Monday, April 19, 2010

Haunting The Hook -- Overlooked -- The Dirty Dozen

I've had a few friends in town over the past few weeks and it's been a reminder of how much I love my neighborhood. It's been so cool to stop in at all these local businesses that my friends are working their asses off to keep going. Of course it would help if some of my visiting friends would buy stuff!



I want to start an initiative to get friends from out of the neighborhood to come to Red Hook and spend more cash (in the bars and restaurants, sure...but not just). Could we get something like that going? Maybe a contest? Maybe it seems too insidious? Maybe run it like bingo. We make a sheet with 12 boxes in it and the first person to get twelve friends to make purchases in twelve businesses gets some kind of groovy prize. "I Did the Dirty Dozen" or something like that.



Bizzarro World Snafu at Fort Defiance yesterday. Took my pal there for brunch and was asked to sit at the bar to wait for a table. We watched three table get sat with folks who had simply walked in off the street and finally we spoke up. We did get an apology but, we were still made to suiffer the consequences of waiting to be seated, instead of having one of the other couples who had been seated with no wait having it explained to them that there had been a mistake. We ended up feeling like we had been pushy customers. We weren't even offered an explanation of how it happened. My friend inquired, even asking if we had possibly caused the confusion somehow by not being clear about our desire to be seated at a table. I'm sure when it's busy signals can get crossed. They sat us at a four top. Of course, then we felt we had to rush through brunch because we were taking up a large table. I left feeling icky. I hope nothing like that happens again.



I love Fort Defiance and the food was absolutely perfect! Advice: If you go for brunch (and you should cause it is awesome!) and are asked to wait at the bar (and you should cause the drinks are awesome!), get assurances from the waiter and the bartender that you'll get the NEXT available table and then keep an eye out for yourself.



Anyway, I had some Columbia students following me around with cameras yesterday. It was cool. Anne let us film in the back of her Tiburon, which was awfully generous of her. Completely ramdom. I will have to get them to film me buying something the next time they are here. I'll give Anne a heads up next time. I promise Anne.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

coming to a shitty canal near you


Susannah Drake and DLand Studio are behind this marvelous plan to clean up the Gowanus canal. It's called Spongepark.

As far as I know, several of the bureaucratic obstacles standing in the way of development have been surmounted, so it looks good for a canal park. Will this inevitably lead to more development around the canal? Doubtless. Cleaner canal=goodbye present character of scrappy Gowanus neighborhood, and hello to more high density development(more luxury condos, gasp!).
Of course it will be nice to combat some of the pollution coming into the canal, especially some of the sewage overflow that enters our waterways during storms. The key strategy to DLand's plan is to line the canal with stormwater runoff swales (think of them as sponges). The swales are comprised of plants that slow down and filter the runoff until it eventually reaches the canal. In this plan the plants act as the bio-accumulators so we don't have to. The benefits are twofold, as redirecting the stormwater from the sewers to the swales also diminishes the amount of raw sewage reaching our waterways thanks to our combined-sewage-overflow infrastructure.

Friday, April 16, 2010

clearly i have nothing to do at the store today...

now that the taxes are all filed and i'm too lazy to sew, but i invited everyone whose email i found on a quick scan through my email, but everyone associated with red hook is invited, and anyone with design acumen is welcome to change this and make it rad, especially if you, too, have nothing you want to do at work today.

reason #1 we don't need a blog

the usual suspects

brooklyn based day trip... there're a lot of editorial day trips out there.

day trip a la brooklyn based

take the ferry to the park...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/nyregion/18stop.html

someone outside of red hook had to tell me about this...

francis was talking about this 5 years ago



now there is a blog. so we can not meet on the street corners and catch up. instead we can interact in cyberspace.