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Do not forget: starting tomorrow night, it’s Bushwick Open Studios, mass neighborhood art show! Bushwick artists all over the hood, from Morgantown to the Evergreens, will be baring their studios for the public to poke around inside. Other cool and kooky events are planned around the art, and yes, this weekend a small but central bit of Knickerbocker will see more hipster traffic than it has ever seen up to this point.

Make sure to remind your friends and send the link out — art makes the world a better place, and those who make it need our support! Plus it looks pretty cool.

UPDATE: Bushwick Open Studios Extra: 106 Central Avenue

#1 — $2000 — 2 bedroom: This place is HUGE! You can see it just from the pics, but the agent says it’s 1350sqft. Two full baths. private backyard. That’s a house. Some great old details, sweet fireplace! All utilities included. This is the deal of the week if you are looking for space and amenities. “Near Myrtle JMZ”

#2 — $1450 — studio loft: We’re gonna cut them a break here: this is in Bed-Stuy, but it’s only one block from the Myrtle JMZ, and they really wanna be in Bushwick. The pics are all of the units under renovation, but they do look very cool. With stainless steel appliances and exposed brick, they promise to be pretty slick. Also mentions they’re live-work spaces, for whatever that’s worth. Right up on the projects. PETS OK Vernon and Lewis

#3 — $1450 — 2 bedroom: Kitchen is cheese — it looks like an intruder into an otherwise cool, exposed-brick apartment. The location is just listed as “Broadway” — so the J tracks could be 5 feet from your toilet. Has a balcony, though. PETS OK Broadway “steps to the J train”

#4 — $1200 — 2 bedroom: Some old details left, looks like the second bedroom is tiny. Landlord lives in the building — that can be great or terrible depending on who they are and your lifestyle. DeKalb and Evergreen

#5 — $1200 — 2 bedroom: Nice wood floors, first floor apartment. Seems pretty basic. PETS OK Bushwick and Hancock

I’ll be doing a Bushwick Real Estate Roundup once a week, in the same style as the Bushwick Apartment Roundup. This will not include condominiums, which will be on their own Bushwick Condo Roundup (different market, after all).

$660,000 | 2-family | 720 Chauncey Street
Three stories including owner’s duplex. Nice clapboard house with bay front. “Six bedrooms” — could be a 3 over 3 or a 2 over 4. Attractive neighbors!

$390,000 | 1-family | 103 Troutman Street
Great little house! Four bedrooms, two stories, 1320sqft, 25×100 lot means wide house and a big yard in the back. Dirt cheap — cheaper than the studio condos they’re going to be selling down the street. $543 taxes for god’s sake.

$599,000 | 2-family | Halsey Street
Three story house built in 1925, a huge 3276 sqft, on Halsey “two blocks from the J train.” “Lots of original details (fireplaces, moldings and tin ceilings). 3 Bedrooms over 2 bedrooms with patio access over finished basement with backyard access.”

$629,000 | 3-family | “Near L”
Three story limestone-brick house, 9 bedrooms, which I guess means 3 over 3 over 3. No address but by the architecture this is near the Ridgewood border by Wyckoff or on the streets just north of the cemetery. These are nice blocks, lots of trees and well-kept gardens.

$599,000 | 3-family | 1102 Gates Avenue
Beautiful three story brick, 3 over 3 over 2, semi-finished basement. 30 seconds to the J train.

The Changeling in Bed-Stuy challenges my characterization of Bushwick proper as the Bodega Belt, and that her hood might have more bodegas per capita. Mm-mm, girl, you need to take a walk up in here one day — you cannot stand on a Bushwick corner and not see a bodega — some corners have two and even three!

And of course then we have more demographic and definitional concerns to take into consideration — is any minimart in New York City a bodega? I think you have to have at least heard one or two Santería stories about a nearby market to even begin claiming you’re tops in bodegas. And if you go inside a random shop, it better have a big table on which the Caribbean answer to vegetables is offered for sale: yuca, yautía, boniato, onions, platanos, garlic, avocadoes. Goya products better be present on the “high class” aisle — if you keepin it real, you get Diana or Kirby, or whatever local brand is even cheaper than those. Pasteles in the fridge made by the lady down the block? We cool. Otherwise, you frun-in’.

Does your landlord suck? If so, I’m sure you’ve complained to whoever will listen. Why not complain to the whole world on a searchable database of crappy landlords? A friend of mine has set up DontRentFrom.com, where you can anonymously enter info about your landlord or management company where anyone can see it. Definitely useful in Bushwick, and in the rest of Brooklyn and all of New York as well. It’s a no-frills tool that hopefully, if it becomes widespread, could have some effect in the rental market. Check it out!

Today as I sat here working, I heard a metallic “tink!” coming from the front of the house. I looked out the window, and watched as one pre-pubescent boy handed the other an aluminum baseball bat. The other kid got into a stance as though he was ready for a pitch, brought the bat back, and just then, despite my previous vows to be sweet as candy to the kids in the neighborhood, I barked out “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!?” They ran off, and I went to check the tree. Luckily it’s young and bendy, so it just has a small mark. I’m still in shock at how two kids can just stand in front of someone’s house and take whacks at their tree with a metal bat.

So, adrenaline still pumping, I came inside, made myself some coffee and sat down to my latest obsession — The City Gardener’s Handbook by Linda Yang. I happened to open to the page that mentioned common problems city gardeners have with gardens that the public can access — namely, theft and vandalism. The book’s answer to vandalism, unsatisfyingly, is to use cheap plants you wouldn’t care too much about losing. But the part about warding off thieves is great: “use plants with natural barbs whose removal is too painful for the vandal to bear.”

Yang goes on to describe something about which I have fantasized…”This approach to ‘offensive gardening’ was honed to a fine point by one desperate gardener who twined barbed wire unobtrusively through her ground cover and around her roses.” The book then has a good list of plants that have their own naturally built-in barbs, including blackberries, roses, thistles, and some that sound downright threatning: stinging nettle and firethorn. A friend of mine started telling me to bury razor blades a few weeks ago; now it’s her answer for any problem I complain about to her. I say it’s her “azúcar!”

Anyway, off I go to collect trash from around my sad, beseiged little tree.

So I went to the meeting for setting up a Bushwick food coop on Sunday. I had never been to Asterisk, which seems like a great place for the parties they have there on occasion…except it seemed a little weird that part of the space was actually living quarters. C’est la vie bohème.

Was kind of uncomfortable crashing the hipster BBQ that the meeting was piggybacking on to, since I was alone and likely stuck out sorely in my comfortably-fitting (as opposed to sterility-inducing) jeans and collared polo shirt. Bob of McClure’s pickles probably sensed this and as I was standing right next to him, struck up a conversation. I tried one of the pickles from the jar he brought, and realized that I had tried them once before at Brooklyn Kitchen. That’s how good they are.

Anyway, when the meeting was to start they called us inside, and it ended up only being about 10 of us. Long story short, they have quite a way to go. Yes, they have been consulting with the Park Slope Food Coop, but they’re just in the first lap of what seems like a years-long race to open an actual location. I’m not sure how many Morgantowners plan on living in their lofts for more than a couple years — the community strikes me as pretty transient. They have intentions of being inclusive of Bushwick proper, but I just don’t see them garnering the local, sustained support needed to put this together.

It seems to me the best course in the short term would be an organic market to compete with Brooklyn’s Natural (about which everyone was complaining, and rightfully so). It would be cheaper and easier and faster to set up, and could still be non-profit if they wanted.

Join the Bushwick Food Coop Yahoo group to stay in the loop.

I stopped by the “Yes No Maybe” building on my way home today, and talked to the owner, Jeffrey. He was out there sweating his balls off with the workers, fielding all kinds of questions from passers-by. When it was our turn to talk to him — yes, we waited our turn! — he enthusiastically began gesticulating and gabbing about all the cool stuff he wanted to do there. The big end-side opening he hopes to run as an outdoor window serving all kinds of summer foods that don’t require cooking (to avoid overbearing city fire certifications). He also talked of the possibility of outdoor movie screenings and BBQs.

The grounds are planted with berry bushes, vegetable plants, herbs, and vines positioned to grow into a wall which will attract birds. He hopes to have a beer license soon and — ready? — to be open in the next three weeks or so for whatever it is he decides to do there.

Summer is gonna rock in Bushwick.

#1 — $1300 — 3 bedrooms: Holy crap look at the details! Moldings and woodword and ironwork and a crazy chandelier! It’s cheap, but no word if the 3 bedrooms are railroad, and there’s a broker’s fee and a 2 year lease. Hancock near the L

#2 — $1200 — 2 bedroom: It’s a railroad but it’s the price of a big one bedroom — why not have a home office? Decent light, cool old fireplaces, nice wood floors. PETS OK Bushwick and Melrose

#3 — $1400-1475 — 2 bedroom: Slick kitchen, plain white new bathroom, on an attractive corner of Bushwick Avenue. PETS OK Bushwick and Bleecker

#4 — $1375 — 1 bedroom: Great corner, right near but not on top of the JMZ tracks, cool old building. Good light, exposed brick, cute little old fireplace. Bushwick and Myrtle

#5 — $1700 — 2 bedroom: Nice wood floors, bay window, decent kitchen, private yard (all concrete). Despite the listed location, it mentions “shopping on Myrtle Avenue” (?). Jefferson Avenue and Wilson

A few times last week I spied some guys bringing construction materials into the little house-shaped building on Moore near the corner of Bogart, but figured it was just another art or performance space. Wrong! David says the word is that a brick oven pizza joint is opening there. A jealous sigh from those of us south of Flushing, but then, we do have great pizza here, even if it is devoid of cool atmosphere. And Bogart and Moore isn’t exactly the other side of the planet. Soon we’ll be able to stumble in after boozing it at Kings County, provided they’re open late enough (please!?).

This is shaping up to be one happening little commercial block. More info as it comes!