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photos by Les Brown
TASTE WG interviews participating bars and restaurants. Here is Carolyn Bane, Chef and Co-Owner of Pies ‘n’ Thighs. TASTE Williamsburg Greenpoint is on September 9th. For more info go to www.tastewg.com.
By Shayna Makaron
There are two amazing upcoming food-related volunteer opportunities in North Brooklyn, and each involves a fundraiser for a worthy cause in our community. The first is tonight at the Greenpoint Reformed Church where the Greenpoint Soup Kitchen Supper Club will be hosted. Proceeds from the supper club will help benefit Greenpoint Reformed Church’s soup kitchen and food pantry, which serves over a hundred homeless and underprivileged members of the community per week. Details here.
The second is the third annual TASTE Williamsburg Greenpoint event, a block party-style tasting event featuring of 40 restaurants, breweries and wineries from neighborhood. The event is a fundraiser for the completion of the Northside Town Hall Community and Cultural Center. TASTE will be held on the 9th, but there are volunteer opportunities beginning this weekend and ending on the day of the event. For each volunteer shift completed, volunteers will receive a ticket that gives the ticketholder four “tastes” (food samples) and two drinks at the event.
One of Mayor Bloomberg’s last political salvos before he leaves office next year is the design competition for micro-units. This insidious pilot program will test the viability of hyper-population density by increasing the residential units in existing buildings by thin-slicing them into micro-units measuring a claustrophobic 300 square feet. The baffling question is why would anyone want MORE people to live in Manhattan?
The developers are pre-positioning themselves by digging under the legal foundation by circumventing those pesky zoning changes, height limitations and the local community board gauntlet, to re-purpose existing buildings into whatever the market demands. This pilot-program is the Trojan horse to legally overturn the 1987 law requiring a minimum of 400 square feet for residential units.
There are particular windows of opportunity in one’s life that are narrow, notably the once in a lifetime sweet spot that youth doesn’t realize or appreciate until years after the fact. It’s the period of time between college graduation and mid-20s, between dating and family commitment. It’s similar to the theme in the cult movie “The Girlfriend Experience” (2009) starring Sasha Grey whose character is an ultra high-priced escort whose opportunity to make obscene bucks has an extremely short shelf-life based solely on her youth and looks.
Manhattan. The geographically small island boasts astronomical rents where recent graduates are willing to pay for the Manhattan Experience. It represents extreme luxury on a small, 13 mile long Fantasy Island slightly larger than a gigantic luxury yacht with two heliports.
Opinion/Editorial by Brooke Parker
City Denies Daycare: Let the children play, but where?
Williamsburg parents are branded by their choice of child care: stay-at-home moms or dads, Tibetan or Jamaican nannies, DIY child care collectives, home-schooling (apparently people consider a two-year-old home-schooled), Williamsburg Northside, Mi Escuelita, Williamsburg Neighborhood Nursery School (WNNS). Each option signals something meaningful, with very subtle differences, about who these parents are, how much money they earn (it costs $12-18/hour for a nanny and $15-25K for nursery schools), and what they believe about parenting, be they progressive, ambitious, bohemian, or conservative.