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photo by Benjamin Lozovsky. “The Margabucha.”
By One Stop Beer Shop tapster Pamela Rossi: I wanted to create a drink with the pleasures of a tall, cool, fruity, salty margarita, and just the right kickstart to a 5 o’clock Friday night outsans the calories.
But why stop there? I decided to incorporate a probiotic drink to satisfy not only the “skinny girl” margarita goers, but our health conscious cravers too. Born is Margabucha: Only 70 cals with the healthful benefits of kombucha!
Shelley Hirsch and Simon Ho.
Where were you then? Greenpoint vocalist Shelley Hirsch and Swiss keyboardist composer/arranger Simon Ho’s new CD is an evocative, nostalgic, and stylistic exploration of personal and cultural memory.
Hirsch was born in East New York, Brooklyn, and has been a seminal and influential presence in the new music and performance art scenes. Throughout her rich career Hirsch has been able to continually broaden and deepen her work musically and emotionally while still making every song sound like a revelation.
Interior of Beer Street. Photo by Allen Ying
Growlers, or half-gallon bottles of draught beer, date back to the late 1800s, when folks bought fresh beer from a pub and took it home in small, galvanized pails or buckets. Through WWII, young children would bring pails of beer from pubs to factories at lunchtime, or home to their parents for dinner, a practice called “rushing the growler.”
Though no one knows for sure why they were called “growlers,” one theory has it that they were named for the rumbling noise of CO2 escaping through the lid, while another claims the moniker came from the grumbling stomachs of hungry factory workers waiting for their lunchtime beer.
Ali and Ari Zablozki, owners of Zablozki’s Bar, and their dog Millie. Photo by Ashley Corbin-Teich
Zablozki’s has been a neighborhood fixture since 2004, before the Williamsburg gold rush, back when its neighbor, Sweetwater Restaurant, was still the punk dive Sweetwater Tavern.
Before the flood, Williamsburg had a small town feel, and only a few bars provided for the locals: Sweetwater, Rosemary’s, Union Pool, Teddy’s, Brooklyn Ale House… just a smattering of watering holes compared to the swampland we know today.
By Phil DePaolo
The latest contested issue in Williamsburg is the attempt by former Manhattan City Council Member Eva Moskowitz, who turned entrepreneur, to open her brand of for-profit charter school (Brooklyn Success Academy Charter School) at the same location as JHS 50, at 183 South 3rd Street. The school, which houses 470 middle school students, also houses another public school, the Academy for Young Writers, which is scheduled to move elsewhere. At a recent hearing, hundreds of local residents came out to oppose the opening of the Success Academy charter school. It’s been documented that Moskowitz bussed in hundreds of Harlem residents to give the appearance of community support.
Charter schools in New York were started by the late Al Shanker, the former president of the American Federation of Teachers, among others. Shanker believed that charter schools couldn’t change education if they were disconnected from regular public schools. He wrote in a 1994 column in the New York Times: “Charter schools must have autonomy to get where they want to go, but they must also be part of a system that has a central purpose, and that means a system that has decided what kids need to know and be able to do. Otherwise, they will end up like all those alternative schools of the 1960s, relevant only to themselves and useless to the system as a whole.”
