Our homes are sanctuaries from the hustle and bustle of city life. Greenpoint is an especially fun and relaxing respite from the daily grind for many of us with Transmitter Park, cozy bars, and zen coffee houses and blissful yoga and meditation spaces. But, what about your own place?
Enter Light + Ladder. This airy design studio based in Greenpoint crafts pieces that will make your home feel both relaxing and cool. Check out these 10 picks to transform your house into an oasis. Continue reading →
If you haven’t been before, Greenpoint Open Studios is an epic showcase of local art. Over the course of one weekend (this year June 3-4), hundreds of local artists open their studio doors to the public for an exciting peek inside their craft. It’s an uncurated, free event that allows visitors to get a glimpse of the process and space where artwork is created while engaging directly with its creators. Brooklyn has a long-standing reputation for being a hotbed of creativity and GOS is going to represent its northernmost tip in true Greenpoint fashion—by keepin’ it real—providing an open platform for showcasing the various expressions of our creative community’s imagination and skills. This year, we have more than 400 artists participating, and an exciting lineup of events: Continue reading →
Baste it, taste it and tweak it again. Showdown is a cookbook about feeding the conversation along with the person.
This week, we sat down with Greenpointer and self-described “meat-head” Jenn de la Vega to talk about how competing (and winning) local competitions sparked Showdown, the cookbook.
GP: Hey Jenn! Tell us about Showdown.
De la Vega: Showdown is a compilation of 100 recipes I’ve entered into competitions. It’s not only about the ones that won. I think the big part of the story is the failure and journey along the way, building a strange cooking career out of competition, creativity and personal challenges.
GP: Did you always want to be a chef?
Jenn breaks out into a big grin. De la Vega: Actually, I never had intentions of being a chef.Continue reading →
A biker busts out some tricks on Freeman Street. Photo: Erik Keithley
This past weekend the Five Boro Bike Tour kicked off the summer cycling season (even though our weather hasn’t fully turned warm yet, dangit). If you love nothing more than pounding the pavement on two wheels when the weather’s at its finest, here’s a roundup of other local bike events happening over the next few months. Take a seat and pop a wheelie through North Brooklyn! Continue reading →
Yesterday Brooklyn Bowl (61 Wythe Ave) hosted the first ever Relix Live Music Conference, which featured a full day’s schedule of panel discussions and presentations capped with a very special keynote presentation. Sold out and live-streaming on Nugs.net, this new conference, spearheaded by Relix’s own Bradley Tucker, progressed without a hitch before a mixed crowd of music industry professionals, journalists, aspiring yuppies, intrigued hippies, and a smattering of NYU students.
The kickoff discussion, titled TALENT BUYING: Where It All Begins, featured panelists including Ben Baruch, Michael Dorf, AEG’s Don Strasburg, and Bowery Presents execs Jim Glancy and John Moore. Of course the question on everyone’s mind revolved around AEG buying up Bowery Presents and separately, subsequently opening Brooklyn Steel… Does this move continue the monopolization of the live music scene (in NYC) or is it an equalizer against the beast that is Live Nation?
Relix Live Music Conference
No one seemed to have an answer, though I think it was Michael Dorf (City Winery) who seemed pleased that artists would have an option to work with someone other than Live Nation. And John Moore (Bowery Presents), faced with the immediate success of Brooklyn Steel, deftly navigated his talking points, saying, “The honeymoon has been great but I think it will be a couple of years before we can really determine how successful it is.”
The Little Glass Slipper teems with flowers this spring in Greenpoint.
There’s something about the flower arrangements at Greenpoint’s The Little Glass Slipper (200 Franklin St). It could be that shop owner, Cary Pereyra-Imbert, takes great care in selecting the flowers she uses, or that the shop itself serves as a small oasis among the condo construction surrounding the neighborhood. Either way, you always leave feeling like you’ve gotten a special treat. Continue reading →
Graham stop, Williamsburg, circa 2005. My mid-20s Brooklyn newbie roommates and I had a garden in our backyard, and we grew tomatoes, sunflowers, peppers and zucchini. But after one of our zucchinis grew to be three feet long*, we started to wonder whether our dirt was actually safe enough to grow anything. Maybe we should have thought about that before we planted. So before you buy any seedlings to get your summer garden going, you should probably find out whether your soil is home to a family of toxic chemicals. This Saturday (4/22) from 10am–2pm you can get your soil tested for free at the Greenpoint Reform Church (136 Milton Street), and NAG (Neighbors Allied For Good Growth) is hosting free soil testing workshops for three upcoming weekends. Here’s the schedule: Continue reading →
This Saturday (4/8), Videology (308 Bedford Ave.) will be screening the film BUGS, along with a Q&A session with the film’s protagonist and the film’s director. The event starts at 11am, with the film beginning promptly at 11:15am and running for 75 minutes. Your ticket includes a welcome drink, a packet of edible crickets from Aketta, and a pipette tasting of grasshopper and bee larvae garums.
Tomorrow night (Friday, 4/7) local instafamous Instagram Taste of Streep is hosting THREE screenings of The Devil Wears Prada at Syndicated Bar & Theater in Bushwick (40 Bogart Street), at 6pm, 8:45pm and 11:30pm. Tickets ($25) include a cocktail and a genuine Taste of Streep goodie bag, plus trivia before the show. But how to choose which screening? It’s a tough call. They’re so different.Continue reading →
The Brooklyn Bridge is a majestic span with its elegant gothic towers and roadway suspended above the East River. Today we take it for granted, but at the time it was built it was called “the eighth wonder of the world.” However, the bridge never would have been built without major contributions from a Greenpoint shipyard and an engineer from Kent Street.
The first step in building the towers for the mighty bridge was designing caissons, or huge metal boxes, that were to be sunk to the riverbed so that diggers could dig down and find bedrock to plant the towers on. John Roebling, the chief architect for the bridge, designed these massive caissons in 1868 and gave the demanding contract to assemble them to a shipbuilding firm located at the foot of Milton Street: Webb and Bell. Continue reading →
