The Yard is a creative co-working space at 33 Nassau Avenue, on the second floor above Spritzenhaus. With month-to-month private office rentals designed for one to seven people, The Yard is already the workday home for a number of local entrepreneurs, writers, graphic designs and start-up ventures including Wanderfly, a personalized travel recommendation site, as well as the music aggregator The Hype Machine.

“We have so many talented, creative people here!” says Morris Levy, The Yard’s founder and manager.  Levy is charismatic and charming, a born and raised Brooklynite with a quick vernacular to match.

READ MORE

Asked if she has any bridezilla stories she can share, Nicolette Owen, owner of Nicolette Camille Floral Design, knocked on wood and said, “No!” Surrounded by beautiful flowers in her Williamsburg studio—white peonies, blue and purple hydrangea, velvety lambs ears, young blueberries, columbine, sweet peas and antique roses—one must deduct that floral design is among the most coveted jobs in the world, especially when you have your own company and can bring your creative visions to fruition.

“A lot people say they would love to have my job,” says the young designer, “but I remind them of all the hard work that goes into it, like getting up at five in the morning to get to the flower market. Doing deliveries. There are times when I’m so tired after working on a big wedding, that immediately after the flowers are delivered all I want to do is to go to sleep,” she says.

READ MORE

For Scott Rossillo, a bagel is a lot more than a piece of bread with a hole in it. The big-voiced, fast-talking Brooklynite and owner of The Bagel Store sees his creations as preserving a true New York tradition.

That’s because Rossillo is what he calls “a bagel purist.” The ingredients, techniques, and equipment behind every Bagel Store bagel are all rigorously faithful to the lessons he learned during his bagel-baking apprenticeship.

“The people who taught me had been in the business 40 years,” Rossillo says, remembering his days at Bake City Bagels in Gravesend, his childhood neighborhood hangout, and later where got his first job. “The people who taught them had already been in the business 45 years!” That’s a bagel-making tradition Rossillo can trace directly back to the immigrant communities of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “People who grew up in New York in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, they know what a bagel is supposed to taste like.”

READ MORE

Michael Fitzgerald has a low-key at­titude about success. Fitzgerald Jewelry, the humble gallery and studio he runs with his wife Hiroyo, doesn’t even have its own storefront.

All that might draw in a casual visitor are a few cases along one wall inside Light Up Brooklyn, a lighting retailer on N. 11th St., and a small sign at the base of a flight of stairs directing patrons to the rest of the gallery. Once upstairs, the first thing one notices is not even the cases of elegant, handcrafted jewelry, but the space itself.

READ MORE

www.vervecards.com

By Anne Szustek
Photo by Dylan Isbell