neighborhood watch

Flatbush to Rise?

Bedford-Stuyvesant: Guess which dark lord lives in this sleekly hideous black fortress? It’s your dad, Luke Skywalker! [Newyorkshitty]
East Village: Big-time developer Ben Shaoul thinks the East Village will always be “gritty and inexpensive and arty,” even though he’s renting $7,500 marble-bedecked apartments here. [NYO]
Flatbush: Look for some major redevelopment on shabby Flatbush Avenue, where the Pintchik family, long the owners of the local hardware store, own about $100 million in property and are readying to class it up to the level of Park Slope or Cobble Hill. [NYS]

Gowanus: A skateboarders’ park? A boutique that gives sewing lessons? A four-story hotel? Sounds like Third Avenue, long the poor relation of the more advanced Fourth, is gonna start gettin’ pretty fancy. [Brownstoner]
Harlem: Spike Lee blasted black pols here as “fuddy-duddies” for voting for Hillary, but said it kinda didn’t matter because Obama-leaning Brooklyn was the city’s new Black Power epicenter, anyway. [Brooklyn Ron]
Long Island City: Parents of a middle school here aren’t thrilled at the prospect of their kids having to share the building with a proposed new high school of TV and film. The school would nurture internships with nearby Silvercup Studios, shooting ground for current Daily Intel unhealthy preoccupation Gossip Girl. [NYS]
Times Square: Some folks want to turn Eighth Avenue around 42nd Street from a corridor of skank to a place where fussy types will eat and shop rather than decamping west to Ninth Avenue. Today, halal holes-in-the-wall. Tomorrow, Two Boots? We’ll see. [NYT]

Flatbush to Rise?