Here’s an interesting question that comes via the Boerum Hill Group that raises the issue of dealing with a vacant building next door. While the issue is less widespread than it used to be, it still pops up here and there. Here it is:
I live next door to a building that has been vacant (in [...]

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This is Part I of a three part vid produced of the 2008 Boerum Hill House Tour. It’s narrated, has background music and seems to make heavy use of Microsoft Virtual Earth to navigate around. You can find Part II here and Part III here.

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No, not that Miss Brooklyn. The Miss Brooklyn whose photo appears here. She’s for hire. We know this because the listing appeared on the BoCoCa Parents email list. To wit:
Book Miss Brooklyn 2008 for your next event! Miss Brooklyn, official preliminary to Miss New York & Miss America, is available to sing, make an appearance, [...]

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Hundreds of people in Boerum Hill are still without power a day after manhole fires knocked out service and took the F, G and other lines out for a while. Readers reported nasty service problems on the subway lines all day and one reader writes that he’s “still without power and living in a sweatbox,” [...]

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Manhole fires in Brooklyn yesterday caused disruptions on five subway lines Sunday evening and cut power to up to 1,500 residents in Boerum Hill. “Around 5:45 p.m., a manhole fire at Dean and Smith streets disabled power to signals on F and G lines, while nearby, at Bergen Street and Fourth Avenue, problems on the [...]

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There’s another year of Stores in the Garden coming up at the Hoyt Street Garden (corner of Atlantic Avenue). Per an email:
We have a microphone and an amp, several benches and some mats to sit on. It is a very popular event, especially for families with young children. This year, besides the story reading, we [...]

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There was more than playing going in a little park/playground on Warren Street between Hoyt and Smith in Boerum Hill late yesterday afternoon. There have been many emails on both the Boerum Hill list and the BoCoCa Parents group about gunfire in or near the park (including one explanation to a late-arriving parent of the [...]

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The Fifth Annual Atlantic Avenue Artwalk is coming up on Saturday & Sunday, June 7 and 8, from 1PM-6PM both days. Per an email:
ARTWALK08 is a tour of open studios, exhibits, public art projects, and special events on Atlantic Avenue featuring over 250 artists. A wide range of artists across media will open their private [...]

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There will be a “Community Forum on the Future of the Brooklyn House of Detention” on Thursday, May 29 at 7PM at St. Cyril’s Belarusian Cathedral (Atlantic Avenue at Bond Street.) Followers of the saga might recall that the city wants to reopen the facility and double its capacity. Here’s the email we got [...]

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[Photo courtesy of 66 Square Feet]
This is an actual Clematis, as found on Dean Street in Boerum Hill.

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[Photo courtesy of 66 Square Feet]
This is a fountain on Dean Street in Boeurm Hill near Bond. We understand that it makes a lot of sound.

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[Photo courtesy of arichman33/flickr]
This is Atlantic Avenue. Those are three Porsches in a row. There may be a back story here or it may be an odd coincidence. In either case, props to arichman33 for getting the pic and putting it in the GL Photo Pool on flickr.

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Our wonderful Carroll Gardens Correspondent supplied us with these photos of, uh, changes at the corner of Smith Street and Warren Street at one of the exits to the Bergen Street Station, writing: “First, nice Spring trees and sunny yellow clapboard. Today, brick-red construction fence. Bye Bye clapboard history and fantastic dogwood trees.” The abrupt [...]

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[Photo courtesy of 66 Square Feet]
These chairs come from GRDN in Boerum Hill and are a very sure sign that summer is just around the corner, despite the ongoing cool temperatures from time to time.

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The debacle of Brooklyn’s “Arabic school” has taken a new turn. “Three opponents of a Brooklyn public school that teaches Arabic filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the school’s founding principal, Debbie Almontaser, claiming that she had defamed them by saying they had stalked her.”–NYT

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There’s a community meeting coming up on May 29 about the city’s contentious plans to expand and reopen the Brooklyn House of Detention. It will take place at 7PM at the Belarusian Church on the corner of Atlantic Avenue & Bond Street. Here’s a bit from the House of Detention Stakeholders group that’s sponsoring the [...]

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As the Crown Heights playground weed smoking debate continues on Brooklynian and in the comments over at Brownstoner, the Pacific Branch Public Library Porn Discussion is still going on at the Park Slope Parents Group. Is it okay for people to look at porn in the library? Does the First Amendment end when lewd acts [...]

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Is internet porn okay at a public library? In point of fact, the Brooklyn Public Library installed a filter to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, but it can be turned off by adults. People being people, the result is that some people use library computers to look at porn or at images that [...]

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It has been some time since we came across tales of woe and despair from the notorious Times Plaza post office in Boerum Hill on Atlantic Avenue, (about which we have written many times). Today, we have new stories to relate from emails circulating, although they are relatively mild tales of woe compared to some [...]

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Today, we inaugurate a new feature that we’re very happy about: interviews and reports from the Center for the Urban Environment. This feature is “Living Local Economies,” which will focus on local businesses that are green or focused on sustainability. The subject of the interview is Alexis Miesen Co-Proprietress of Blue Marble Ice Cream on [...]

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Things are a little pissy in Boerum Hill. “One neighbor has had the bed of his pickup truck repeatedly doused with urine, and on several occasions large quantities of urine have been used to soak the gardens and sidewalks in the middle of the block…”–Curbed

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This is an email circulating via the Boerum Hill group. We present it in its entirety:
Of late I have had a weekly visitor who is a fairly dapper Asian woman. She apparently does not speak English. She enters my yard, rifles my garbage cans and containers. Today she blithely stole a new garbage [...]

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“The Vargas Mini-Market, a bodega at the corner of Bond and Warren, was shut down late last week. According to the restraining order affixed to the shuttered business, it was closed for the ’sale of untaxed cigarettes.’” Isolated thing or growing trend in the age of mega-taxes?–Brownstoner

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The South Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance–whose formation we noted in an exclusive report here on March 5 and whose name and status we updated last Thursday–has officially announced itself. It involves groups from Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and Red Hook’s Columbia Waterfront District. A press release from SoBNA went out last night and it [...]

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There were many comments left yesterday on our post about the parking sign outside PS 38 in Boerum Hill that was mysteriously altered to expand the parking off-limits to residents during school hours. Residents say a school employee tampered with the sign to reserve an entire block for school employees and, then, said that those [...]

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