Mister Noisee

Anonymous, counterfeit ice cream

Ice cream trucks are symbols of childhood, of summer, of fun. They bring joy to young and old alike all over the city. Not liking them must make you a curmudgeonly, fun-hating stick in the mud. Everyone knows the Mister Softee song!

Whatever. Try living with one outside your bedroom.

That's what it feels like for 25-year-old Brooklyn resident Olga Orellana. She says she can hear them outside from around ten in the morning until almost midnight, making so much noise.

"I don't know why they go so long," she says. "Who is eating so much ice cream?"

Ice cream truck noise was supposed to be a thing of the past, with a law passed in 2005 that requires trucks to turn the music off while parked. In my observation, trucks do observe this rule, especially in Manhattan. However, foot traffic in Brooklyn is less dense, and so the trucks have to keep moving to find customers, and thus the song is playing almost constantly. Which, for ground-floor, front-bedroom dwellers like Orellana, is a problem.

"All day and into the night, I hear the trucks," she complains.

It's not just the noise that's a problem, either, it's also the smell of exhaust from the generators that keep the ice cream cold. It clogs the air for minutes after the truck goes by. The smell can make the ice cream just purchased from the truck very difficult to enjoy.

While Mister Softee is the most visible offender, they are not the only one, nor the most nefarious. This entertaining Times story from 2005 profiles a private investigator who tracks impostor Mister Softee trucks for copyright infringement. While he seems to have been successful, there are off-brand ice cream trucks that play "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain" and don't have a company name or phone number on their sides, only 311. This raises questions of accountability. Who does one complain about when calling 311?

A representative from 311 did not have figures about ice cream truck noise complaints available, and a representative from Brooklyn's 83rd Precinct said the precinct does not get a lot. But that's not to say people don't complain in their living rooms and online. And with confirmed reports of the seemingly apocryphal tale that ice cream men deal drugs, it may be time to just go into the bodega, get a frozen Snickers, and let the ice cream truck ride off into the sunset, speakers blaring.

Ryan Ford: Brooklyn's the Borough

The painting is not finished, but it is still disturbing. A wrestler, dressed in purple, is in the center, a look of anguish on his face. His hands disappear into the mouths of shadowy demons. Standing all around him are gray-faced, leering spectators. One throws money, another has a pet monkey on his shoulder. Each has a distinct expression and personality. In the bottom right, almost as large as the scene in the center, a group of young boys runs around. The Bosch-inspired painting is bleak and barren, a battle scene in a desert.

The painting, with the working title Dudes of Destruction, is one of the latest works of Ryan Ford, a Bushwick-based artist.

Ford, thirty, is almost too large to fit in the small room in the shared loft space that serves as his studio. However, he is obviously right at home there. His sketches and assorted detritus cover every inch of wall space, and his paint-stained iPod plays from a corner. Works-in-progress are all around.

“I’m supposed to do this,” he proclaims.

Ford was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, and then moved to Pinehurst, North Carolina as a teenager. He attended the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, and moved to Brooklyn three years ago.

Much of his early work is influenced by the Sienese school of painting, a flat Renaissance style. it. He combined this classical technique with pop culture, most often videogame imagery. Works in this style include Cloud Eater vs. Box of Hell, which depicts two figures about to fight, Tekken-style, in front of a distant mountain range.

However, he became dissatisfied with this style.

“I felt bound by landscapes,” he says. “I was stuck in those parameters.”

He moved into painting with airbrushing and stencils, laying down a shiny background over which he painted darker images than previous, like the “Globhammer,” “a wheel of sewage and bile that just smashes things.” The Globhammer series was his way of “dealing with darkness, the void.”

The Globhammer makes an appearance in Brooklyn’s the Borough, Ford’s most explicitly New York-influenced painting, smashing some of Bushwick’s run-down, vinyl-sided apartment buildings. A cartoonish figure with a plastic bag for a head walks down a gritty street where one building is on fire, and another has no roof. The painting’s anxiety and disgust is palpable. It’s part of a long line of art about disillusionment with the City.

“I got lost in dark feelings,” says Ford about the darkness of the Globhammer series. “I was having some feelings of despair, but however grimy it got, I was going to roll around in the muck.” This muck manifested itself in striking imagery of violence and grotesquery.

However bad Ford may ever feel, though, he will paint his way through it.

“I have an addiction to laying paint down,” he says.

Take a look at Ryan Ford's work here

The Horror at Ikea*:

Distant ships and giant head seen from Erie Basin Park

Red Hook is arguably one of Brooklyn's best-known neighborhoods, acclaimed for its artistic and literary prowess and shipyards, and most recently Ikea, but notorious for its crime and isolation. Despite considering myself a Brooklyn resident, I had never been there, and felt inclined to check it out. What I saw from the street was an abnormally diverse, unique neighborhood, in both its people and its construction.

The neighborhood is a peninsula jutting out into Gowanus Bay. It used to be bigger than it is now, including what is now Carroll Gardens, until the construction of the Gowanus Expressway separated the two and cut Red Hook off from the rest of the borough. It is difficult to get to by the subway, serviced only by the F and G trains at Smith-9th Streets, a station that bears the distinction of being the highest elevated station in the MTA system, at approximately ninety feet. The station is somewhat outside of the neighborhood. The lack of subway access has further isolated the neighborhood, giving it, for me, an certain air of mystery.

Upon descending the endless escalators in the station, I stepped out onto a heavily industrial street over the Gowanus Canal and headed west into Red Hook. Not knowing where I was going, I opted to mirror the route of the B77 bus, which would loop me along to Ikea, and show me the southeast corner of the neighborhood.

Red Hook in some ways reminds me of my neighborhood, Bushwick, in its mix of still-functioning industrial business and half-rejuvenated, half-decrepit housing. However, Red Hook seems older, more historical, with cobblestone streets, a curious grid, and buildings that just seemed to have been plopped down wherever there was room. There was also a wider mix of people. To be frank, middle-aged white women are a rare sight in Bushwick, and in Red Hook I saw many.

On Lorraine Street, I noticed a stalled condo across the street from the Red Hook Houses, the city's largest housing project. Its balconies would have looked directly onto the red bricks of one of the buildings of the enormous complex, whose high crime rate prompted Life magazine to call Red Hook the "crack capital of America" in 1992.

The amusingly-named Clinton-Bush Park is not named for our former presidents, but for its cross streets. It borders on the sprawling Red Hook Park, where the well-manicured baseball fields are loomed over by a blackened former factory. Across from the ballfields on Sigourney Street is the Red Hook Community Farm, where local kids learn about sustainability while growing organic produce. The farm possesses a jarringly incongruous tractor-crossing street sign.

In front of Rocky Sullivan's Tap Room on Dwight Street, I introduce myself to Cheryl, a middle-aged black women walking her Yorkshire Terrier, Sam. She has lived in Red Hook for fifteen years, so she has seen some changes in the neighborhood, some good, some bad. She does like the Ikea, though: "I bought a lamp there that looks good in my kitchen," she says.

I finally make it to Ikea, that shining beacon of civility and efficient Swedish design. It is built right on Erie Basin, which is home to still-functioning ship repair docks. A thoroughly modern park is around Ikea extending out onto the former docks. Inside, with nothing to buy, I have a delicious dinner of meatballs, mashed potatoes, and lingonberry sauce while looking out at the Statue of Liberty.

Mmm, meatball!

*This is a reference to the H.P. Lovecraft story "The Horror at Red Hook." Hilarious joke!

The Cardew Object

The Cardew Object workshop on April 10th was part of a "celebration of British avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew," according to the event's poster. The goal of Cardew and the event was to create an open, improvisational environment where participants respond musically to image and discussion-based prompts. For example, one group improvised and interpretation of the painting "Starry Night," changing how they played as the computer cursor moved from left to right across the painting on the screen. Discussion prompts were questions like, "what does embarrassment sound like?" Instruments played included ukulele, prepared guitar, and a wide assortment of percussion and toys. It was very disorganized, chaotic, and nonmusical, and it was difficult to discern what was even happening. When asked what he thought of the proceedings, participant Nick Engel said, "I got nothing." Cardew himself believed that everything he ever created was a failure. Take from that what you will.

A Park Grows in Bushwick

Maria Hernandez Park occupies about 3 blocks in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, between Irving and Knickerbocker Avenues and Starr and Suydam Streets. Across Irving, there is an elementary school, P.S. 123. Across Knickerbocker, there is a recently opened bar. Starr Street is a hotspot in the neighborhood's flourishing art scene, and on the corner of Irving and Suydam is an excellent taqueria. Maria Hernandez Park occupies a central geographic location in the rejuvenation of Bushwick, and the park's story is much like that of the neighborhood's as a whole.

The park was founded in the late 18oos, and was known as Bushwick Park. The park survived as the neighborhood went through drastic changes. The last of the 11 breweries that used to occupy the area closed in 1976, and in 1977 hundreds of homes and businesses were destroyed or damaged due to looting during the blackout. The once-solid neighborhood decayed, and Bushwick Park decayed with it, full of broken glass and debris and graffiti.

In 1989, the park was renamed to Maria Hernandez Park after a local activist who died for her efforts to rid drug dealers from the area. She organized community efforts to evict drug dealers from their apartments. She was shot five times through the window of her Starr Street apartment on August 8, 1989. That same year, the park was renamed in her honor.

Five years later, the park was cleaned and repaired, with new benches and fixed-up ballfields. In 2006, the park was named New York City's Park of the Month. It received a new basketball court, new fences, and a stage for performances. Now, at all times of the day, there will be children on the playground, or teenagers playing basketball or wallball on the courts. In the summer, the park plays an integral role in block parties. It could be an example in a revised Life and Death of Great American Cities.

One Hour in City Court

New York City Court briefs for Monday, March 22nd:

• A 26 year old female was accused of one count of 2nd degree assault and four counts of endangering the welfare of a child. The complaining witness, Jennifer Guzman, claimed the defendant entered her home the evening of March 21st during a birthday party held for Miguel Guzman, the defendant's ex boyfriend and the husband of the complaining witness. According to Assistant District Attorney Mason, the defendant arrived at the scene to give a birthday present to Mr. Guzman. She allegedly forced entry into the home and "smooshed" Mrs. Guzman's nine year old daughter Jannelle's face into the ground. The defendant then threw a glass at Mrs. Guzman who suffered a laceration to the face and swelling and bruising on her head, hand, and arm. Mrs. Guzman refused medical attention. ADA Mason sought five thousand dollars bail. However, the defense attorney argued that her client acted defensively, as she received stitches on her hand from a glass thrown by the complaining witness. Additionally, Miguel Guzman's niece and sister were present at the arraignment in support of the defendant. It was brought to the court's attention that Mr. Guzman's mother had an order of protection against her daughter-in-law. Judge Ellen Coin granted two orders of protection to Janelle and Jennifer Guzman against the defendant, who was released on her own recognizance.

• An 18-year-old defendant was accused of underage drinking, open container, and resisting arrest on 120th Street and Madison Avenue. According to ADA Mason, when confronted by police, the defendant shouted, "fuck you, fuck you cops." A hearing was scheduled for May 3rd, and the defendant was released on his own recognizance.
  

• A 30-year-old defendant was accused of driving while intoxicated. ADA Mason sought a $750 fine, 30 days in jail, and a license suspension for 6 months. Police arrived at an accident at Montgomery Street & Madison Avenue and found the defendant, who smelled strongly of alcohol. He refused a field sobriety test, and said, "so what, I smoked some marijuana tonight. So what. I have a fucking lawyer, I'm gonna sue you." He then tried to hug one of the arresting officers, then passed out in the back of the police car. The defense attorney asked that he be released due to the fact that the defendant works full time at two jobs, has a wife and child, and cares for his elderly mother. Bail was set at $500 and a trial was scheduled for May 7th.

• An 18-year-old defendant was accused of felony robbery and assault. According to ADA Mason, the defendant and three other men got into a taxi to go to Lulo's, a restaurant on St. Nicholas Avenue. The men then allegedly started banging on the glass causing the cabbie to exit the vehicle, leaving behind his jacket. The defendant also exited the vehicle and began hitting the complaining witness in the head. The cabbie fled the scene and when he returned his jacket and $100 cash were missing. The cab driver went to the restaurant the men had requested transportation to, saw them, and called the police. The defense attorney claimed to not understand why the defendant, a known marijuana dealer, would steal $100. At the time of arrest, the defendant had $1,000 cash in his possession. Bail was set at $10,000.
  

• A 40-year-old defendant was accused of the criminal possession of a controlled substance in the seventh degree. ADA Mason asked that the defendant's bail be $2,000, citing his extensive criminal history. This was the defendant's tenth arrest since 2009. The defense attorney argued that police had no probable cause to stop and search his client. Judge Coin denied the attorney's request that the defendant be released at his own recognizance, saying, "your client has a fifty page wrap sheet." Bail was set at $2,000. When his arraignment came to a close, the defendant was escorted to the detention center and he shouted unintelligibly in protest.

• Four separate cases with five defendants between them were presented on charges of counterfeiting. In the first, the defendant entered a guilty plea and requested a non-incarceratory sentence due to a serious neck injury (a large scar on the back of his neck was visible from the observation area). Bail was set at $750 due to prior felony convictions. In the three following cases, each defendant pled guilty to a reduced charge of violation disorderly conduct, and were given a $100 fine.

I-278 Problems, But A Car Ain't One: The Gowanus Expressway

The Gowanus Expressway at 43rd St. in Sunset Park. Image via Google.

The Gowanus Expressway is one of Robert Moses' most controversial projects. From the day it opened on November 1, 1941 until now, the highway has always been problematic, with issues ranging from its contribution to urban blight to how to best fix it now that it has fallen into disrepair.

The Gowanus Expressway is a 6.1-mile section of Interstate 278, which starts in Linden, New Jersey and travels through all five boroughs before it ends in The Bronx. The Gowanus section starts after the Verrazanno Narrows Bridge, and runs through the neighborhoods of Bay Ridge and Sunset Park, and Red Hook until it meets the interchange of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and heads north as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It is six lanes wide, and carries 200,000 vehicles a day.

The road is most notorious for, other than its traffic congestion and deteriorated condition, the ruin it brought upon the neighborhood of Sunset Park after its construction. According to The Power Broker, Sunset Park was a poor neighborhood, but a clean, tight-knit one, with its commercial hub under the elevated train tracks along Third Avenue. When new tracks were constructed along Fourth Avenue, Moses was determined to build a new highway over the disused ones on Third. Residents pleaded with Moses to build the road along the run-down, industrial Second Avenue one block to the west, but Moses maintained that using the El pillars would be cheaper than building new ones, and that it wasn't worth building to accommodate Sunset Park because it was, in his words, a "slum."

Once construction began, one hundred stores and 1,300 families were displaced. Third Avenue under the Expressway was expanded from four to ten lanes, and became a major thoroughfare for truck traffic. The elevated highway was ninety-four feet wide and, unlike the El tracks, allowed no light through, effectively blocking the sky on the street below. Underneath, it was always dark and loud and damp, and dangerous to cross, so people and businesses began fleeing the neighborhood. It decayed into a place for drugs and prostitution and poverty and abandoned cars; the slum it had not been before Robert Moses built the Gowanus Expressway.

Currently, the neighborhood is experiencing some regeneration, but problems with the Expressway remain. It is now nearly seventy years old, and in poor condition. In 2006, the Department of Transportation okayed a $12.8 billion, 3.5 mile, 7 lane tunnel along the waterfront that would replace the Expressway, but the project remains stalled and would take an estimated 15 years to finish.

A World of Pain On the G Train

Waiting for the shuttle on Union Avenue (via)

The notorious G train has been living up to its reputation for problematic service of late. Since January 15th, the train has not been running on weekends due to work in the stations and on the tracks. G train riders are understandably upset.

"It's frustrating to act like people don't need to take the train on the weekend," says Williamsburg resident Kelly McMahon, who relies on the G to get to her weekend job as a barista in Long Island City.

Weekend service on the Brooklyn-Queens Crosstown Line has been suspended since the middle of January, replaced by shuttle buses. Last weekend, some service was to have resumed, between Court Square in Queens and Bergen-Nostrand in Brooklyn, but all work was cancelled due to the snowstorm and the train ran on its regular weekend schedule. According to the MTA, there will be no service for the next two weekends between 71st Avenue and Court Square, and after that regular service will resume.

The line has been shut down for several maintainence projects, according to Gothamist: "a switch replacement at Bedford-Nostrand, asbestos removal at Greenpoint Avenue, fan plant replacement at Jackson Avenue and track maintenance work at various locations."

Kelly McMahon is dissatisfied with the inconsistency of G service. She says that it takes some of her co-workers an hour and a half to get to work when the train isn't running. According to McMahon, the shuttle buses are even worse than the train.

"After work the other day, I waited for forty minutes for a shuttle," she says. "I watched four or five full shuttle buses go past. I ended up taking a regular bus that didn't even drop me off near my house."

According to the MTA's Transit Service Reduction report, regular weekend service on the G will decrease. On Saturdays and Sundays, service frequency will be reduced from eight minutes to ten minutes. However, according to the Straphangers Campaign, the G already comes less often than average. Service will also be discontinued between Court Square and 71st Avenue.

McMahon, for one, is not happy about that information.

"There's no alternative to get from here to there," she said.

Brad Lander Crusades for Neighborhood Preservation

(via)

Brad Lander, one of New York City Council's newest members, has made neighborhood preservation one of his signature issues. From his years working as a city planner to his first term in the council, Lander has helped fix up abandoned properties, supported small businesses, and strived to develop new affordable housing and maintain what there is.

Lander, a Democrat, was elected to the City Council in November of 2009, replacing Bill de Blasio, who is now the city's public advocate. He serves the 39th District, encompassing Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Kensington, and Borough Park. He lives in Park Slope.

For six years, Lander was the director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, a community advocacy group based at the Pratt Institute. During his time as director, he worked with politicians and other housing advocates to set up an inclusionary zoning law during the rezoning of the Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront. The law requires that developers who build larger buildings must set aside 20% of space for low- and middle-income housing.

"What I feel a lot of passion about is, shouldn’t this growth and development bring us new parks and affordable housing and jobs?" he told New York magazine's Daily Intel blog in 2007. "It seems like all they bring is luxury condos."

(via)

Before joining Pratt, Lander was the executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a community advocacy non-profit working in South Brooklyn. The Fifth Avenue Committee, during the economic downturn of the early 90s, bought abandoned or potentially abandoned buildings from the City or out of foreclosure and renovated them, preserving residents' homes and supporting business growth by renting out retail space in Fifth Avenue Committee-owned buildings. The Committee also helped found a non-profit temp agency, FirstSource Staffing, that helps ensure for wages for temporary wages.

In his first two months on the City Council, Lander has been appointed to serve on the Land Use, Housing, General Welfare, Environmental Protection, Economic Development and Waterfront committees, as well as chair of the Land Use subcommittee on Landmarks, Public Siting, and Maritime Uses. He has also launched a website, stalleddevelopment.com, that has an interactive of stalled, abandoned, or vacant development sites in his district. Lander hopes that the website will help community members stay involved in getting these spaces developed.


"These developments cause real hazards for their neighbors," Lander said in a press release. "We need to get a better handle on these sites, and to take action to convert local blight into community benefit.”

Lander was embroiled in some controversy over the summer when an ad in the Borough Park Yiddish newspaper Der Blatt used homophobic language in endorsing him. Lander denied having anything to do with the ad.

"People in Borough Park know of my support of marriage equality and no one would believe that we would have placed this ad," Lander told YourNabe.com. "It could only serve to do me harm.”

Condos for Convicts

Photo via BushwickBK




A luxury condo in Bushwick, Brooklyn is being converted into a halfway house, according to the Times Newsweekly. All eight units in the building on the corner of Willoughby and Evergreen Avenues have remained unsold since going on the market in 2007, and rather than renting the units, the building's owners have reportedly made a deal to operate it as a halfway house. Community members are up-in-arms at the announcement.

The building, designed by Scarano Architects, had units listed for more than $600,000, which would be abnormally expensive even for other parts of Bushwick, and this location in particular is near known drug spots as well as a daycare center, according to local resident Evette Villafane.

Villafane said at a recent community council meeting that the conversion started to happen without the community's knowledge. District Manager for Community Board 4 Nadine Whitted also said at the meeting that while the halfway house is not necessarily unwelcome, there needs to be an effort on the part of its operators, an organization known as the Gelzer foundation.

Is is unclear from the Times Newsweekly story whether the building is already serving as a halfway house and what modifications, if any, will be made. It is possible that anti-gentrification advocates may claim this as a victory for affordable housing. The story also does not explain how the money from the city to operate a halfway house could possibly be greater than renting the units.

The situation is well-summarized by commenter Matt on the blog Bushwick BK: "everyone needs a place to go, but recovering addicts in a posh condo on a weird corner with drug activity still in the area?" he wrote. "This aughta be interesting."

Liam's Journalism Video

MTA Service Cuts...For the Greater Good

This is a post from the blog BushwickBK about how subway and bus service changes will effect Bushwick. The news is good and bad. The MTA proposal can be viewed here.