Boerum Hill: Pétanque (that boccelike game), Gauloises, Gallic gypsy music, and other components of Frenchness reigned at yesterday's Bastille Day celebration on Smith Street. [McBrooklyn]
East Village: The owner of the newish Bowery Wine Company was going to give free pizza to anti-gentrification protesters gathered outside, but the police told him not to because the protesters might start throwing it in a food fight. [Vanishing New York via Curbed]
East Williamsburg: A house that went for a little more than a mil last week was very possibly bought by French filmmaker Michel Gondry, who was directing a Microsoft commercial in Brooklyn last week. [Brownstoner]

Greenpoint: Representatives Anthony Weiner and Nydia Velazquez want polluted Newtown Creek, which separates Queens and Brooklyn, to be named a federal Superfund site to hasten its cleanup. [NYT]
Jackson Heights: Five good reasons to live here: the good Latin American food, the first-run movies, the fact that it's twenty minutes from Manhattan, the fact that crime's dropped 76 percent since 1993, and a shop that sells Peruvian maca, "which the Incas used for energy and libido." [Metro]
Midtown East: A woman riding her bike on East 49th Street last night was struck and killed by a minivan. This is terrible. [NYP]
Upper West Side: A doorman hurried a woman out of a burning brownstone (where eight NYFDers and one resident were injured) moments before an explosion blew out the room she was in. She's cracked open her 401(k) to put toward his Christmas tip. (Ha-ha, just kidding. But maybe she should, right?) [NYS]