By Shannon Manning

This amazing space has only been open a few weeks so expect new things every time you visit. The front of the store features a showroom of wearable, useable, playable art pieces by Beth Goldowitz and Sharon (Sascha) Ascher, joined by John-Michael’s fashion. Beth primarily works in felt: installations, rugs, furniture upholstery, bags, whimsical dolls in the shapes of animals, Humpty Dumpty, goddesses, aliens, soaps with felted wool covers, and intricate bead work jewelry and purses. Sascha’s work involves taking natural elements like leaves and flowers and fusing them with fabric to create sliding panels for space dividers that allow light to flow. Fabrics are also stenciled, dyed, and silkscreened, and turned into panels or pillows, or fused with glass to create tabletops, walls, installations, or smaller display pieces. The ladies of Greenpoint View also provide interior design and consulting for business, institutions, and homes, especially children’s spaces (felt is great for kids’ spaces.)

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The most recent location of Tommy Hild’s 25 year-old frame shop Frame Art straddles the border of Williamsburg and Bushwick on Flushing Avenue at Thames Street. Hild, a native of Timisoara, Romania who has lived in New York City since the 1970s, made framing his life’s work, after an artist friend lamented about the difficulty of finding a skilled craftsman to frame his work. A quarter-century later, Hild reflects on the changes in the industry. Framing has become largely an e-commerce driven business. And many of the old art handlers and framers in the city have fallen by the wayside over the years.

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The Coffee Scene in North Brooklyn

Coffee, once the expression of freedom (America switched from tea to coffee during the American Revolution when they rebelled against the British tax on tea), quickly descended to happy to serve you coffee in old-fashioned coffee shops where you got bottomless cups of muddy Joe for next to nothing. If not for Starbucks popularizing high-end coffee, we’d not be talking about how hipster, grab-the-pulse of a neighborhood coffee shops became as ubiquitous as a barbershop.

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