Local volunteers cultivating vegetables in the Secret Garden. — Photo by Diego Cupolo

On July 29, 1977, a terrified Avellar Hansley watched as the large furniture store on the corner of Broadway and Linden Street burned down only a few yards from her house. Tomorrow she will see a farmers’ market open for the second year in a row on the same plot of land – in what is now a community garden that she helped create with her own bare hands and selfless determination.

The Bushwick Farmers’ Market will hold opening day celebrations on July 1 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the Linden-Bushwick Block Association Garden and many of the day’s events will be dedicated to Hansley’s work to preserve the open space over the last three decades. As a tribute, graffiti artists from Big City Walls and YOUnity will be painting a large mural with her name on it during the event.

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Often a reporter, with a small pool of key people to interview, will unintentionally produce a story that resembles one written by another writer. This phenomenon is at work in a Times article on the art scene, and again in one on the Broadway Triangle-child abuse fiasco. But it’s hard to ignore the similarities between the Brooklyn Paper’s recent story on The Loom, which more or less lifts the one we ran two weeks ago and changes the words and paragraph order.

BushwickBK: Let’s start with the name Bushburg. An amalgamation of Bushwick and Williamsburg, the property management company’s name implies having one foot in two worlds: an ascetic manufacturing-zoned landscape pockmarked by artist lofts and a gentrified, retail-driven culturally dense neighborhood.

Brooklyn Paper: Hoffman is hoping that The Loom will spark the creation of a new neighborhood with one foot in the underdeveloped Bushwick and another in the gentrified East Williamsburg. This spirit is spelled out in the company’s name, Bushburg.

I have spoken to Joseph Hoffman. He doesn’t expect to “spark the creation of a new neighborhood,” he’s not an egomaniac — he simply plans to cash in on one that already exists. And describing East Williamsburg as “gentrified” and Bushwick as “underdeveloped” reveals the extent of the writer’s ignorance — either that, or his underestimation of the reader’s intelligence.

Finally, the addition of several stock mentions of gentrification are stirred in, some bordering on the offensive, such as “the new hipster destination might be the final nail in the coffin for the neighborhood’s local population.” If the reporter had visited Bushwick, he’d note the “local population” (non-white people, he means) is quite numerous. In fact, the addition of some 20 stores to a neighborhood of literally hundreds is no kind of “nail” in any “coffin” — several restaurants catering to Mexicans, Ecuadorans, Dominicans, and of course Puerto Ricans line Flushing Avenue, not to mention the ooooh so scary part on the other side of yonder Flushing Avenue (which constitutes 90% of Bushwick).

You can’t fault a reporter for not knowing every facet of a neighborhood they don’t live in the way a native would — that’s an impossible standard to hold. But the “doom” facing Bushwick’s many communities is a figment of the media’s imagination, augmented with the addition of quotes from the-sky-is-falling activist types.

A still from Even — As You and I, one of the films screened Friday night.

What more effectively cures a rainy day than catching a movie?  No, no, not sitting at home re- watching Annie Hall on your laptop without putting any clothes on – though that works pretty well too – but braving it through the downpour to a local cinema to enjoy something new and different on the big screen.  We’ll take it a step further than new and different, in fact, and go for something nearer the realm of avant-garde (cause you’re in the mood).  And to seal the deal: free beer. 

Rain?  What rain?

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Greg, left; and Chelsea. — Photos by Laura Feinstein. Click to enlarge.

In an attempt to re-start-up some of the hot Bushwick clothing porn that was the short-lived "Street Style," we’ve contracted fashion buff Laura Feinstein to harrass you people on the streets of the neighborhood and show the rest of us what weird/fabulous ideas you may have in the way of dress. Or maybe you are just rocking your v-neck in a particularly amazing way — you know, like, you actually have some sort of chest to fill it out. We hope it gels into something solid, regular, and above all, entertaining — please also chime in with comments about what we should call this feature. –BushwickBK

Last Sunday, New York was turned into one huge concert as musicians all over the five boroughs took to the streets, nightclubs, and parks as part of Make Music Festival NYC. Here in Brooklyn, BushwickBK — when not being rained out of our own Make Music gig — roamed some of the local haunts to scope out some of the area’s most fashionable music lovers.

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Chris Rock and his wife Malaak have chosen a group of 30 local kids from the Salvation Army on Bushwick Avenue as protegées. They are encouraged to shun violence and revenge, focus on advancing their studies, and possibly most important, gain perspective on their lot in life by being exposed to conditions in third world countries.

The Daily News reports:

Malaak Rock chose the kids — who range from 11 to 15 — through essays, recommendations and interviews.

“It was bad. Real bad. Different from Brooklyn. The garbage, the stink. They only had one room. Some kids had no shoes,” Shawn recalled while at the center recently.

Assemblyman Vito Lopez and City Council candidate Maritza Dávila, left, and Councilmember Diana Reyna. — Photos by Aaron Short.

Why has Bushwick’s largest social service organization chosen to close a key youth center, claiming a lack of funds, while refusing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a city councilmember? Aaron Short digs deep into a petty and bitter political contest between Assemblyman Vito Lopez and Councilwoman Diana Reyna that leaves the children of the neighborhood’s low-income working families as the real losers.

For two months, Councilwoman Diana Reyna and the leaders of the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council (RBSCC), one of the largest youth and senior service providers in Brooklyn, have been locked in a bitter funding dispute, resulting in the elimination of a popular summer camp and afterschool program for Bushwick children.

After twenty years, the Hope Gardens Multi-Service Center’s youth program will be discontinued today and ten staff members will lose their jobs.  Hope Gardens is one of the centers managed by RBSCC, and the program serves over 70 children, many of whom live within several blocks of the Center in Hope Gardens, Bushwick proper’s only public housing project.

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So, how ’bout that fabulous weather we’ve been having, eh? Here’s hoping the weekend is gorgeous! Kudos to those of you who were able to make it work for MMNY despite the weather, and everyone please stay tuned for a rain date for the Bushwick Music Festival at María Hernández Park. It will happen… someday!

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Director Kevin Smith chats with a local (who was wearing a boombox as a necklace) during the filming of A Couple of Dicks in Ridgewood. — Photo by Diego Cupolo

Mr. Butch Coolidge, better known as Bruce Willis, is in town and he brought the army of tractor trailers that have been clogging up the blocks around Cypress and Myrtle Avenue for the last two days. Well, actually, about half of Hollywood has invaded Ridgewood to film A Couple of Dicks, a Kevin Smith film slated to debut in early 2010.

The movie is about two cops on a quest to find a stolen 1952 baseball card and stars Mr. Diehard, Tracy Morgan, Seann William Scott, Adam Brody, Jason Lee, Kevin Pollack and a bunch of other schmucks. Crowds gathered around the Ridgewood Veterans Triangle to sneak a peak at the long list of celebrity cast members as the movie crews shot a scene in the Cellular Fantastico USA cell phone store.

Apparently, the puritans at Warner Brothers wanted to change the name to “A Couple of Cops,” but it seems like the phallic title has risen above the controversy. Smith and his crew will be filming the movie throughout the summer in neighborhoods all around Brooklyn and Manhattan.

First the admirable part: Arun Wiita, a recently graduated MD-PhD, went to every single subway stop in New York City, took photos, and quickly described the surroundings over a two-week period for a project he calls The New York Subway Project. That takes patience, follow-through, and displays the level of curiosity we should expect from a doctor. Unfortunately, it’s the descriptions themselves that are pissing people off.

In each location, Wiita’s method is more or less thus: note the condition of the station, comment on the the surrounding structures, and then make a wild guess as to the area’s racial mix based on the faces at and near the station. Adjectives like “hoody,” “ghetto” and thuggish,” “depressed” and “crappy,” are tossed with abandon. Blacks and perceived Hispanics are listed matter-of-factly, but whites and Asians are in most instances called “gentrifiers” — often race is not even mentioned. The impression is that Wiita considers all blacks and Hispanics to be helpless game pieces, waiting in terror for some “gentrifier” to shift them along the subway “Risk” map to East New York.

In response to the 125th Street (2/3 line) station listing, Bushwick resident Joya Nemley points out his seeming amazement at the fact that “there are lots of people around, mostly black, many in professional attire.”

“Was he expecting Cross Colors jeans and 8 ball jackets?” asks Nemley — a black professional. “The shittiest part of it all is that he took all this time to do this project which could have actually been awesome. Instead it’s just a massive fail.”

Not exactly sure if Bushwick is tourist-ready at the moment, but its international image has been soaring since the British Airways’ in-flight magazine, High Life, published an article on how “1980s Manhattan” the neighborhood has become.

The piece uses adjectives like “underground”, “edgy”, “adventurous” and “quirky” to describe the Bushwick scene and promotes local favorites like the Wyckoff-Starr, Goodbye Blue Monday, Northeast Kingdom and a few art galleries. Best of all, the last sentence says, “Bushwick is just nine stops on the L train from Union Square, but it’s a 20-minute time warp to a golden age of New York cool.”

Just imagine a typical tourist’s photo album after a vacation in Bushwick: self-portraits in front of the Boar’s Head Rock Street distribution plant, rainbow-colored puddles, skinny people on double-decker bicycles and maybe a shot of that creepy Santa statue on Bogart Street – each picture holding precious memories of rotting garbage fumes and lost time in a vast industrial wasteland … hope no one leaves disappointed.