of interracial couples. I walk past a bodega where the “clockers” used to sell drugs by the pay phones. My friends and I used to joke that the presence of these crack dealers on select corners “protected” us from real estate speculators and home-hungry Manhattanites.
Once the aura of danger left Fort Greene, its many charms could no longer be hidden. When Corcoran opened a real estate office on Lafayette Avenue several years ago, it was clear to me that my Fort Greene was history.
From roughly 1986, when Spike Lee’s first feature-length film, “She’s Gotta Have It,” which I helped finance, captured the spirit of the black bohemia in Fort Greene, until the early years of this decade, I had always viewed the area as a crucial black artistic enclave. It had nurtured some of the most important African-American talents of the past two decades, from Wynton Marsalis and Chris Rock to Erykah Badu.
And the neighborhood became the centerpiece of this black alternative vision precisely because it was a place where many whites were afraid to go. While Harlem carried the weight and burden of its celebrated past, Fort Greene was where young black artists were freer to concoct a new synthesis of the old and the new, in film, music and literature.
First, a bit of personal history: I grew up in a tough, sometimes terrible place known as Brownsville, specifically the Samuel J. Tilden housing project on Livonia Avenue next to the elevated New Lots subway line. When my mother finally pulled us out of the projects, it was to take us to East New York, which was as rough as Brownsville but gave us a chance to own a home.
Like most native New Yorkers of my generation, I was raised in a city rigidly defined by tribal homelands. Racial tension caused by the blurring of these boundaries has been as much a part of Brooklyn’s DNA as knishes were and beef patties have become. But it was also true that whites typically fled whenever a critical mass of blacks arrived.
After a post-college stint of four years in Jamaica, Queens, I ended up back in Brooklyn, in Fort Greene, in 1985. It was a neighborhood I knew only because of Brooklyn Technical High School, the housing projects that had produced the Knicks’ brilliant small forward Bernard King and its proximity to Junior’s, the cheesecake emporium.
When I moved to the neighborhood, a significant number of white homeowners were living on the glorious brownstone “South” streets like Oxford, Portland and Elliot, but their presence was dwarfed by two kinds of black folks.
First, there were the working-class people who drank at Frank’s bar on Fulton Street, ate Sunday brunch at Two Steps Down on Dekalb Avenue and avoided eye contact with the minor-league clockers selling crack cocaine and marijuana outside a bodega on Lafayette near Fort Greene Place. Then there were aspiring young black artists like me.
Though there had long been a black artistic presence in the area — mostly jazz people like Cecil Taylor, Betty Carter and Spike’s father, Bill Lee — I was part of a wave of young writers, designers, cartoonists, dancers, actors and musicians who gave parties, walked the streets and worked hard at becoming good and famous. A few did both.
But in the last half-dozen years, many of my contemporaries have departed — some to Los Angeles to work in television and movies, others to Manhattan and New Jersey for bigger homes and gated communities. Black artists still live in Fort Greene, but they are only a piece of the neighborhood’s color palette.
I USED to look at the older white residents of ethnically changing Brooklyn enclaves like Canarsie and East Flatbush and wonder how they felt strolling through their neighborhood. Now I feel their sense of loss, their memories, their fear of the future.
On Fulton Street on this particular Saturday, I watched workmen make preparations for a new Turkish restaurant as I stood in front of Silver Spoon, a recently opened yogurt ice cream shop on Fulton Street, on the site of a now-departed Ethiopian restaurant that, I must admit, I visited only twice in my many years in Fort Greene. (So much for racial solidarity.)
The Brooklyn Moon Cafe on Fulton, once the center of the New York spoken-word scene, continues on. Night of the Cookers, a long-established black-oriented bar and restaurant on Fulton, is still in business.
But there seems to be surprisingly little interplay between the new white Fort Greene and the old-school black community. I asked my friend Mike Thompson, who opened the Brooklyn Moon 15 years ago, about this. He said that while he did have white customers, he noticed that the newcomers seemed more comfortable at recently opened spots like a French bistro farther down on Fulton Street.
Heading across South Portland Avenue toward Fort Greene Park, I got that “Oooh, tall, scary black man” look from a white woman as she passed me with averted eyes. This usually doesn’t irritate me in Manhattan, where I expect it, but on this day, the look annoyed me coming from someone I imagine moved to the area maybe two weeks ago.
Walking toward the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, at the highest point of Fort Greene Park, lifted my spirit. After years of work, the soaring memorial is gleaming white, free of graffiti, as clean as I’ve ever seen it. I walked over to the bench dedicated to Richard Wright, who wrote much of “Native Son” in this park in the summer of 1938.
I noticed that someone had scratched off most of Wright’s name from the plaque on the bench, and I wonder whether my part in Fort Greene’s history will be as easily erased. I realize that much of my resentment comes simply from the fact that most of my friends are gone. Some of them abandoned the neighborhood before the crime abated, while others became famous or well off and moved on.
I’ve stayed anchored to the area, still inspired by the creative energy I felt when I moved here as a young man. It’s as if so much good work has been conceived in Fort Greene that it has seeped into the neighborhood’s DNA. Yet I fear that this new Fort Greene of high-rises, planned sports arenas and traffic jams won’t be a very congenial place for a middle-aged black author. Thing is, I’m not sure who I’d be somewhere else.
Nelson George’s book “City Kid: A Writer’s Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success” will be published this month by Viking.
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Re: Brooklyn people
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Mutty</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I have pics of the two stadiums side by side I took back in late late February. I also wanted to know what they were going to do with the old stadium. Funny thing is, I used to live right next to those stadiums and my stop on the train was actually the very same stop at Yankee Stadium. Still looks the same today decades later.
Funny you should mention 125th. Heading up there in a minute. </div></div> <span style="color: #3333FF">Please post a pic. I don't think they can tear down the old one, too much history. But it will be ridiculous to have two stadiums in the same spot. So I guess they'll have to tear it down.
Waste. And who paid for the new stadium again? </span>
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Re: Brooklyn people
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Gen</div><div class="ubbcode-body">mi know wah yuh mean. the trader joes ovah yahsuh juss send up the housing prices by 15% </div></div> <span style="color: #3333FF">There's a Trader Joe's over there? Where? </span>
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Re: Brooklyn people
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Yuri_</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Ah rite - seet deh ... likkle moas wha Stahbux soon opin.
Two, two's - wha Gap! </div></div> <span style="color: #3333FF"> On Myrtle... 
Did they tear down those projects on Myrtle near Flatbush, where KFC used to be? </span>
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Re: Brooklyn people
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Mutty</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Made this man on the corner of Myrtle and Washington rich living on Chinese food:
</div></div> <span style="color: #3333FF"> Kum Kau 
There used to be a caribbean restaurant across the street from them, Spooners or something like that. Sprinkles? I think that's it. </span>
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Re: Brooklyn people
Yes - it was Sprinkles - it closed a couple years ago.
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: MrsBlue</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Mutty</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Made this man on the corner of Myrtle and Washington rich living on Chinese food:
</div></div> <span style="color: #3333FF"> Kum Kau There used to be a caribbean restaurant across the street from them, Spooners or something like that. Sprinkles? I think that's it. </span> </div></div>
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Re: Brooklyn people
Yes and no MrsBlue - some of the projects and project like housing on that block are now gone - all gone - KFC, gone!
All condos going up.
On the other side of the street, the large sprawling housing project is still there.
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: MrsBlue</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Yuri_</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Ah rite - seet deh ... likkle moas wha Stahbux soon opin.
Two, two's - wha Gap! </div></div> <span style="color: #3333FF"> On Myrtle... Did they tear down those projects on Myrtle near Flatbush, where KFC used to be? </span> </div></div>
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