Irving Avenue brickwork.
A Concise History of Bushwick: Interesting and all-encompassing article on Bushwick’s rise, fall, and rise. Too much emphasis placed on Giuliani and cops, and not enough on prevailing trends. Backs me up on blaming Great Society policies for the wild success of blockbusting, not to mention encouraging joblessness and abetting arson. Plus more!
Sauce With Your Noodles: NYT can only imagine a world where whatever the government says is true, is. And so they don’t question the need to fight a bloody war on drug gangs in order to “fix” the very problems caused by drug prohibition. Who cares? Well it was all inspired by the de-braining of Carmine Galante on Knickerbocker in 1979.
You Can’t Wreck This Place I Just Heard Of!: Tons of info in this post on the Ridgewood Reservoir, once a main water source for Brooklyn, now an overgrown wilderness the city wants to bulldoze to build more damn baseball diamonds.
john the bicyclist June 2nd, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Those developments regarding Ridgewood Reservior are alarming. I missed all those articles last year and the NY Times Op-Ed. I cycle around it from time to time. It is a vivid, fantastic place. One of those unique NYC spots, well worth the short trip.
Michael Dietsch June 2nd, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Great City Journal link, Jeremy, thanks. It’s always good to see a thoughtful, non-reactionary article about Bushwick’s recent past.
I’m curious what you mean by “prevailing trends,” though.
ricmac01 June 3rd, 2008 at 12:31 pm
BushwickBk readers, Jeremy’s “Bushwick rise, fall and rise” link above is a great read. I was surprised, however, with Mr. Malanga’s thanks to (“especially the police”) for the neighborhood’s revitalization. Unless they moved here, started families and/or businesses here, shopped here or in some other way called Bushwick their home they were merely just doing the job they hired on to do. To give thanks for doing their job is to imply that previously they were ignoring their job?
Jeremy Sapienza June 3rd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Mike, I meant the fact that crack use was waning, crime was down, and the economy and living standards were on the rise across the country and across the board. Crediting Giuliani for all of this in NYC and Bushwick is facile and ridiculous. Which makes me nod agreement with ricmac’s comment.
Steve June 3rd, 2008 at 3:37 pm
ricmac01–Cops didn’t do their jobs because, along with fire, trash pick up and other services, they were reduced by the city with the explicit hope of reducing the population in NYC’s poor neighborhoods (‘planned shrinkage’). This was in response to the fiscal crisis, largely a result of the city underwriting the mortgages of real estate giants. These aspects of NYC’s history, along with the deindustrialization which destabilized working class neighborhoods, are always absent from articles like Malangas’s.