Carroll Gardeners Fight the Good FightCarroll Gardens: Volunteers MoveOn into vacant Carroll Gardens apartment, using it to call voters round the country. [Brooklyn Papers]
Kensington: City drags its feet in building playground, kids sad. [NYDN]
Lower East Side: Cronkite Pizzeria and Wine Bar helps hipsters indulge their inner child and their repressed adult by serving up cotton candy and affordable wine. [Gothamist]
Park Slope: Sharing is caring, and drivers and bikers will soon be splitting Fifth Avenue. [Streets Blog]
Prospect Heights: From ghetto to glorious: New bodega management patches hole in wall and actually stocks what its customers want, which is beer and cigarettes. [Daily Heights]
West Village: Ye Waverly Inn reopens, with better lighting and a new mural but sadly, when these photos were taken, no Graydon. [Eater]
Williamsburg: Breast-feeding has come to the ‘Burg, and the nabe’s okay with it. But not quite as okay as lactating moms would like. [Brooklyn Record]
the morning line
Forget It, Jake
• Chinatown business owners are beefing with Hollywood crews that have flooded the neighborhood, with 25 film permits issued over the last twelve months. City Hall says it’s the neighborhood’s fault for being so damn photogenic. [amNY]
• In one of the strangest street attacks in recent memory, a pedestrian was stabbed by a passing bicyclist last night on West End and 63rd. The assault appears completely random. Perhaps citywide bike lanes are a good idea after all. [NYDN]
• Local news predicts an unrelieved Manhattan Bridge traffic nightmare for the next year while the lower level is closed for a spruce-up. Daily Intel’s AccuChopper 20,000 predicts the same nightmare for the twenty years following the Atlantic Yards groundbreaking. [WNBC]
• Mets tie series, prompt the following tortured sports-pun headline of the day: NOW BATS MORE LIKE IT. [NYP, natch]
• Finally, some club called Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers went out of business — with a name like that, what could be
the problem? — hopefully stemming the steady flow of elegiac human-interest features. [VV, NYT]
intel
Byrne Bikes for BeepManhattan Borough President Scott Stringer organized a big-deal transportation conference for nine o’clock this morning at Columbia University. The point was to talk about government policy — how do we all get around in a continually growing city? — and the folks at Transportation Alternatives had a great way to gin up attention for some transportation alternatives. A group of biking celebs — David Byrne, Matthew Modine, Moby — would join Stringer’s keynote speaker, Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, for a ride up the West Side Highway to the event.
the morning line
Upstate Car Wreck Kills Couple, Breaks Hearts
• A 10-month-old girl is newly orphaned, and in critical condition, after an SUV crossed the median in Orange County and rammed her parents’ rental. That the father was the founder of Fandango.com and the mother a rising-star neuroscientist may raise the item’s profile, but the fact that they were high-school sweethearts makes it completely devastating. [NYDN]
• Affordable housing may be coming to the Lower East Side, Brooklyn Heights, Dumbo, and elsewhere: Bloomberg wants to make his tax break for developers dependent on the low-cost caveat. Ah, how times change: We remember when half of Dumbo’s inhabitants lived there for free. [NYT]
• In psycho-killer news, Mark Chapman was denied parole for the fourth time, one day after his victim John Lennon’s 66th birthday; and Andrew Goldstein, a schizophrenic who pushed a woman under the N train in 1999, pleaded guilty, saying he knew what he was doing. We guess that’s progress? [amNY, NYT]
• In what continues to be Stephen Colbert’s week of total media domination, Colbert County in Alabama opens “The Stephen Colbert Museum and Gift Shop.” Don’t read the linked article too carefully, because the author completely sells out a potentially funny bit from a future show. [Montgomery Adviser via Radar]
• New bike routes are coming to the city. Except that this is New York, not some hippy-dippy Portland, so our bike lanes are actually “shared lanes” and are basically streets with some stenciling on them. We’re sure it’s just a coincidence that these new-style stencils look like chalk outlines of flattened bikers. Right? [StreetsBlog]