The mobile soup kitchen run by the North Brooklyn Angels, known as the Angelmobile, is the first recipient of the Whole Foods 5% Day. This Thursday (1/10) Whole Foods has committed to passing on 5% of their profits to benefit The North Brooklyn Angels from in-store sales at all three Brooklyn stores (Williamsburg, Fort Green and Gowanus.)
If you’re available consider volunteering tomorrow 3-4 hours to help staff their information tables. Shifts 11 AM – 2PM and or 3:30PM – 7PM. You will work in a team and have fun while doing good!
To get involved, email [email protected] with the subject line WHOLE FOODS VOLUNTEER
Brooklyn Community Board 1’s monthly board meeting and public hearing was last night. If you couldn’t make it in person, the entire meeting is available to watch below.
After 97 – 99 Clay St. was sold to developers in 2014, the 25 rent-stabilized tenants in the building reduced to five, following what current tenants claim has been a sustained effort by the new landlords to push them out through untenable demolition and construction conditions. “The first thing that happened is that they changed the locks on Christmas day and didn’t tell us,” said Gretchen, who wishes to withhold her last name and continues to live in a rent-stabilized studio at 97 Clay St. despite alleged harassment.”We live between a halfway house and two homeless shelters and there was no front door for two months,” she said adding that one of the other tenants is a wheel-chair bound senior citizen, making him especially vulnerable.
“They let everything get very run down and then started offering buyouts. They first offered me $4,000 and I said no.”
The new landlords originally planned to raze the building to make way for new construction, but with at least one tenant remaining in each of the buildings, the owners had to settle for renovations instead. Around February 2018, tenants say that demolition commenced and the living situation became increasingly hazardous. Complaints to the management company, Perfect Management, would simply result in a visit from the building’s super who tenants say has acted hostile toward their complaints. Perfect Management has not yet responded to Greenpointers.
The new 74,000 square-foot Wegmans supermarket located at the Brooklyn Navy Yard is now hiring and training 500 employees (150 full-time), as the Rochester, NY-based company nears its first New York City opening that is scheduled for this fall.
Wegmans, which has 98 stores in six states, is consistently ranked as one of the best companies to work for by FORTUNE Magazine. The Wegmans scholarship program also helps employees attend college.
For those looking for employment, Wegmans released a press statement with directions on how to apply.
Full-time job applicants are invited to apply online at jobs.wegmans.com, or call 347-652-2424 for more information. Interviews are conducted by appointment only and applications are not accepted at the store construction site. Available full-time positions include everything from entry-level management to customer service, overnight grocery, and culinary roles like chefs and line cooks. Select part-time positions for bakery and culinary roles are currently being filled as well. Hiring for all other part-time positions will begin at a later date.
But Wegmans’ food isn’t merely fresh, it’s also cheap. An independent analysis of prices at grocery chains by Washington consumer group Checkbook found that Wegman’s prices were 13 percent lower than the average prices found at Giant and Safeway. Consider that Whole Foods, whose food quality has been compared to Wegmans, just announced it is working to open a new chain of cheaper stores, effectively conceding that its current, decidedly pricey model is ill-suited for the future.
Part of the reason Wegmans manages to maintain low prices is that its turnover is so efficient. Wegmans has historically been very good about managing food waste, which can be a sizable cost for other grocers, according to Flickinger.
Greenpoint has received a lot of attention for the many great restaurant openings of 2018, and now the NY Post has identified Greenpoint as one of the ‘hottest NYC neighborhoods for 2019,’ largely due to new waterfront real estate development and the Amazon HQ2 announcement.
Some 42 buildings are under construction in Brooklyn’s northernmost ‘hood, with 1,754 units in progress and even more in the pipeline. The most attention-grabbing addition is 40-story condo tower The Greenpoint, which will be occupied early this year, but Localize.city notes “no fewer than five major developments are underway.”
The first market-rate building of the Greenpoint Landing megaproject, One Blue Slip, started leasing last summer, with rents starting at $2,600 per month for studios (higher than the current neighborhood median of $2,400 for a one-bedroom).
Not to mention Amazon’s HQ2 in Long Island City will be just two stops away on the G train.
Gov. ‘Amazon’ Cuomo at Thursday’s press conference in Manhattan.
Governor ‘Amazon’ Cuomo held a surprise press conference in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon to announce last-minute changes in the two-year-old L train shutdown plan that was scheduled to start in April 2019. The plan for a full shutdown of the L train’s Canarsie tunnel has been scrapped in lieu of a new engineering plan (PDF) to keep the tunnel in operation during reconstruction. The announcement has a profound impact on Brooklyn residents working in Manhattan and the real estate developers with local interests, who are some of Cuomo’s largest donors.
Without offering many specific details, Cuomo said that L train commuters can expect service disruptions on some nights and weekends during the coming 15-to-20-months of construction on the Canarsie tunnel.
Cuomo didn’t talk about the MTA’s former plans to create express bus lanes on the Williamsburg Bridge and across 14th Street in Manhattan. Cuomo also continued to deny his control over the MTA: “No, I am not in charge of the MTA…Yes, I did ask this group, I convened this group, I got them access, I facilitated their research, they came up with their conclusion, they presented it to the MTA, and the MTA said it’s a better way to do it.”
The flooded Canarsie tunnel in the aftermath of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy
The Canarsie tunnel was damaged way back in 2012 from the salty, corrosive floodwaters of Hurricane Sandy. The MTA announced its mitigation plan in 2016, and since then dozens of meetings in North Brooklyn have been held by local activist groups such as the L train Coalition and NYC Council Members Stephen Levin and Antonio Reynoso.
Cuomo’s team of Ivy League engineers drafted a new engineering design “never used in the United States” to supplement the full shutdown, Cuomo explained during Thursday’s press conference:
To make a long story short: They have proposed a new design to use in the tunnel. It is a design that has not been used in the united states before to the best of our knowledge. It has been implemented in Europe. It has never been implemented in a tunnel restoration project. They came up with that design suggestion that uses many new innovations that are new to, frankly, the rail industry in this country. But the MTA has gone through their recommendations and gone through the new design, and the MTA believes that it is feasible, it’s highly innovative but that it is feasible. Long story short, with this design, it would not be necessary to close the L train tunnel at all, which would be a phenomenal benefit to the people of New York City. There would need to be some night and weekend closures of only one tube, so service would still work because there are two tunnels, but it would be a major, major breakthrough, and that’s what we want to discuss with you today.
Governor ‘Amazon’ Cuomo will take a break from striking backroom deals with monopolistic billionaires and make a surprise announcement during a press conference today at 12:45 p.m. in Manhattan regarding the L train shutdown, Gothamist reports. Just two weeks ago Cuomo submerged himself into the Canarsie Tunnel that runs between Manhattan and Brooklyn to take a hard look at the reconstruction plan with a team of experts. As of now, the plan (four years in the making) is to shut down the tunnel to train traffic for 15 months begging at the end of April 2019.
A potential switch may be a three-year shutdown with one track remaining in operation, Gothamist reports:
MTA sources told Gothamist that they have heard rumors that the governor was planning on altering the L train shutdown. “We usually have provisions that allow us to get out of contracts at any given time, but there’s been a fair amount of work done already,” one source said. “If there’s a new plan only the very upper management knows what that is.”
Another source in contact with city decision makers said the governor may switch from the 1.5 year total shutdown timeline to one that would last 3+ years by partially shutting down one track.
Update: The NY Times reports that a full Canarsie Tunnel shutdown will not happen. Specific details are still to be announced.
Brooklynites, rejoice! Gov. Andrew Cuomo plans to cancel the full shutdown of the L train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. https://t.co/7VzrGhzEzA
The former Pep Boys that is now home to Otto Greenpoint (Google Maps)
If you are dreaming of living in luxury directly on McGuinness Boulevard surrounded by gas stations in the footprint of a former Pep Boys Auto Shop, then you’re in luck. The city’s affordable housing lottery presents you the opportunity to apply for one of the 60 low and middle-income units at The Otto Greenpoint, a 197 unit “luxury” development at 211 McGuinness Blvd that markets itself as “community-forward.” The lottery is open through March 6.
According to Otto’s website, amenities include “a full time front desk concierge, a community lounge, library and co-working space, a resident’s gaming lounge, a state-of-the-art penthouse fitness center and an expansive rooftop with pool, hot tub, BBQs, lawn areas, outdoor TV and 360-degree views of New York City.”
The suspect that the NYPD are seeking in regards to the attempted sexual assault.
An attempted rape occurred in a South Williamsburg apartment building at S. 2nd and Havemeyer streets on Tuesday (New Year’s Day) around 5:30 a.m., and a ‘person-of-interest’ is now in police custody”ABC7NY reports.
The suspect is described by police as a male in his mid-20s, 5’8″ tall will facial hair. The suspect approached the 26-year-old victim in the first-floor of the apartment building, punched the back of her head and attempted to sexually assault her.
UPDATE: The suspect turned himself into the 90th Precint on this morning around 8 a.m. and is being questioned, the NY Daily News reports.
Anyone with information in regard to this incident is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the CrimeStoppers website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM, on Twitter @NYPDTips or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then enter TIP577.
