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Photo by Yaz Rosete for Bushwick Daily.
Sunday-night noise complaints have supposedly gotten so bad in Bushwick that the neighborhood’s community board is advocating a midnight bar curfew on Sunday nights. Bushwick, the nabe the Daily News has dubbed “the world’s indisputable epicenter of cool,” is adding around a dozen bars every six months.
A leading member of Community Board 4 called it “a lot of spillover from Williamsburg.”
Photos by Eddy Vallante
All you need to know about the newest vintage furniture store in Williamsburg can be told in one unusual table. It is a small kitchen table whose top is stripped from the lane of a 1920s-era bowling alley in Elm Grove, West Virginia. The iron base on which the top is balanced used to be a stanchion pole in the Wheeling Tunnel. “We cleaned out Elm Grove Lanes,” acknowledged David Sofsky, a member of the Sofsky family that owns Brooklyn Reclamation. “Two full-length trailers filled with bowling alley paraphernalia. Forty lanes of it. It’s enough wood to make end tables, bar tops, and stools for the next 10 years.”
The price tag for the table is $1,400—owing to the fact that the wood is nearly a century old and the table was customized with re-purposed material. “The most expensive stuff is the oldest stuff, and the stuff that’s customized,” David said. “I do think, for those items, we’re on the reasonable side, price-wise.” “We try to keep prices affordable for the average customer. We get some customers coming in with big bucks. We also get young people just moving into the area.”
Bruce Lee stands in the ready position inside the entrance to the New York Martial Arts Academy, in Williamsburg. He is shirtless, bending at the knee, twisting slightly to his right, every muscle on his rippling torso obedient to his will.
It’s a movie cut-out of Bruce, mind you, a still photograph taken from a fight scene in Enter the Dragon. But this image has been enlarged to life size, and is lifelike enough for me to approach with reverent caution.
This is the enduring, iconic image of Bruce Lee, in a fight to the death, as it should be. His face and chest are slashed and bleeding, but his wounds are only skin deep. Blood streaks like war paint down his glistening body. His hands are up, his eyes are ablaze.
Andy Warhol, eat your heart out
Bruce Lee stands in the ready position inside the entrance to the New York Martial Arts Academy, in Williamsburg. He is shirtless, bending at the knee, twisting slightly to his right, every muscle on his rippling torso obedient to his will.
It’s a movie cut-out of Bruce, mind you, a still photograph taken from a fight scene in Enter the Dragon. But this image has been enlarged to life size, and is lifelike enough for me to approach with reverent caution.
This is the enduring, iconic image of Bruce Lee, in a fight to the death, as it should be. His face and chest are slashed and bleeding, but his wounds are only skin deep. Blood streaks like war paint down his glistening body. His hands are up, his eyes are ablaze.
Andy Warhol, eat your heart out
Matthew Winn opened Molasses Books in Bushwick, last month. Photo by Allen Ying
To the transplants who’ve lived in Bushwick the longest, the neighborhood’s grit is nothing short of a virtue, and its lack of creature comforts is a source of pride.
It must have something to do with the factories and cement yards, the scrawny trees and parks without pigeons or squirrels.