A 24-hour cafe featuring hand-rolled bagels and a full-scale juice bar named Bagelogy is scheduled to open early next year at 699 Manhattan Ave.
The new cafe will be housed in three former commercial stores, including the former Greenpoint Finest Deli in the front, and will be outfitted with porcelain tiles, custom-designed tables, and floor-to-ceiling windows.
Bagelogy’s side entrance on Norman Avenue
Owner Sam Kaplan, who was born and raised on Norman Ave., is in the process of adding bathrooms and seating capacity for 30 customers in the space with the help of an architectural team.
Kaplan emphasizes fresh ingredients when describing the future menu options. “We are gonna go above Boar’s Head, we’re not doing processed meats,” he said. Customers can expect hand-carved roast beef, hand-sliced lox and eight to 10 choices of tofu cream cheese along with traditional cream cheese options made in-house. Continue reading →
Brooklyn is a borough teeming with innovative thinkers and diligent entrepreneurs. Ideas pour out of these creative minds, and all they need is a place to simmer and settle. Where to go?
Enter Class & Co, the sleek and stylish coworking space in East Williamsburg (260 Ainslie Street, third floor). This boutique coworking home boasts a cozy vibe with exposed brick, tons of sunlight, and unique work stations ranging from private offices to a reimagined train cart for private phone calls. While getting your work done is key, Class & Co also aims to foster a community of young professionals and intellectually curious minds from different fields, creating an ecosystem for great thinkers to come together and enjoy classes and community. And Class & Co’s mission goes beyond its handsome four walls — the company helped sponsor our Polar Vortex market, another community-building event.
Greenpoint does not seem like a very likely place to have a tradition of taxidermy, but this is an area that is always full of surprises and it turns out that Greenpoint made a major contribution to taxidermy.
Taxidermy is defined as the art of preparing and preserving the skins of animals and of stuffing and mounting them in lifelike form. One of the finest practitioners of this art is Amber Maykut of Brooklyn Taxidermy (681 Morgan Avenue). Amber took lessons from George Dante and John Bollman, taxidermists for NYC’s American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian.
At the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Amber interned in the special exhibitions/fabrication department and studied the art of the diorama under Tom Doncourt. She also became certified in bird and mammal taxidermy. Brooklyn Taxidermy has been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, The LA Times, VICE Magazine, National Geographic, New York Magazine, Brooklyn Magazine, Time Out NY, and many other publications, but Amber is neither the first nor the most famous, local taxidermist.
Greenpoint’s legendary taxidermist John Rowley created many of the great dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History and wrote two of the most important texts about Taxidermy.
I came across Rowley’s story in an old edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s Old Timers Recollection series in which Greenpointer Alfred Preston in February of 1940 recalled growing up with Rowley. Information on Rowley’s youth in Greenpoint is sketchy, but it appears he was born in 1862 and was largely self-educated.
Taxidermy began to establish itself as a science and art form in the 1880s just as Rowley was reaching adulthood and New York’s American Museum of Natural History was being founded. One can surmise that he visited the museum, which first opened in 1871, as a boy and like millions of other children, was fascinated by the animals he saw there, but the state of taxidermy was primitive then. Animals were simply stuffed and they were not exhibited in the lifelike dioramas that have enthralled millions of visitors for decades, so creating realistic dioramas was one of the important early tasks of the museum. Continue reading →
Saturday 12/15 – Sunday 12/16: The A/D/O Supermarket @ A/D/O (29 Norman Ave.), 12pm-7pm, FREE, A/D/O’s holiday market returns! The two-day market will feature a unique curation of gifts from publishers, designers and artists exploring where art meets design and utility. Artists and designers will be on site selling apparel, design objects, home goods, books and jewelry. Both nights, A/D/O will host special events and exhibit works by Elena Parasco and Anthony Jamari Thomas. Refreshments provided from 4:00 – 7:00pm each day, more info [Sponsored]
WEDNESDAY 12/12
#^ Taste Makers: A Conversation with Paul Freedman and Mayukh Sen @ MOFAD (62 Bayard St.), 6:30pm, $30, book discussion + tasting, Buy Tix # Where’s Our Beer: End-Of-Year Happy Hour @ Greenpoint Beer and Ale (7 North 15th St.), 6:30pm, FREE, socialize, celebrate and look to the year ahead, RSVP ^ Seth Meyers and Amber Ruffin book signing @ Quimby’s (536 Metropolitan Ave.), 8:30pm, FREE, Note: to meet Seth and Amber you must buy a copy of the book. More Info ♫ 1s, 2s, and 3s: Round Robin Improvisations @ Arete Venue + Gallery (67 West St. #103), 9:30pm, $15, acoustic improv pieces, more info
THURSDAY 12/13
* Offshore Holiday Party and Fundraiser @ Sunview Lunchnet (221 Berry St.), 6pm, $20 donation includes 2 free drinks, supports artists’ residency program, More Info ♫ Radio Free Brooklyn’s Holiday Party @ Braven Brew Company (52 Harrison Pl.) 7pm, FREE, $10 suggested donation, 2 free beers with RSVP, RSVP ♫ Manono Nights @ Magick City (37 Box St.), 8pm, $5, Buy Tix ♫ Phosphorescent Live in Brooklyn w/ Liz Cooper & The Stampede @ Brooklyn Steel (319 Frost St.), 9pm, $27.50, Buy TixContinue reading →
After Anella (222 Franklin St.) closed following a fire last summer, owner Blair Papagni made sure that her staff would land new jobs while the chaos of the situation settled.”The fire happened on a Saturday, the day after the fire, me, my two managers and my chef, we all went out to brunch, and we first and foremost made a list of every person that worked for us and where we thought we could employ them,” Papgani said. “And then we had a staff meeting a few days later and it was sorta like a job fair.” Anella reopened with much of its original staff in November following months of rebuilding.
Anella, after the fire. Photo: Megan Penmann
Papagni signed a lease for Anella in December 2008, and attributes the restaurants’ staying power in part to her landlord. “I think that the experience of a lot of people, unfortunately, is that they have terrible landlords, and I actually have a really good relationship with my landlord and he’s made it possible that Anella will be able to be there for a really long time,” she said.
When it came to redesigning the fire-damaged restaurant, Papagni found a rare opportunity to reflect on what Anella’s strong points were. “I think that our mantra with reopening was to use the fire as an opportunity to fix things that maybe weren’t working so well for us and embrace the things that were,” she said.
Anella’s new interior
In a city where the restaurant industry is especially competitive, many dining establishments operate as turnover machines while treating their employees as disposable. Papagni takes great pride in the fact that Anella employees tend to stick with the business on a more longterm basis: “Our two managers that are on right now have been with me for seven years. My Chef, Mayo is his name, he started at Anella as the dishwasher when we opened in 2009, and he’s worked every position in the kitchen, and he worked his way up to chef,” she said Continue reading →
Governor Andrew Amazon Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio Bezos announced on Tuesday a community advisory committee “to share information and solicit ongoing community input about Amazon’s planned headquarters project in Long Island City.” North Brooklyn is not represented on the committee despite the effects that the neighboring area will face with housing and infrastructure.
“Amazon’s new headquarters will bring more than 25,000 jobs benefitting all New Yorkers from NYCHA residents to CUNY students,” the Mayor said in a statement. “The Community Advisory Committee will bring together stakeholders of all backgrounds to help shape this important plan.”
After signing non-disclosure agreements with Amazon, brokering a $3 billion tax subsidy in private, along with a promises for eminent domain, the Mayor and Governor have now graced their lowly constituents with “three subcommittees to develop plans for the headquarters and onsite public amenities, investments in neighborhood infrastructure to benefit the surrounding communities, and training and hiring programs to ensure that homegrown talent fills the 25,000 to 40,000 new jobs at the headquarters.”
Greenpoint, which is walking distance to the Anable Basin Amazon HQ2 site, and the greater North Brooklyn community are unrepresented on the committee, according to the committee member list on the press statement:
After opening in 2013, Williamsburg’s OUTPUT (74 Wythe Ave.) is closing its doors on Jan. 1, 2019, the popular dance club confirmed today. In a statement posted on Facebook, OUTPUT staff explained that the ever-changing nightlife scene and financial burdens posed “multiple existential challenges” to the business model:
This sudden turn of events may seem shocking to many, but for those of us watching from the inside, we have seen the writing on the wall for some time. A confluence of factors contributed to the club’s misfortune; rapidly shifting social trends, unfavorable market conditions and weakening financial outlooks coincided with the simultaneous emergence of multiple existential challenges unique to the club’s circumstances. The mounting situation led to one unfortunate yet unavoidable conclusion; for OUTPUT to continue as a viable enterprise, the business model and mode of operation would need to change drastically, in ways that would likely betray the mission on which the brand was founded. Facing the prospect of taking great risks on uncertain outcomes just to keep the club open in some diminished capacity, the day-to-day operators who founded the club and have been at the helm throughout, made the painstaking decision to reject compromise and instead close OUTPUT with the club’s hard-earned reputation intact.
CCM purchassed the 74th Wythe Ave building that houses OUTPUT for $1.6 million in 2012 and sold the building for $7.4 million in 2014, according to the Commercial Observer. Continue reading →
No snow seems to be on the way, but you can still revisit the wintry landscape of our Polar Vortex market with these seasonal pics! See a smattering of the photos below — with the superlatives each photo won — and click on over here to see the full album. Special thanks to Outsnapped for this market’s photo booth!
To recap, children, parents, and (of course) dogs all got together to celebrate our amazing local vendors, pose in our photo booth, and share holiday cheer. Mano-a-Mano designed an ice castle while scents of mulling spices wafted in the air and Success Academy led ornament-making workshops upstairs. But for more winter fun, join us on February 10th for our Valentine’s Market! More info to come but until then, potential vendors can apply here!
Have a very happy holiday season, Greenpointers — thanks for making our recent market such a snowy success.
Following a measles outbreak of 39 confirmed cases in Williamsburg and Borough Park since October, the New York City Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene has banned unvaccinated schoolchildren from attending Orthodox Jewish schools in Brooklyn.
The highly contagious virus can infect people of all ages who lack a vaccination. The measles outbreak in Williamsburg stems from children who traveled to Israel, where the country’s Ministry of Health counted over 1,300 measles patients in November of this year. NYC health officials released a statement warning travelers to take caution.
As of December 5, there have been 39 confirmed cases of measles in the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn since October. The initial child with measles was unvaccinated and acquired measles on a visit to Israel, where a large outbreak of the disease is occurring. Since then, there have been additional children from Brooklyn who were unvaccinated and acquired measles while in Israel.
If you plan to travel to Israel, protect yourself and your family against measles and get vaccinated with the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine at least two weeks in advance of your trip. If you have traveled to Israel and you have a fever, cough, red eyes, runny nose and body rash, contact your doctor. You should call your doctor before going to their office to prevent exposing other people to measles.
As of Friday, Dec. 7, yeshiva students can only attend school if they are vaccinated, even if the student has an approved exemption and/or the yeshiva has no reported measles cases. Unvaccinated students can return to school after receiving the proper shots.
According to the Dept. of Health, pre-k and daycare attending children must have at least one measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination and kindergarten through 12th-grade students must have two MMR shots.
Approximately 2 percent of children in the Orthodox community remain unvaccinated for either religious or medical purposes, NBC New York reports.
Hey Greenpointers! Are you ready to deck the halls…with History?
Holiday History runs deep in this town, since Santa is a Native New Yorker. It’s true! Saint Nick is the Patron Saint of New York City, and New York’s writers and artists were the first to describe and depict Santa as we know him. He even got his sleigh in Chelsea! Add to this the fact that New York retailers invented holiday window displays, the original yule log footage was filmed here, and we’ve even got the original manuscript of “A Christmas Carol,” and it’s clear New York is a veritable holiday hot spot.
If you’d like to hear more about New York’s holiday history, please join me around town this month for my Hometown Holiday History event series!
Saturday 12/15
New York’s Holiday History from George Washington to Andy Warhol @ QED Astoria (27-16 23rd Avenue), 3pm, $10, Buy Tix
Saturday 12/22
Santa’s from West 23rd Street and other Secret Histories of New York Holidays @ Caveat (21A Clinton St.), 7pm, $15, I’m so thrilled to be joined by two incredible storytellers who will add to the historic holiday fun with tales of the ancient roots of the Winter Solstice, and the origins of Santa’s reindeer! Buy Tix
Thursday 12/ 27
TRIVIA Night: Deck the hall, drop the ball! @ Archestratus (160 Huron St.), 8pm, FREE, you know the drill for this one, Greenpoint! This month’s Trivia will be Holiday/New Year’s themed. Feel free to swing by solo, or with a team of up to four, to strut your stuff, win wonderful food and drink, and claim the title of Greenpoint Trivia Champ! RSVP
Saturday 12/15 – Sunday 12/16: The A/D/O Supermarket @ A/D/O (29 Norman Ave.), 12pm-7pm, FREE, A/D/O’s holiday market returns! The two-day market will feature a unique curation of gifts from publishers, designers and artists exploring where art meets design and utility. Artists and designers will be on site selling apparel, design objects, home goods, books and jewelry. Both nights, A/D/O will host special events and exhibit works by Elena Parasco and Anthony Jamari Thomas. Refreshments provided from 4:00 – 7:00pm each day, 
THURSDAY 12/13
