The History of Bedford Avenue

By Becky Bratu and Lillian Rizzo

To understand Brooklyn, you have to know its history, its neighborhoods, its people. And its Bedford Avenue.

The southern end of Brooklyn’s longest thoroughfare begins at a Sheepshead Bay pier and ends at Greenpoint’s 35-acre McCarren Park, which was once a public pool, then concert venue and now, once again, a pool-to-be. Bedford Avenue crosses through 10 neighborhoods and is 10.2 miles of houses, big and small, storefronts, churches, synagogues, schools, a college, playgrounds, restaurants and a housing development where Ebbets Field once stood.

The avenue traces its name to a 17th-century Dutch settlement near what is now Bedford-Stuyvesant. The Dutch were the first among colonial settlers in that area; they bought the woodlands from the Canarsie Indians and named the site Bedford. The area was used mostly for farming throughout the 18th century.

In 1869 Bed-Stuy was home to the Temple Israel, a synagogue located on Bedford and Lawrence avenues, according to the New York Historical Society. In 1905 the congregation had 600 members. When Jews began to leave the area, the building was demolished and the site has been used a municipal traffic court and then as a linoleum discount store. Temple Israel merged with another congregation, Beth Elohim, and reopened on Eastern Parkway near Flatbush Avenue.

By the turn of the 20th century, Brooklyn neighborhoods were getting their names from real estate developers and were made permanent once telephone companies named their exchanges after them. Neighborhoods along Bedford Avenue such as Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick and Bedford Stuyvesant were a part of this group. By the 1950s it was one of the few Brooklyn neighborhoods where blacks could buy houses. Heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson, musician Eubie Blake, and baseball legend Jackie Robinson lived in Bed-Stuy, as have rappers Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z and Lil’ Kim.

Greenpoint, one of the few Brooklyn neighborhoods that kept its original name, was another Dutch purchase used for farming. After 1840, the neighborhood was a center for shipbuilding. The Polish community was already settled in Greenpoint by the late 1930s.

Long before Williamsburg was to become the social scene that is today, it was a rural settlement in the Dutch town of Boswijck (Bushwick). During the mid-1800s, the neighborhood was known as a playground of the rich, who visited beer gardens, clubs and fancy hotels. But Williamsburg began to change again after the Williamsburg Bridge was opened in 1903, and Eastern European immigrants began to leave the crowded Lower East Side to live in airy Brooklyn. Jewish immigrants fleeing the Nazis settled in Williamsburg in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and today the area hosts more than 20 separate Hasidic sects.

In Crown Heights, Bedford Avenue intersects with Eastern Parkway, the first six-lane parkway in the world and host of the annual Labor Day West Indian parade. The Dutch first settled this area in the 1600s, and African American slaves farmed it. The neighborhood was once known as Crow Hill, and some suggest?the name was a reference to the original African settlement in the area. According to an 1873 Brooklyn Eagle story, the whites of the area called these settlers “crows.” The 20th century brought many changes to the neighborhood, including its name. Immigrants from the Caribbean began to settle here and by the mid-1940s the area had attracted a number of Lubavitch Hasidim whose world headquarters is at 770 Eastern Parkway.

Sheepshead Bay gets its name from a type of local fish. The area remained undiscovered by European colonists until the late 18th century. In the late 1800s, The Sheepshead Bay Race Track made this area a hot spot where wealthy New Yorkers ate steaks between races or gambled in local casinos. Supreme Court?Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, singer Carole King graduated from the neighborhood’s James Madison High School.

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A few bullet points about Bedford Avenue’s history:

Brooklyn College
The institution that became Brooklyn College was opened in 1910 in Manhattan as an extension of City College for Teachers. The Board of Higher Education authorized it to become a four-year institution called Brooklyn College in 1930, and in 1937 the present-day campus opened its doors on the site of the Flatbush?Golf Course. President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid the cornerstone in 1936. It was Roosevelt’s New Deal Federal Emergency Public Works Administration that put people to work in constructing the college. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and violinist Itzhak Perlman taught here. In fall 2010, 16,912 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at the college.

Just diagonal to the college at 2939 Bedford Avenue is Midwood High School, opened in 1940. Midwood was also constructed and opened as a part of the WPA. Some of Midwood’s famous graduates include director Woody Allen and author Eric Segal.

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Automobile Row
In 1929 a portion of Bedford Avenue, from Fulton Street to Eastern Parkway, was known as Brooklyn’s automobile row. The street was filled with car dealerships such as Buick, Ford, and Chrysler. Of all the buildings that housed these dealerships, only the gothic Studebaker building is still standing on the corner of Sterling Place. In 2000 it

received landmark status. Traffic along automobile row became so hectic that in 1929 the police installed a traffic tower at Grant Square, the same tactic used on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to slow traffic.

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Prohibition
From 1919 to 1933 it was illegal to sell, manufacture and transport in the United States, although that didn’t stop people from drinking. The Bedford Nest speakeasy was located at 1286 Bedford Avenue. It was the borough’s most popular speakeasy and was raided almost weekly. Brooklyn’s liquor came through rumrunners who operating along the south shore of the borough.

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Ebbets Field

While Brooklyn was home to several baseball clubs by the mid-1800s, the Brooklyn Dodgers became the team of the borough in 1893 and stayed that way until they left for Los Angeles in October, 1957.

The home of the Brooklyn Dodgers was Ebbets Field, located on Bedford Avenue in Flatbush. Nicknamed “Dem Bums” the Dodgers won the National League championships in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953, but couldn’t make it past the New York Yankees in any of those World Series. In 1955 they finally won the World Series against the Yankees, bringing Brooklyn to a state of pandemonium.

Ebbets Field sat in one of the borough’s most diverse neighborhoods, and that diversity was mirrored on the field in 1947 when the Dodgers broke baseball’s color line with the arrival of the game’s first black player, Jackie Robison. The Dodgers’ owner, Walter O’Malley, was eager to leave cramped and aging Ebbets Field. But unable to convince the city – and its ultimate power, Robert Moses – to sell him the land cheaply for a new park in downtown Brooklyn, O’Malley took the club away, and broke Brooklyn’s heart.

Ebbets Field was demolished in 1960. And in 1962 the Ebbets Field apartment complex was built on the site.

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Look Back Brooklyn, 2010

We looked back over 2010 and took stock of some of our favorite trends, developments and stories. What a year, Brooklyn! We’re signing off until 2011 (though we will send out a New Year’s Eve-themed Tip Sheet next week) but first, from Brooklyn Based to you: Thank you for making this the most dynamic, contentious, delightful and outright weird place anyone could ever want to live.? Here’s what we all got into last year:

Barclays’ Parking Lot
In April, one month after the groundbreaking for Atlantic Yards, Daniel Goldstein issued a sad yet inspiring public statement. After six-plus years of leading the battle charge against AY, he struck a $3 million dollar deal to step down as the “official” spokesperson for Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn and evacuate his home (which the state had already seized) in 17 days. Ratner had already tried four times to get him to drop the suits; this time, eviction was imminent and he could either accept a lowball offer from the state or get paid handsomely to pack up his family quickly. But Goldstein made clear that AY was never about one apartment, and despite the fact that this abuse of eminent domain was upheld by the courts, all was not lost. “Our fight has—and this is one of the victories—given hope, inspiration and encouragement to innumerable people that a community united can fight principled fights worth fighting, regardless of the outcome,” he wrote.

Case in point: Judge Marcy Friedman recently ruled against the Empire State Development Corporation for claiming in its review that the buildout would take 10 years, when they knew it would take 25. Now they have to go back and rationalize their findings. It’s not stopping the project–which is now looking like a big-ass parking lot–but it is exposing some of the lies that helped push it through, and hopefully prevent another boondoggle like this from ever happening. Other good AY news: Norman Oder is writing a book about the entire case, which has taken a strange turn as of late, with Ratner trying to lure Chinese investment in exchange for green cards.

Hipster Hooray
We can’t begin to express how tired we are of the endless hipster debate. Haven’t kids always worn dumb clothes and disaffected attitudes like badges of honor? This year though, despite the publication of two books capitalizing on hipster haterade (Look at this F*cking Hipster, by Joe Mande and Stuff Hipsters Hate: A Field Guide to the Passionate Opinions of the Indifferent by Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz) the whole conversation began to mellow, at least a tiny bit. Back in January Justin Richards wrote a piece for New York Press called “Meet the Helpsters” in which he presented plenty of evidence that plaid-clad Williamsburg is up to more than cocaine and performance art. Richards profiled community organizers, rooftop gardeners, political activists and urban planners, all of whom might be picked out of a line-up and charged with hipsterism, but who are also working toward admirable goals like sustainable food systems, social justice and a greener Brooklyn.

Then, Lincoln Restler and Kate Zidar made a major splash on the political scene by running for district leader positions. Now, neither Restler nor Zidar is a classic Williamsburg hipster (though he sports heavy horn-rims and she teaches at Pratt), but compared to Brooklyn’s old guard politicians they may as well have campaigned in skinny jeans, Bette Midler tees and asymmetrical haircuts. Restler won his race, beating out the son of a long-time pol, though Zidar lost, and their organization, the New Kings Democrats are here to stay. Any way you slice it, in 2010 we all had to acknowledge that hipsters do more than just go to NYU, work as stylists and cash their parents’ monthly checks–even if they’re wearing the same glasses that got us beat up on the playground in fourth grade.

Clinton Hill Officially Gentrifies
For the first time in its years-long history of gentrifying, a Clinton Hill resident could find her favorite local artisinal cheese at not one, but two gourmet food shops. No, really, the drinking and eating scene on Fulton Street in Clinton Hill hasn’t advanced much beyond West African cuisine and bulletproof Chinese in the last 10 years, so it’s exciting to see fresh options on this strip. Now you can find Grayson and grass-fed beef at the Brooklyn Victory Garden, macaroons at Desserts by Michael Allan, get a drink at Fulton Grand or the just-opened Hanson Dry, and, very soon, shop at the Greene Hill Food Co-op, which will change Putnam for the best. (Their buying club starts Jan. 19!) Nearby, Franklin Ave. is also quickly changing its tune, with Dough, Choice’s brand-new donut shop; Alcatraz, a gourmet Mexican spot we take out from often; and Allison Stewart’s sweet new coffee shop, Bedford Hill. When Stewart christened her café with this name she probably sparked the imagination of a million brokers. Look for the term describing the Clinton Hill-Bed Stuy border in 2011–that’s a BB prediction.

The Great Absolut Brooklyn Debacle
This summer Absolut released a special edition vodka, flavored with apple and ginger, called Absolut Brooklyn. You’ve seen it, and its Spike Lee-designed label, in ads all over the city, and on blogs all over Brooklyn. Absolut sponsored the Brooklyn Blogfest 2010, and got a wide variety of bloggers to post about the product in exchange for a Flip camera. Not all of the bloggers made it clear that they were participating in a “quid pro post” as J. David Goodman called it in the New York Times, and a blogging ethics debate took flight. Did the deal break the code of journalistic ethics? Sure. But many of the bloggers who wrote about their Brooklyn appletinis don’t think of themselves as a member of any journalistic association or club, and hey, journalists, you can’t post a sign that says “No Bloggers Allowed” and then expect the blogoverse to follow your rules. No matter what side you come down on here, the big reveal for the Brooklyn blog world was this: People are watching, reading and following, more closely than you think.

The Weirding of Prospect Park
We love that The Brooklyn Paper both keeps us up to date on community news around the borough and makes time and space (it’s a print publication in 2010–they still have to contend with an inflexible newshole) to follow their quirky obsessions. All summer long they reported on strange occurrences in Prospect Park, ranging from piles of chicken heads to a goose found with an arrow lodged in its neck to epic trash heaps, in a series called Meadows of Shame. The park story that really went the distance though, hit the public on July 12, when it was revealed that the federal Agriculture Department had rounded up and killed nearly 400 Canadian geese that had been summering in Brooklyn. Government officials cited airline safety as the reason, and Brooklynites gathered the following week to honor the dead fowl.

End of Days Weather
So there was a tornado this fall. In Brooklyn. What more can we really say? Well, a couple things. Thanks to social media, we followed the tornado, not just from our windows, but via Twitter and the crazy photos people posted on Flickr and Facebook. The green sky was our first warning that crazy weather was to come–the second came when we read this “@redhooklobster: I swear a small tornado just came down van brunt st! Hail green sky. I was sitting in my car. Very scary.” The tornado ripped up trees all over the borough, including one in Fort Greene that was home to a bee hive. City Room published a story about the homeless bees–and their well intentioned human helpers, that was our favorite tale from the Great Brooklyn Tornado of 2010.

My Coffice is on Latte Lane in Laptopistan
Maybe it’s just because some of us here at BB have spent a considerable amount of time in the Pacific Northwest, but coffee, and coffee shop culture has always seemed like an old story to us. Then, Jon Reiss, one of our favorite new writers, pitched us a guide to coffices–coffee shops for working–last summer. He did a bang-up job on the story (though many of you were pissed that we left off your favorite coffice), and the concept ricocheted around the New York media. In December The New York Times published this piece reporting from “laptopistan,” the same week that Time Out New York presented a whole package of coffee stories, including one titled, “Best Coffee Shops for Doing Work.” Then, in last Sunday’s Week in Review section, the NYT gave “coffice” a shout out as a 2010 neologism, which apparently originated in South Korea.

Published on 12.23.10.

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New Year’s Eve Nosh

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Piano Man

Monday December 27th, 2010

08:00:00 PM

GREENPOINT Around 10pm 7pm on certain Mondays each month, Dan Neustadt of In Cadeo (and touring keyboardist for The Hold Steady), plays indie songs from likes of The Flaming Lips and Arcade Fire on the piano at The Manhattan Inn. We can’t think of a better way to ease into a post-Christmas week than listening to “Suddenly Everything Has Changed” and sipping a stiff drink. And if singing is your thing, then head back on Tuesday night to catch Joe McGinty’s piano karaoke from 10:30-1am.

Published on 12.22.10.

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Bedford Avenue Project: When They Lived in Brooklyn

Over the past two weeks we have been running stories aimed at the question, “Who is Brooklyn?” Today is the last day of the Bedford Avenue Project and although some features, such as the interactive map, will continue growing, we offer two final pieces written by the editors of the The Brooklyn Ink, Mike Hoyt and Michael Shapiro—who both, at one time, lived in Brooklyn and who both, eventually, chose to leave.

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By Mike Hoyt

Rent is why I came to Brooklyn and also why I left, though there is more to the story.

I am unlikely to forget the day we moved there, because it was the day before my first child was born, in June of 1982.? We had been living in a dark and cramped fifth-floor walkup on the Upper West Side. The rooftop was basically ours in summer, which was lovely, but it was not a place to take a baby. We needed room, so we followed the subway lines out to where we might get some. We found a third-floor walkup in Carroll Gardens that made the place in Manhattan look like a closet. Beautiful tin ceilings, an ancient but airy kitchen, a closeline out the window over the fire escape. It was reasonable, too.

The landlord was rehabbing the building and behind schedule, but the pregnancy wouldn’t wait, and we were the first to move in. My wife insisted on carrying some of the small stuff, which may have triggered her labor. We went to a diner to feed the friends who had helped us, and after they left, she said, surprisingly calmly, “guess what?” The next morning, we would start a family. In Brooklyn. Everything was different.

My wife grew up in Sheepshead Bay, but even to her, Carroll Gardens was something new. And to me, a Midwesterner, it was the red-brick heart of Brooklyn. The neighborhood was solid Italian and we were not. We were the first of what would be a wave of gentrifiers, and we got a chilly reception at first. I’ve always thought that a Fourth of July fireworks extravaganza in the street right below us was staged for our benefit; it was as if a truckload of M-80s went into the celebration. But an infant in your arms soon melts that kind of tension away. Not too much later, another one was on the way, and the old women in the neighborhood claimed they could guess the gender by the shape of my wife’s belly. (They were right, too: another girl.)

Frank and Mary lived upstairs, a retired longshoreman and his wife. The landlord, we soon learned, had let them stay but had cut their apartment in half and installed a lawyer on the other side of a new wall. They would invite us upstairs to dinners, at which the first course was so delicious and bountiful that the other three were daunting. Every once in a while they blew off steam in a fight, in which the dialogue went this way:

Frank: (stage whisper) Mary! People will hear you!

Mary: (very loud) I don’t give a shit!

Frank: Mary!

Mary: I don’t give a shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

And so forth.

We loved the neighbors and the neighborhood. The food shopping was a treat. At the “Pork Store,” cheeses and meats hung from above, and the smell of roasting coffee filled the air. At the pastry store, forget about it. Two of our children were baptized in the stately old churches nearby. Daughter number one learned to ride a new blue bike, with training wheels, around the busy block, hearing a great deal of instruction from me about the function of stop signs.? We watched the old men play bocce in summer and the lights go up at Christmas.

We might have stayed, even with an expanding family, but the landlord—he who had chopped Frank and Mary’s place; he who the whole neighborhood despised, because he was an agent of the change that was to come—doubled the rent. The four of us, eventually to be five, found a nice little rental in Jersey, with a yard and a street full of neighbor kids running around. That place we came to love, too, but we still come back to Carroll Gardens to walk around.

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By Michael Shapiro

I was 21 when I finally left Brooklyn, and in 1974 that was considered late. Brooklyn was then a place to leave, especially if you were young and eager and searching for people just like you. My parents wanted to leave in 1952 and would have moved to Long Island had my grandfather been willing to help them with the $1, 000 down payment for a house in Syosett. He was sure that if they moved to “the country” he and my grandmother would never see us again.

My parents, as if trying to create some distance from the borough in which they’d both grown up, refused to join in the ritual of the Sunday dinners?at?Lundy’s,?the vast barn of a restaurant in Sheepshead Bay. They aspired to Manhattan, which meant family dinners in the Village at places like the Ninth Circle Steakhouse and Monte’s, on MacDougal?Street.

My Brooklyn felt like a great, flat, and lifeless place, where my friends and I longed for the day when we could drive, and, at long last, get away. It was possible to live in a tiny pocket of Brooklyn, and seldom step outside. I certainly did. My life was confined to the square mile that encompassed my elementary school, high school and alma mater, Brooklyn College, right across the street from?Midwood?High. Everyone I knew and loved lived within that square mile, a village in the city.

There was nothing cool about my Brooklyn and nothing especially cool about the rest of the borough, save for the occasional Bohemian apartment, like the one on President Street across from Prospect Park where my music teacher lived. A friend who lived in Park Slope avoided having people visit her home because she was embarrassed about living in such a down-on-its-heels neighborhood.

Brooklyn then was caught between two epochs: the time of the Dodgers when, as selective memory had it, the sun shone every day on a packed Ebbets Field; and the then-unimaginable Brooklyn where young people flocked to, of all places, Williamsburg.

And so it felt necessary to leave. Maybe you left for college, and did not come back and, or, you waited until you got married and left first for Staten Island and for New Jersey, returning on weekends to visit your parents until they left, too, for South Florida.

I left for graduate school, having lingered a little too long, perhaps out of inertia, or more likely out of fear of leaving my small, safe if stultifying corner of the world.

I did not find the leaving easy. But then leaving for the unknown and unfamiliar never is, no matter how thrillingly it is anticipated. I came twice to live, but did not stay long. My parents left, and settled where they’d always wanted to be: Manhattan.

It would be nice to be able to say that I missed Brooklyn. But I did not, certainly not the place I knew. Yet I felt, and still feel, a connection to the place, not as it was, but as I imagined it might have once been like—the sepia-tinged Brooklyn of kids playing stickball in the streets, the stoops filled with people, the Dodgers on the radio.

I do not recognize Brooklyn as it has become, the Brooklyn where my son goes to high school and my daughter goes to eat. I am a stranger there, having left long before it was fashionable to stay.

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NYE Dinners

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The Pink Before Christmas

Friday December 24th, 2010

08:00:00 PM

DUMBO Skinemax has nothing on “pinku eiga,” high-production, Japanese softcore films shot on 35mm. Unlike straight-up porn, Japanese censorship laws meant that these erotic indies, or “pink films,” had to be creative in their disguise of genitalia, which inspired much more complex films than your typical skin flick. A two-week long, free series begins tonight at reRun Theater & Gastropub, with The Japanese Wife Next Door: Part 2.

Published on 12.21.10.

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Voices of Bedford Ave

By Idil Abshir, Yolanne Almanzar, Joseph Deaux, Mariya Karimjee, and Abigail Ronck

Reporters for The Brooklyn Ink speak to residents of Bedford Avenue who explain why its longest avenue matters.

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Brooklyn Native Jose Ortiz talks about moving back to the borough and the new neighborhood he found around Bedford.

Jose Ortiz sits in a laundromat on Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Joe Deaux/The Brooklyn Ink)

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Shannon Shaughnessy: Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn’s main street.

Shannon Shaughnessy stands outside the Metropolitan Pool and Recreation Center in Brooklyn. (Joe Deaux/The Brooklyn Ink)

Carol Selby: Clothes from the threads up.

Original designs in Carla Selby's dress shop, Carla's Creative Workshop. (Abigail Ronck/The Brooklyn Ink)

Roger Cowie: IT on Bedford Avenue.

Storefront of Roger Cowie's Computer Clinic, a father & son business on Bedford Ave. (Abigail Ronck/The Brooklyn Ink)

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Bedford Avenue Interactive Slideshow

The staff of the Ink stitched together an interactive slideshow that takes you from McCarren Park in Greenpoint to Sheepshead Bay. Along the way we’ve put together eight audio slideshows of businesses or places along the avenue. Click on the embedded video icons to play them.

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Green Vinyl

Some records are made to be broken; at Brooklyn Phono, they’re also made to be recycled.

The vinyl manufacturer, which is one of three in New York City and 14 in the country, presses albums for local labels like Norton Records and Crypt, based in Germany.

Typically, Brooklyn Phono uses only virgin vinyl or a mix of new vinyl and old vinyl, aka regrind, to make albums. But this year Green Owl, a label in Manhattan, specifically asked for records made from 100 percent recycled vinyl. So Brooklyn Phono had to source some of its regrind from outside its Sunset Park plant.

“We told them, look, we can’t be accountable for this material,” said Thomas Bernich, the founder of Brooklyn Phono. “We don’t know where it came from. But we actually had a great experience with it.” For their Green Owl runs, they used albums from at least as far back as the 1940s, including some Norwegian and Russian language discs.

It’s not just the vinyl itself that comes from a different era. The machine that Brooklyn Phono uses to cut into blanks is like a cross-section of records’ past.

Leandro Gonzales, who masters music at Brooklyn Phono, said the process begins by using a lathe to cut into a blank, which makes a negative mold of the record. The blank discs, also called lacquers, are made in L.A. and come in different sizes based on the final product–seven-inch records are cut on a ten-inch lacquer, ten-inch records are cut on 12- or 14-inch blanks and 12-inch records are cut on 14-inch blanks.

“This machine in particular is like a blend of different moments in the history of record-making technology,” Gonzales said. It houses an aluminum-cast lathe, for example, from the 1940s. The machine slowly cuts a groove into the blanks while a speaker provides the vibrations that will create the recording.

“It’s basically carving the sound,” he said.

Once the mold is ready, record presses in another part of the facility produce the actual vinyl records, using a process called compression molding. Records come out of the press with some excess material, which gets trimmed off. (This excess material is what is typically used for regrind.) Then they go to quality control, where they are checked for scratches and particles, and randomly selected for a listen upstairs. Once they pass muster, they’re sleeved, packaged, and shipped to the customer.

Vinyl sales are nowhere near what they were before the advent of cassettes, CDs and mp3s, but records are in the midst of a resurgence. When Brooklyn Phono opened in 2002, there were just two machines; now there are five, and they’re pressing thousands of albums a day. Still, to incorporate the ease of digital media, Brooklyn Phono albums also come with a code so the same record can be downloaded.

“The customer gets a tangible product as well as a portable product,” Gonzales said.

This tactile quality of albums–being able to lower the needle onto them, and physically skip songs–is part of the appeal for Bernich. But it’s more than just their physical qualities that he admires. “I love the sound of records,” he says. “I can’t make music, but being a part of the medium is very satisfying.”

Published on 12.21.10. Text, video and photos by Liza Eckert

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Bedford Avenue Interactive Map

THE WHO IS BROOKLYN? MAP

The Brooklyn Ink is collecting data on as many people in BK as possible to answer the question “Who is Brooklyn?” We’re making an interactive map that you can view as it develops. We are asking residents “How long have you lived here?” and “How long do you plan to stay?” to get a picture of the borough’s residents. Check it out here and submit your own report to add to it!

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Recipe Card: Salvatore Bklyn

One taste of? Salvatore Bklyn’s smoked ricotta on a crostini at the Unfancy Food Show a few years ago and I was smitten. Topped with a thin slice of prosciutto, a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of coarse salt, it was the perfect bite. Made with local whole milk from an upstate dairy co-op, their small batch ricotta is creamy, rich and worlds apart from the stuff on most supermarket shelves. And smoked–a stroke of genius! I went back for? seconds, but of course they’d sold out.

The owners, Betsy Levine and Rachel Mark, got into the ricotta biz after? meeting a man named Salvatore at a little enoteca in San Gimignano, Italy. They liked his gusto for life and his ricotta, and “after a meal high in saturated fats followed by fitful sleep, had an idea to start a ricotta cheese company.”

Back in Brooklyn, they started experimenting in the kitchen at Lunetta, where Betsy worked as a sous chef. After good feedback at the? restaurant, they branched out to selling in retail locations like Marlow & Sons and Stinky Bklyn. Now they have a production space in Clinton Hill and cheese is full time for Betsy, while Rachel continues to work a day job at a wine importer.

Betsy says she misses the intensity of working the line in a professional? kitchen, but running her business has it’s own punishing demands.? Spanning her two worlds is a recipe?for an unusual meatloaf from her days at Lunetta. She explains:

“I love me some meatballs. But when I was a restaurant cook making family? meal for the crew, I never had the time to make all the balls. So I made meatball meatloaf. One of the best secrets about really good meatballs? is adding a little ricotta cheese, so here is my pork and ricotta? meatloaf. Serve with a nice and parmesan-y polenta or grits.”

Pork and Ricotta Meatloaf with Creamy Coarse Polenta

Ingredients
1 Italian sub roll (the kind you get at the Italian deli) cut into a? rough small dice (sesame seeds a plus for me, but take the crust off if? you prefer none, or get the rolls with no seeds)
1 ? pounds good ground pork
3 ounces thickly sliced pancetta, minced
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
? cup ricotta cheese (5 ounces)
? cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
A good healthy dash of crushed red pepper
Kosher salt
Two 28-ounce cans peeled San Marzano Italian tomatoes, whole
Freshly ground pepper
? cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Directions
1. Preheat the oven to 325°. In a large bowl add the bread, pork, pancetta, eggs, ricotta, parsley, crushed red pepper and 1 1/2 teaspoons of kosher salt. Mix well. Let it hang out for a half hour or so. Pack mixture into an olive oiled meatloaf pan.

2. Open can of San Marzano tomatoes and drain them. Cut tomatoes in half and? shingle them over meatloaf mixture in pan. Season tomatoes with salt and pepper. If you want, nestle a thin slice of garlic on each half too.

3. Roast the meatloaf in the oven for about 1 ? – 2 ?hours, give or take. If you see the garlic or tomatoes getting a little too much color, just flip? them around to present the other side.

4. Remove loaf when cooked and let it cool a little. Garnish with a little? Parmesan. Either try to carefully remove the loaf from the pan, slice it while still in the pan, or eat directly out of it.

Polenta
Ingredients
1 quart water or stock seasoned with salt
1 cup coarse polenta or grits
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 Tablespoons of butter

Directions
1. ?Bring salted water or stock if you have it up to a boil. Add coarse ground polenta or grits (Anson Mills is great).

2. Turn the heat down to medium and allow to cook (around 40 minutes),? stirring every 5 minutes or so to prevent sticking, burning, ?clumps.

3. Add more water or stock if needed. When polenta is tender and cooked,? fold in Parmesan and butter and check if it needs salt.

Finishing
I like to use a shallow bowl. Spoon some of the polenta in the bowl. Add a healthy slice of meatloaf on top. Be sure to add some of the oven? roasted tomatoes and whatever delicious pork juice that is left at the? bottom of the meatloaf pan.

Published on 12.16.10.

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Trunk Show

SPONSORED TIP Maybe it’s time to do some holiday shopping for yourself: This Friday Greenpoint salon + event space The Parlour Brooklyn will host a trunk show for an amazing collection of vintage clothes from 7-11pm.

Published on 12.16.10.

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Arts and Letters Expansion Approved

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Brooklyn School Library opens – and closes – its doors

Principal Sandra D'avilar shows off P.S. 9's brand new library that she will promptly close, for lack of librarians. (Alex Alper/The Brooklyn Ink)

By Alex Alper

On November 12, P.S. 9 and M.S. 571 unveiled a revamped school library, which they promptly closed, because there was no librarian.

“Here we truly came together…with a common cause … and created this for our youngsters,” said Sandra D’Avilar, Principal of the elementary school that renovated the library, but whose tightened budget no longer had room for a librarian. “And it’s still not enough to make someone from the Board of Education call and say, ‘hey, we found some money. We‘re going to send someone you can interview, and we’re going to find you a librarian.’”

Out of 880 elementary schools in New York City, 519 had a library and no librarian last year. That’s more than a 300 percent increase in elementary school libraries without libraries over the previous year, after remaining relatively flat over the previous three years.

“Accountability trumps everything,” said a city education department insider who wanted to remain anonymous, because of the sensitivity of the issue. “There is no accountability for information skills, just for literacy and math; therefore, principals figure that libraries don’t make a difference in their bottom line of student test scores.”

The cuts follow a long trend: since 1998, the first year for which there is data available, New York City elementary school librarians have decreased by more than half.

“What is happening all around the country is that, as schools are faced with budget cuts and they have to decide what is going to go…they are eliminating the library because it is harder to rationalize cutting a teacher,” said Kiki Dennis, a parent at P.S. 9 and decorator who designed the library said.

Nationally, figures were not available especially for elementary schools, but the number of school librarians decreased by about 3 percent.

New York State law requires elementary schools to have libraries, but not librarians. Middle and high schools are required to have both.

Many legislative efforts have been made to extend the librarian requirement to elementary schools in New York but so far none have been successful.

In 1985, the Citizen’s Committee for Children and the Women’s City Club of New York, conducted a study of New York City elementary schools and recommended that the librarian mandate be extended to K-6. They were unsuccessful, just as a bill requiring the same thing was rejected in the state assembly in 1994.

In a three-part study, Ruth Schwartz, Director of School Media Program at Syracuse University found that elementary students in schools where there were well-trained, certified librarians, had significantly higher test scores on national achievement tests than elementary schools that did not have such personnel, even if they had a library. While the correlation existed for secondary students as well, it was much more significant at the elementary level.

“This was ammunition to make the case for certified librarians at the elementary level and we were making progress, and then this financial crisis hit and all our efforts flew out the door,” she said.

Arkansas, Hawaii, and South Carolina all have state laws requiring that every school have a school librarian, according to Nancy Everhart, President of the American Association of School librarians. Many states lack a librarian mandate at any level, she says.

But despite the almost unanimous support for extending the librarian mandate to elementary schools, the Commissioner’s regulation on librarian placement has not changed substantially since it was passed in 1928.

According to a State Education official who also declined to be named, the state’s push to ensure all school librarians are certified is also causing the decline. Finding certified librarians is sometimes a challenge.

The number of certified librarians in New York City elementary schools has increased almost three fold since 1998. In the same period, the number of uncertified librarians at the elementary level decreased by three quarters.

Another reason for school library neglect is the strength of the New York Public library system, the fourth largest in the country, without 87 branches.

P.S. 9 is five blocks from a public library and books line the shelves of most elementary school classrooms.

Still, the parents of P.S. 9 were adamant that the school have its own library, funded through grants from Brooklyn politicians.

“Our goal is to really have this be a fully staffed space that becomes an educational tool and resource, an additional support to the curriculum that is happening here,” said Dennis.

Parents are confident the school will get funding for a librarian.

“The numbers can get crunched. Something can get moved around. Somebody who might be on payroll might be moved off,” said Laura Jaffe, another P.S. 9 parent. “[D’Avilar] doesn’t just think outside the box. She throws away the box.”

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Markowitz Pushes for Skyscraper Historic District in Downtown Brooklyn

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz lent his support to plans to designate the center of Downtown Brooklyn as New York’s first “Skyscraper Historic District”, according to The New York Post.

However, he clarified that his support hinges on the removal of a co-op complex at 75 Livingston St. from the proposal. The designation would protect the buildings in it from being demolished by developers.

Opponents to the plan say it will increase rents and costs of living in the area, potentially driving people out.

Tags: Downtown Brooklyn, Marty Markowitz, Skyscraper Historic District

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Police Hunt for Attempted Bank Robbery Suspect

Police are seeking the public’s assistance in finding the man suspected of an attempted bank robbery on Wednesday evening at the Citibank on 1528 Sheepshead Bay Road.

According to the police, the suspect walked up to the teller and passed a note through the?window demanding money. When the teller walked away, the suspect fled.

Police say the suspect is a white male, 50 to 55 years of age, 5′10″ to 6′ tall and weighing 200 to 250 pounds, with a salt and pepper goatee. He was last seen wearing a plaid jacket, blue jeans and brown work boots.

Tags: bank robbery, police, Sheepshead Bay

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Security Measure Turns Public Street into Prison Parking Lot in Sunset Park

A concrete barrier with the initials for the Federal Bureau of Prisons has closed 29th Street to thru traffic since 2001. It’s now used as a parking lot, according to prison officials. (Camilo Smith/The Brooklyn Ink)

By Camilo Smith

Along the southwest edge of 29th Street and Third Avenue in Sunset Park, cars dart along the shadow cast by the Gowanus Expressway. While drivers may not be able to distinguish the industrial red brick of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Metropolitan Detention Center from the other factories along the route, what’s immediately out of place is the long white concrete barrier that clumsily crosses 29th Street ending atop the sidewalk on the other end.

The barrier has been in place since just after September 11, according to city officials. It’s a security measure meant to protect the 12-story, double towers at 80 29th Street and its adjacent seven-story 100 29th Street building. The structures are respectively known as the West and East buildings that make up the Department of Justice’s MDC: Brooklyn.

Ed Ross, a Bureau of Prisons spokesman in Washington, confirmed that the access to the street in front of the detention center has been blocked for years. But members of Community Board 7 and local residents are saying enough is enough and that 29th Street, a public road, needs to have its concrete blockade removed and returned to public use.

“From a planning standpoint and from a community standpoint, it is something we view negatively,” says CB7 District Manager Jeremy Laufer. “Perhaps there are legitimate security reasons, but they’ve never been explained to this community.”

Most residents complain that the blocked street is used as a parking lot and although the blockage has been in place for nearly a decade its taken on a renewed importance. Given Brooklyn’s waterfront development initiatives, which include a planned 14-mile, multi-use waterfront greenway and a recycling center set to open next year, the concrete barricade is a reminder of transportation limitations in that section of Sunset Park’s overburdened industrial zone.

“It’s an inconvenience, not only for the community, but it’s an inconvenience for the recycling facility,” said Murad Awawdeh, a Sunset Park resident and community activist, referring to the nearly $100-million center owned by Sims Recycling of NY, which broke ground two months ago.

Laufer, the district manager, says the fact that Third Avenue is a one-way street, the 29th Street access is vital to get to the recycling center, which will sit on the edge of the Gowanus Bay once it’s complete. The blockade could create a bottleneck on Second Avenue. According to a City press release, the recycling center will function 24-hours a day, 6-days a week, and will receive drop-offs by “no more than 100 trucks per day”.

Laufer feels 29th Street was “seized” from the community, and knows the concrete barrier will cause trucks to reroute through his community, which already deals with a heavy truck presence. The area gets clogged due to the Gowanus Expressway lack of on ramps. Freight vehicles are often forced to use neighborhood streets to find highway access. Trucks making their way to the 30th Street Pier, where the Sims facility is being constructed may find that “There’s only one way in, and one way out,” after making their drop-offs, says Laufer.

The nearly 3-foot-high security barricade is made of several 10-foot-long concrete segments connected together to close the street at its crosswalk. This is a security measure for the federal prison, according to New York City Department of Transportation spokesman Scott Gastel. The facility, which opened in 1994, became famous for housing 9/11 suspects who later sued the prison, in what the media dubbed Brooklyn’s Abu Ghraib.

According to the Federal Highway Administration these so-called concrete Jersey barriers are intended to lift and redirect a vehicle that crashes into them. They have become fixtures near federal facilities throughout the country. Security experts say this form of perimeter security for government buildings increased following the September, 11 attacks. Especially for locations built near the curb or streets, “setback” distance from the street of 50-feet to 100-feet is seen as crucial for security.

“Security is a big issue,” says James Davis, spokesman for the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn located near the Sunset Park waterfront. (Camilo Smith/The Brooklyn Ink)

“Security is a big issue. Most prisons sit on a couple hundred acres of land. In the city,” says James Davis, spokesman for Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center “we don’t have that luxury.” Davis says the prolonged shutdown of the street doesn’t rest with the Bureau of Prisons or the MDC. He would not say which agency has that final decision to keep 29th Street blocked. He did confirm that the street is designated for public use, however.

Perhaps the most perplexing thing about the street closure and the thing everyone in the community notices is that the barricade has helped turn 29th Street into a private, free parking lot. “We benefit from [the closure], the fact that we have a lot of lawyers come through. We have them park here.” Davis says the street is commonly used to park visitor and staff cars, among others in the local business community.

“That doesn’t sound like security to me,” says Laufer. “If employees of the prison are using this public space as a private lot, is that considered a taxable benefit and are they paying taxes on it? he asked.

The fact 29th Street is openly used as a parking lot behind a concrete security barricade is often referenced at Sunset Park community board meetings. CB 7’s waterfront development plan created in 2007, and called a 197-a plan, mentioned a goal of opening waterfront access at 29th St. It’s one of only two access points in the neighborhood, the other being the 58th Street Pier. Sunset Park borders 2 ?-miles of waterfront, and another access point at 43rd and 51st Street is being worked on as part of Bush Terminal Pier Park, set to open within the next two years.

The Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway initiative, which plans to connect Greenpoint to Sunset Park at one point in its early design phase, focused on a path through 29th Street, but that changed earlier this fall according to Awawdeh, a local resident and organizer with environmental justice organization Uprose, “The community plan was to get the Greenway onto Second and First Avenue as soon as possible, we found out at the last meeting that it’s not possible, because the prison won’t budge on that.”

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Brooklyn School Library opens – and closes – its doors

Principal Sandra D'avilar shows off P.S. 9's brand new library that she will promptly close, for lack of librarians. (Alex Alper/The Brooklyn Ink)

By Alex Alper

On November 12, P.S. 9 and M.S. 571 unveiled a revamped school library, which they promptly closed, because there was no librarian.

“Here we truly came together…with a common cause … and created this for our youngsters,” said Sandra D’Avilar, Principal of the elementary school that renovated the library, but whose tightened budget no longer had room for a librarian. “And it’s still not enough to make someone from the Board of Education call and say, ‘hey, we found some money. We‘re going to send someone you can interview, and we’re going to find you a librarian.’”

Out of 880 elementary schools in New York City, 519 had a library and no librarian last year. That’s more than a 300 percent increase in elementary school libraries without libraries over the previous year, after remaining relatively flat over the previous three years.

“Accountability trumps everything,” said a city education department insider who wanted to remain anonymous, because of the sensitivity of the issue. “There is no accountability for information skills, just for literacy and math; therefore, principals figure that libraries don’t make a difference in their bottom line of student test scores.”

The cuts follow a long trend: since 1998, the first year for which there is data available, New York City elementary school librarians have decreased by more than half.

“What is happening all around the country is that, as schools are faced with budget cuts and they have to decide what is going to go…they are eliminating the library because it is harder to rationalize cutting a teacher,” said Kiki Dennis, a parent at P.S. 9 and decorator who designed the library said.

Nationally, figures were not available especially for elementary schools, but the number of school librarians decreased by about 3 percent.

New York State law requires elementary schools to have libraries, but not librarians. Middle and high schools are required to have both.

Many legislative efforts have been made to extend the librarian requirement to elementary schools in New York but so far none have been successful.

In 1985, the Citizen’s Committee for Children and the Women’s City Club of New York, conducted a study of New York City elementary schools and recommended that the librarian mandate be extended to K-6. They were unsuccessful, just as a bill requiring the same thing was rejected in the state assembly in 1994.

In a three-part study, Ruth Schwartz, Director of School Media Program at Syracuse University found that elementary students in schools where there were well-trained, certified librarians, had significantly higher test scores on national achievement tests than elementary schools that did not have such personnel, even if they had a library. While the correlation existed for secondary students as well, it was much more significant at the elementary level.

“This was ammunition to make the case for certified librarians at the elementary level and we were making progress, and then this financial crisis hit and all our efforts flew out the door,” she said.

Arkansas, Hawaii, and South Carolina all have state laws requiring that every school have a school librarian, according to Nancy Everhart, President of the American Association of School librarians. Many states lack a librarian mandate at any level, she says.

But despite the almost unanimous support for extending the librarian mandate to elementary schools, the Commissioner’s regulation on librarian placement has not changed substantially since it was passed in 1928.

According to a State Education official who also declined to be named, the state’s push to ensure all school librarians are certified is also causing the decline. Finding certified librarians is sometimes a challenge.

The number of certified librarians in New York City elementary schools has increased almost three fold since 1998. In the same period, the number of uncertified librarians at the elementary level decreased by three quarters.

Another reason for school library neglect is the strength of the New York Public library system, the fourth largest in the country, without 87 branches.

P.S. 9 is five blocks from a public library and books line the shelves of most elementary school classrooms.

Still, the parents of P.S. 9 were adamant that the school have its own library, funded through grants from Brooklyn politicians.

“Our goal is to really have this be a fully staffed space that becomes an educational tool and resource, an additional support to the curriculum that is happening here,” said Dennis.

Parents are confident the school will get funding for a librarian.

“The numbers can get crunched. Something can get moved around. Somebody who might be on payroll might be moved off,” said Laura Jaffe, another P.S. 9 parent. “[D’Avilar] doesn’t just think outside the box. She throws away the box.”

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A Life in Court: Friendship and Corruption Inside the Brooklyn System

At the Brooklyn Supreme Court, attorney John O’Hara files amendments to the wrongful death suit he is pursuing on behalf of his friend, the late Judge John Phillips. (Alysia Santo/The Brooklyn Ink)

By Alysia Santo

Attorney John O’Hara, 49, is waging a campaign to expose the treatment that his mentor and friend, Judge John Phillips, endured in the last years of his life. O’Hara is representing Reverend Samuel Boykin, Phillips nephew and administrator of the estate in a $10 million wrongful death suit against the residential facility where Phillips died in February of 2008.

The suit, which was brought early this year, alleges that Phillips was “confined against his will for approximately eight months by the defendants at their facility,” and that as a diabetic, he did not receive the proper diet and frequently missed his insulin shots.

It’s sharp contrast to Phillips’ 13 years on the bench in the Brooklyn civil court, where he was nicknamed the “Kung Fu Judge” because of his 10th degree black belt. In those days he was an elected trustee of the people, tasked with dispensing justice.

But O’Hara’s crusade for Phillips started long before he died. He says that Phillips’ trouble began after he started telling people he wanted to run for District Attorney in 2000 against Charles “Joe” Hynes.

Soon after Phillips made his announcement to run, Assistant District Attorney Steven Kramer became concerned when stopping by Judge Phillips’ property to investigate an alleged real estate crime. According to Orlando Rivera, a spokesperson for the DA’s office, “Justice Phillips’ home was in disarray,” and the judge appeared “disoriented and uncared for.” Kramer began writing letters to local judges recommending that a “law guardian be appointed to oversee Justice Phillips’ finances and protect his numerous and valuable assets.”

Judge Leonard Scholnick placed Phillips in the State Supreme Court’s guardianship program, and over a period of 8 years Phillips estate went from an estimated $10 million to owing $2 million in taxes. This all under the watch of a series of five different court appointed guardians whose responsibility was to protect Phillips interests.

O’Hara and other defenders of Judge Phillips say this is one of several examples of the Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles “Joe” Hynes, using his power and influence over the court to undermine political challengers.

O’Hara’s perspective on the DA’s office comes from personal experience: after successfully running candidates against the Brooklyn Democratic machine in the early ‘90s, District Attorney Hynes indicted him for allegedly breaking a number of election laws. After three trials and three appeals he became the second person to be convicted for false registration and illegal voting since Susan B. Anthony in 1873. He was disbarred in 1997 but in 2008, following Phillips’ death, he applied for reinstatement to the bar.

In October 2008, the members of the New York State Committee on Character and Fitness granted reinstatement in a unanimous vote. “Mr. O’Hara, accurately it appears, claims the machine went gunning for him,” stated the committee’s report, which concluded that O’Hara had been the victim of a political prosecution.

Sandra Roper says she suffered at the hands of DA Hynes as well after she ran in Judge Phillips’ place for DA in 2001. After her run, she spent the next couple of years in court, defending herself against felony theft charges that she felt were brought about to punish her for challenging Hynes in the election. After she was found not guilty, she pursued Hynes on a selective prosecution charge but it was dropped.

Phillips believed he was suffering from a political persecution as well. In a letter dated April 11th, 2001, Phillips wrote to his attorney, Dominick Fusco, that the Kings County DA’s office “is behind a plan to declare me incompetent prior to my announcing my candidacy in the democratic primary against Mr. Charles Hynes.”

“What happened to Judge Phillips is so bad. I’ll never let this go,” says O’Hara. His recent reinstatement to the New York bar is O’Hara’s last hope to get the late justice he feels Judge Phillips so strongly deserves.

It is a twisted ending to a long friendship. O’Hara and Judge Phillips had both been mavericks in the Brooklyn political scene, challenging the established Brooklyn Democratic Party machine.

******

The two men met in 1976, when O’Hara was 15 and Phillips was 51, while O’Hara was volunteering in a state assembly campaign at the Board of Elections in downtown Brooklyn. “I had always heard about the Kung Fu Judge,” says O’Hara. “When I met him he was larger than life. He invited me to come out to his campaign headquarters in Bed Stuy.” O’Hara would pedal his bike the six miles from Bay Ridge to help Phillips hang posters and get ballot signatures.

When O’Hara was applying to law school, Phillips, now a judge, mailed and phoned a recommendation for all 12 schools that he was applying to. “I told him I was driving a cab one night a week extra to get the money orders for the applications. He kind of laughed because I didn’t have a checking account.” O’Hara chokes back tears remembering when he went to go pick up the recommendations from Phillips. “Inside each file he had written out the check for the application fee for each law school. I remember these things like they were yesterday.”

After Phillips lost his reelection bid in 1986, he tried to run again in 1990 and 1991. Signatures were intensely scrutinized and Phillips applications for a spot on the ballot were denied both years. In 1992, O’Hara helped him get on the ballot, and the voters elected him. “I made sure all the petition technicalities were there,” says O’Hara. As the years went by, the friendship evolved. “Even though he was twice my age and a different color, we just had a kind of understanding, “ O’Hara says. “We had a mutual admiration for each other that had grown over time.”

O’Hara’s habit of running campaigns against establishment Democrats was sidelined in 1996 with his indictment by the DA’s office for casting an illegal vote from a residence which was not his “principal and permanent address.” The charges were prosecuted three separate times, a rare occurrence, particularly for a nonviolent crime. A Brooklyn courthouse insider who spoke to Brooklyn Ink anonymously, said people who knew about the prosecutions saw it as corrupt, “Everyone could smell a rat.”

The DA’s office responded through an emailed memo. “We cannot comment or engage on a conversation beyond what is given to you on these documents,” writes spokesperson Orlando Rivera. In a play by play of the trials and appeals, the DA’s office lists the evidence against Phillips, yet does not directly respond to any of the questions surrounding the allegations being made by O’Hara and others.

O’Hara was disbarred in 1997 and fined $20,000. Over the next 10 years he fulfilled 1500 hours of community service in the same parks that he used to campaign in. One of them was even across the street from his high school. “I called it the chain gang,” he says. After being recognized one day, O’Hara bought a green jacket and pants. “I wanted to blend in with the park employees.”

After O’Hara’s conviction in 1997, he found out that Judge Phillips had been trying to run for DA in that year’s election, but had been taken off the ballot over his petitions for the third time. “I tracked him down and I said Judge, why didn’t you tell me you were running for DA, and he said ‘I wanted to surprise you’,” says O’Hara. “He told me he wanted to take Hynes out because of what he did to me.”

The pair started planning out Phillips’ run for DA in 2001. “We knew this guy could be taken out,” says O’Hara. “Phillips was a black man with a lot of money. That’s what made Hynes nervous.”

******

Weeks after telling friends he was running against Hynes, Phillips was visited by doctors under a court order from Justice Leonard Scholnick. In sealed court transcripts from a hearing about Phillips’ medical status in 2001, Dr. James J. Lynch, a Brooklyn-based psychiatrist, testified that he became alarmed during the examination when Phillips started telling him why he thought he was there. According to Lynch, Phillips said, “the District Attorney is involved, specifically an Assistant District Attorney, but that person was part of the conspiracy against him, was trying to take his funds, take his property.”

Two different doctors testified that Phillips was suffering from early stage dementia but that the condition was not putting him in “acute danger” and that with a “home attendant” to help him clean, cook, and shop, it “would be an okay situation.” The same day as the testimony, Phillips was placed under the control of the first of almost a half-dozen court-appointed guardians. His person and his property were now under the direction of the Brooklyn court system – a system in which he himself had once presided.

In an emailed response from the DA’s office, Rivera attached a memo saying that Judge Phillips was placed into a guardianship program because ADA Kramer was concerned about his mental health and “sought to help.” It was all done to protect the judge, since Phillips was “considered a friend and mentor by many people in the District Attorney’s office.”

In 2004, Phillips was taken against his will to East Haven Nursing and Rehab in the Bronx. Ezra Glaser, Phillips’ attorney during his time there, says in his experience with guardianship it is unusual to declare someone incompetent during the early stages of dementia. “The fact that he [Hynes] has such extraordinary care for an old man that wants to run against him just seems a little bit odd to me,” says Glaser.

Officials at East Haven upheld an order from Brooklyn Judge Michael Pesce saying Phillips couldn’t receive any mail, phone calls, and visitors were limited to a short list of people, at times being denied access completely. John O’Hara was horrified, and went into action. “I held a demonstration in front of Pesce’s house. I would take the files Phillips was receiving, many of which became sealed, and I would mail them to reporters everywhere.”

When O’Hara was denied access to Judge Phillips, he snuck into the building. “I got Phillips on tape saying get me out of here, they are holding me hostage,” says O’Hara, who then passed the tapes to a reporter at the New York Post. A series of articles ensued, with titles like “’Prisoner’ Judge Bids for Liberty.” (Grace Bargrese, an employee of East Haven who was around Phillips during his time there said she was “not interested in sharing any information” about Phillips.)

Samuel Boykin, Phillips’ nephew, also fought to help Phillips. “They used a court order to put a person in a nursing home against the family members’ will,” says Boykin. “We challenged the court’s position, we wanted to make his golden years more comfortable. But they denied that every time.”

Reverend Samuel Boykin and Judge John Phillips at East Haven Nursing and Rehabilitation in 2006. (Courtesy of Samuel Boykin)

After two and a half years, Phillips was moved from East Haven to Prospect Park Residential. Eight months later, Phillips died in the elevator of what O’Hara calls “his nursing home jail.” O’Hara and others close to Phillips say the residence failed to properly provide for his diabetic needs.

According to court documents, since 2001 Phillips had gone through five different court appointed guardians and three judges. His estate was effectively robbed. All 12 of his properties, which consisted of multiple apartment buildings and storefronts across Brooklyn, were sold. His assets, which totaled over $10 million, were now in the red, where they remain. According to court documents, Phillips estate owes the IRS $2 million. In a summary by the last court appointed guardian, James Cahill, not one of the guardians ever filed a tax return and not one of them has ever been brought up on charges, although the Committee on Character and Fitness disbarred one of the guardians, Emani Taylor, for embezzling Phillips’ funds.

******

When O’Hara realized that Judge Phillips would not be able to run for DA, he looked up the name of a civil rights attorney named Sandra Roper, whose law office happened to be just around the corner from Phillips’ office. Roper was well known in the Brooklyn community, and had recently met with Phillips to discuss running on the same slate for a seat in the city council. She had worked for the NAACP, and had admired Phillips both as lawyer and judge. O’Hara and Roper had never met, but O’Hara suggested she switch her campaign to run for DA’s office – which would fill the slot that Phillips couldn’t.

Roper demurred at first. But then she started hearing the stories about what had happened to Phillips. “People on the block mentioned some police-looking folks had come and scooped up judge Phillips and took him,” says Roper. “No one knew where he was at that particular time. Soon I got the whole story about O’Hara and Phillips. And that’s when I made my decision to run for DA.”

Peter Sweeney and Eileen Nadelson joined the opposition ticket to run for the judgeship alongside Roper. The campaign had almost no money. “People who run for school council spend more money,” says O’Hara. But they managed to line up the signatures needed to get on the ballot. Two hundred volunteers over the course of two weeks gathered 12,839 petitions.

The legal backlash came quickly. Attorneys for Hynes sent investigators to the homes of Ropers petitioners. According to court documents, one hundred seventy-two witnesses were subpoenaed, including Roper’s father – who had died 11 years prior.

“As surreal as it was when I found out what happened to Phillips and O’Hara, what ensued after was beyond surreal,” says Roper. In what is believed to be the largest election-law matter in Brooklyn history, over 10,000 signatures were scrutinized. After six weeks in court, the judge ordered Roper’s name removed from the ballot, along with the two candidates for judge.

Yet the New York State Appellate Division reversed this decision two days later. Judge Nadelson and Judge Sweeney won their seats, but Roper ended up losing the election. Despite her loss, she showed the DA’s vulnerability. As an unknown female candidate with almost no funding, Roper had managed to get 37 percent of the vote.

Roper’s legal woes continued when in 2003 she was indicted in the Brooklyn Supreme Court on felony theft charges after a former client, Mary Ward, filed a complaint with the DA’s office charging that Roper had cheated her out of $8,000. Roper had already been exonerated from these charges after Ward filed a complaint with the Bar Association Discipline Committee.

It is unusual for any attorney to be prosecuted on charges that have already been exonerated by the grievance department due to the exhaustive nature of the reviews. According to court documents, it was revealed at trial that Ward had a long history of filing complaints against attorneys. “For [Hynes] to allow this to go forward even though I had been cleared speaks volumes,” says Roper.

The trial ended in a hung jury — eight of the jurors found her innocent. In 2006, Roper filed a lawsuit against Hynes and the New York State Unified Court System, alleging that a “selective prosecution” had cost her a job as a court attorney and deprived her of her right to run for office. “I wasn’t suing about money, I wasn’t suing about getting my job back, I wanted vindication,” says Roper. Ezra Glaser, Phillips’ and O’Hara’s former attorney, represented her. “A prosecutor has immense powers,” says Glaser. “He had immunity to act as a government actor, so the charges were dropped.” Phone calls and emails about the Roper case were not returned by the DA’s office.

“People who fight the system pay a big price,” says Judge Nadelson, who retired last year. “The party is making the rules about who can be a judge, or a politician, or anything else. It’s scary when you think about it.”

******

It was after delivering the eulogy at Phillips’ funeral in February 2008 that O’Hara decided to go back to his beginnings – as a lawyer in the courts. As Roper, O’Hara, and Glaser stood outside together, watching the casket being put into the hearse, Roper said, “You know, it just doesn’t seem like its really final.” The next day O’Hara and Glaser starting working on O’Hara’s motion for reinstatement to the bar.

While Roper has stepped out of the political arena, she has researched and written pardon requests for O’Hara four times. Glaser recently filed this year’s pardon request to the governor.

“You become consumed with your own vindication,” says O’Hara, who says he is not done with the Brooklyn DA office yet. “I am considering running for DA in 2013.”

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Made in Brooklyn: Bonbon Oiseau

Deb Stein is not what you’d expect from a jewelry designer. She doesn’t keep up with fashion magazines, doesn’t consider next season’s trends, and doesn’t have an Etsy store. In fact, she never even meant to be a jewelry designer. Her company, Bonbon Oiseau, just sort of happened.

“I really backed into this business,” she remembers. “I was selling a few pieces I’d made at a friend’s shop called Therapy in Williamsburg. Daily Candy wrote about my stuff, and suddenly, I had a business.” She’d dabbled in beading during grad school, but otherwise, she had no background in jewelry making. “I started getting emails from Teen Vogue and shops all over the country. And I thought, ‘I don’t even know how to do this.’”

That was in 2005. Today, Stein’s Bonbon Oiseau creations—all made in her Greenpoint studio—grace showroom floors from Paris to Tokyo, and are mainstays at Brooklyn boutiques like Cog & Pearl and Kill Devil Hill, and shops spanning the US and Europe. And while you won’t find any Bonbons on Etsy, Stein does have online shops on Big Cartel and the Bonbon Oiseau website.

Stein’s style is punctuated by a certain spunk that can only come from such unconventional beginnings. Before stumbling into jewelry, she was a painter with an eye (and ear) for stories. She spent two years in India researching a family of toymakers and artisans to see how they passed tradition through their families. “They did everything from scratch. Every little bit—the hair from their paintbrush was pulled from a squirrel’s tail, and that squirrel was in a cage right next to them.” She’d uncover their stories and weave them into her paintings, fueled by her subjects’ dedication to handmade everything. So when Stein dropped painting and picked up jewelry designing, it makes sense that her storytelling bug immediately resurfaced.

She’s since mastered her jewelry-making techniques through metal smithing and stone setting classes, but otherwise, Stein is entirely self-taught. “Mostly I subvert the techniques into what I need them for and what I want to do,” she says. “I still consult with my old teacher, Caroline Glemann from Liloveve, or a few fellow designers (like Virginia Galvan) who are great metal smiths.”

Antique glass, beads, and reclaimed treasures mark her signature style in every piece. But nothing within the Bonbon line is arbitrary. Every collection unravels astory, and each piece is a vignette from that tale. Many series even belong to a sole heroine. “In the ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ collection, I imagined the main character Phileas Fogg as an intrepid female traveler touring the world and picking up little talismans along the way,” Stein explains. “Each charm and detail in the collection reflect the memories and souvenirs I imaged she’d brought home.”

Her “Reve des Bonnie & Clyde” collection is inspired by—yes—renegade outlaws Bonnie & Clyde. Stein made each piece imagining what Bonnie Parker might have had in her jewelry box while on the road. The result was hand-wrought silver, Victorian etched glass hearts, antique charms, and woven chains with a sexy edge.

Not every backstory is borne from quirky characters: many Bonbon creations come from Stein’s own travels. One of her most cherished collections is inspired by a trip to China. “The idea started with Bruce Chatwin. He published an essay called “Rock’s World” about an ancient village outside of Lijiang,” she explains. She visited the village after reading the essay, and years later, the “Fleuri d’Hiver” collection emerged. “That collection came from every detail I remembered about the nature, people, and colors I experienced there. The red from a thousand-year-old camellia tree that a monk protected during the Cultural Revolution. The yellow of the mustard fields. The celestial symbols the Naxi women wore on their coats were represented by little black sequins.”

Even the beads Stein uses tell a story. Many come from sources in Paris, Texas, and here in New York. “My favorite source,” she says, “is a genteel old-school Frenchman with a jewelry shop in Paris. His daughter saw my work and told me the glass I was using was the work of her grandfather. So I went [to her father’s shop] and he tentatively showed me a tray of beautiful old glass rings and funny twisted beads in bright reds, turquoise, violet, and ivory. He told me his father used to produce the glass beads for Chanel and the costumes of the Folies Bergere dancers in the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s.

“When I came back the next day—always a two day process with him because he’s only willing to show me a few things at a time—we bargained for over an hour in a very Victorian way—he wrote down the prices to show for my approval, I’d cross it off and say I could pay this for this many, it went on and on! A true character that makes designing with the beads that much more inspiring.”

A story is literally hiding in every detail of her work, whether it’s in the beads themselves, or Stein’s design muses. Bonbon Oiseau’s upcoming 2011 collection, “Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining,” takes an unexpected turn. There are no villains or enchanting voyages behind these creations. The sole inspiration, in fact, is Stein’s father. “He’d always use these old sayings—he’d often say, ‘every cloud has a silver lining.’ After a sad year of mourning his death, I was inspired to create an uplifting collection based on his favorite saying.” Together with her assistant, Vanessa Kinzer (who helps create every collection), Stein used seed beads to design intricate woven patterns that look like clouds. A thin silver (or gold, above) chain creates the graceful lining.

Stein also brings her fervor for people and stories back into the Brooklyn community. She spearheads an annual holiday raffle for the Food Bank of New York City, where she and eight other artists donate a piece of their work to the prize. The swag features Brooklyn-made goodies including a feather calendar by the?Wild Unknown, assorted wonders from Sesame Letterpress, hand-poured organic candles from Tamika Rivera of Therapy, and a set of jewelry from Bonbon Oiseau’s own Fleuri d’Hiver collection. The winner is drawn on Christmas Eve, so there’s still time to throw your hat into the fashionably charitable ring—details can be found on the Bonbon Oiseau blog.

“It’s an especially fun raffle to organize because everyone is so grassroots,” Stein said. “If we can band together and offer our work as a way to give back, it’s a no-brainer.”

Maria Gagliano is a writer, book editor, and co-publisher of Slice magazine. She’s a Bensonhurst native living in Park Slope, where she’s teaching herself to sew, garden, pickle, preserve, and bake like her Sicilian family. She chronicles her (mis)adventures at pomatorevival.com.

Published on 12.15.10.

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