A New York Magazine “Best Bet”: The Brooklyn Museum Offers Its Love Of Brownstone Neighborhoods, The Savaging Of Which It Lauded

Left, Claudia Pearson illustrations featured in Brooklyn Museum gift shop.  Right, townhouses and Freddy's Bar torn down for Atlantic Yards- Click on any image to enlarge

During a ten-year stretch roughly coinciding with the Great Depression, Universal Studios gave us a golden era of monsters: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and werewolves as in the Werewolf of London (1935) and The Wolf Man (1941).  You might also consider including The Phantom of the Opera with two principal release dates framing that decade (1925 for the original and a remake in 1943).  The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde films, with versions made in 1931 and 1941, although in a similar vein, was not from Universal, produced by two other studios, Paramount and MGM, respectively.

The fun thing about the monsters was that each came packaged with some hokum mythology not necessarily genuinely derived from classic source material.  It was useful if the framework of the mythology was also serviceable for setting up damsel-in-distress scenarios.  One such myth that served very well in this regard was the curse afflicting the cinema werewolves: That when they transformed they were compelled to try to kill the things they loved most.

Why was I thinking about this old horror film trope about werewolves?  Because, reading New York Magazine’s “Best Bets” column I discovered that the Brooklyn Museum is selling in its gift shop tea towels celebrating the charm of brownstone Brooklyn designed by illustrator Claudia Pearson.  According to New York Magazine, Ms. Pearson is “Clinton Hill–based” and “drew inspiration from her surroundings” when she designed these towels.  Presumably they are sold in the Brooklyn Museum in partial acknowledgment of the museum’s own  “Prospect Heights” address and by way of making a statement of its oneness with a community comprised of and valuing what is being depicted.

New York Magazine's "Best Bets" feature

Claudia Pearson tea towels from New York Magazine website

Rummaging around the internet I discovered that the Brooklyn Museum shop also sells a “Brooklyn Brownstone Mug” similarly designed by Ms. Pearson.

Claudia Pearson's Brooklyn Brownstone Mug

The not so humorous irony in all of this is that these same Brooklyn brownstone neighborhoods the museum is celebrating in its gift shop are beset by the prospect of some significant destruction and dismantling, with portions even being removed from the Brooklyn map altogether.  The vortex around which this destruction swirls is Atlantic Yards, the heavily subsidized corporatizing eminent domain takeover a significant swath of Brooklyn by which Forest City Ratner is increasing its mega-monpoly stranglehold on the borough’s assets.  Ms. Pearson’s Clinton Hill brownstone neighborhood, together with the Brooklyn Museum’s Prospect Heights brownstone neighborhood, both border the Atlantic Yards site footprint along with the other significant brownstone neighborhoods of Park Slope, Fort Greene and Boerum Hill.

Going to the Brooklyn Museum's gift shop online we see how prominently Ms. Pearson's brownstone Brooklyn work is being featured

For all its negative implications for these neighborhoods and for the rest of the city’s population, Atlantic Yards was something the Brooklyn Museum, itself, helped to promote and bring about when, with key approvals hanging in the balance without which the mega-project could not have proceeded, the Brooklyn Museum decided to give a special award honoring Bruce Ratner, the head of the Forest City Ratner, the developer/subsidy collection firm responsible for it.  In theory, the giving of the museum’s Augustus Graham award to Ratner was to signify that Ratner embodied, as a man, the praiseworthy attributes of community service and selflessness, something quite the opposite of what the Atlantic Yards project has truly been all about.

If the museum’s award honoring Ratner didn’t itself tip the balance toward Ratner’s obtaining the approvals needed, it certainly combined to exert influence with the things that did.   The museum’s award to Ratner was publicly protested (with Ratner being characterized as a “vampire” among other things) but the museum has never apologized to the communities of Brooklyn for what it did.  While the error of making the award should have been obvious at the time, that was before the mega-project significantly degenerated, and more and more underlying negative facts about it got publicly disclosed.  (Abbreviating the list: The mega-project is now receiving much more subsidy than before, its design has been cheapened, unions have been double-crossed, the passage of time steadily exposes the sham and folly of the community benefit agreement signing and endorsements, the time frame for its build-out will be decades- perhaps forty years- not the ten years first advertised.  And then there was the way that rightfully or wrongly Ratner skirted indictments when implicated in investigations.) . . .

. . . Notwithstanding that the negatives of the situation have become much more conspicuously abject, the Brooklyn Museum still has not issued an apology to the community or sought to reverse the travesty of its award to Ratner by reclaiming or renouncing it.

Is there a way that the effect of the museum now honoring brownstone Brooklyn could be more starkly startling?. . . . Ms. Pearson could design and the museum could sell in its gift shop, products (see below), tea towels and coffee mugs that depict Freddy’s Bar and Grill and the little nearby townhouses torn down to create the so-called “Barclays” arena and the now empty acres and parking lots Ratner owns around it.  Maybe that would also be more appropriate in that the museum, as with its dusty old linen-wrapped mummies, often focuses on educating the public about what was and is now no more.

Should the Brooklyn Brownstone mugs in the museum shop show townhouses in the process of demolition like the ones below?

The Tracy Collins photos above that appeared in Atlantic Yards Report show the demolition of Dean Street townhouses before it was clear the land would ever be used for the Ratner project.  Land on which they were sited is still vacant.

With an image of the now demolished 489 Dean Street derived from a Tracy Collins photograph, the kind of "Brownstone Brooklyn" coffee mugs the Brooklyn Museum could be selling

A Freddy's Bar Mug?

Tea towels that feature the buildings next to Freddy's that were torn down (from a Tracy Collins photograph)

If the Brooklyn Museum, set up as a charitable organization to serve the public, actually values Brooklyn and its brownstone neighborhoods, what was it that caused the lycanthropic transmogrification whereby it howled harmonizing tones of praise and support for Ratner as he wolfishly prepared to devour more of Brooklyn and its brownstone acres into his increasingly gargantuan government-supported mega-monopoly?  The elixir that brought about that transformation was money.  Despite what the museum’s Augustus Graham award is supposed to honor, Ratner was not honored for what he had done for the community: He was honored for the money he had given to the museum that had gotten his people placed on the museum’s board of trustees.

Sometimes the idea that one kills the thing one loves is explored as a concept with serious real ramifications that are to be studied.  Jane Jacobs, the great urbanist observer and thinker who wrote “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” explored in that book a sort of `killing the goose that laid the golden egg’ concern in an urban planning context: She wrote (p. 246*) that the benefits of a diverse economy can be killed off by a rush of businesses coming in to take advantage of an “enviable location” so that the “enviable location” thereby ceases to exist.  Or, alternatively, in another context, you can find theories that “killing the thing you love” is a beastly symptom of the alpha male urge to dominate at all costs.

(* “. . . .making the same mistakes as a family I know who bought an acre in the country on which to build a house. For many years, while they lacked the money to build, they visited the site regularly and picnicked on a knoll, the site’s most attractive feature. They liked so much to visualize themselves as always there, that when they finally built they put the house on the knoll. But then the knoll was gone. Somehow they had not realized they would destroy it and lose it by supplanting it with themselves.”)

The situation with the still unapologetic Brooklyn Museum is neither of these.  Although it’s a damsel-in-distress scenario with the public and Brooklyn’s brownstone neighborhoods in jeopardy and although the treacherous peril of this world becomes all the more frighteningly dangerous when that damsel’s self-proclaimed lover suddenly reveals a sinister face that is opposite to that mild and friendly one that has been shown before, the elixir that provokes that Jekyll and Hyde transformation here is simply money and there is no real magic or mystery to the transformation. It is simply the hypocrisy that money can so readily buy.

No Sparkle In Barclays’ Bob Diamond: Societal Mores Unmoored, What And Who We Honor Today- That Which We Used To Shun

(Above, Bob Diamond Building at Colby College)

This post is about honor: what we honor today in society, who we honor, and why. In particular it is about the kind of honor that gets handed out when we name things. . .

. . As you read on a bit you will realize that there is a good portion of this article that I should have written and posted long ago. Had I done so I would have seemed remarkably prescient. (Does it count if I tell you it was, in fact, written in my head years ago?) Unfortunately, I apologize: Noticing New York readers, I am not a fast writer, there is so much to write, and sometimes I wind up on hiatus and write nothing at all. . .

As it is, it’s time to pick up our story- it concerns that project of ill-renown, the proposed Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly in Brooklyn . . .

Diamond Not Glittering

Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays Bank, recently resigned abruptly and in disgrace over the rate-rigging scandal for which Barclays has been fined £290m ($450m) for manipulating LIBOR rates (LIBOR stands for “London interbank offered rate” a critically important benchmark rate). Barclays is reported to have done so to benefit its traders and cook its books. As Atlantic Yards Report’s Norman Oder notes (See: Tuesday, July 03, 2012, Barclays' Bob Diamond resigns, tainted in scandal; was responsible for arena naming rights deal; will MTA feel chagrin about selling subway station naming rights?)
Mr Diamond is:

The executive responsible for the Barclays Center naming rights deal--rights that New York State gave to developer Forest City Ratner--has resigned in the wake of a scandal. And that puts an asterisk on the first subway station naming rights ever sold by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority*.

(* For an extraordinarily paltry sum- $200,000 per year for 20 years- far below what ought to have been paid.)

If a one-time fine of £290 million seems huge (MSNBC dubs it “a record amount” and remember that pounds are a lot more valuable than dollars) consider it against the kind of compensation and bonus money that Mr. Diamond has been paid: In early 2010 Diamond’s compensation was approximately £63 million even after waiving his 2009 bonus, while in one of the years he did take his bonus he received £21m. (See: July 3, 2012, The Many Facets of Robert Diamond, by Michael J. De La Merced.) The fine was imposed jointly by by U.S. and U.K. regulators.

As the subject of names will be important in the discussion that is about to ensue let’s note that Mr. Diamond’s full name is Robert E. Diamond Jr., that’s Robert Edward Diamond Jr.

Add Mr. Diamond’s name, Robert E. Diamond Jr., to the lengthy roster of individuals involved in bringing into existence the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards and the Ratner/Prokhorov basketball stadium who have exited the scene in ignominy. Mr. Diamond is by no means the only individual involved in the perpetration of Atlantic Yards to wind up besmirched but we’ll save going into an enumeration of that long list for another day and another Noticing New York article.

September 2009 Event Not Previously Written About in Noticing New York

Here is the portion of this particular story I should have written long ago. In September of 2009 I found myself visiting the admissions office of Colby College up in Maine. The college representative handling the orientation was expounding to our small group about the unique attributes of a Colby College education. His adjectives and concepts were all rather vague. I wanted to lock it down with some tangible specifics. “Can you give me examples,” I asked, “of individuals graduating from Colby College in whom you can see represented the kind of traits that this kind of special Colby College education imbued them with?”

“Well, there is Doris Kearns Goodwin, the presidential historian,” (indeed, I had already noted the Doris Kearns Goodwin books, including her 2005 “Team of Rivals,” sitting on the bookshelves at the back of the room dedicated to Colby College authors- I was also quite familiar with her as a dependably tapped talking head on subjects presidential for American Experience documentaries and Charlie Rose shows), . . . “And then there’s”- the Colby College representative straightened his spine as if the individual he was about to announce outranked Ms. Goodwin in stature- “Bob Diamond the head of Barclays Bank.” . . .

. . . He smiled. I scowled.

“You know,” I said, “we come from Brooklyn and a lot of people in Brooklyn have a lot of problems with Barclays Bank and its involvement in putting its name on and money into the basketball arena boondoggle project being forced through with eminent domain abuse. We would consider Mr. Diamond’s role in all of that unethical and harmful to the community.” All of this wound up with me having more discussions afterward with the college admission’s representative and with other parents from our small discussion group about the bad things that Barclays was doing . . . The bad things Barclays was doing that were known at the time.

Immediately though, before the group broke up, the next thing I said was this: “Speaking of putting names on things I noticed that the building outside is called `The Diamond Building’- I gather that the `Diamond’ in that name is Mr. Diamond?” I’d noticed the building coming in (see photo at beginning of article and below). Seeing the building I had already suspected the worst. You see, I was already thinking in those terms, in part because a section of the New York Times I had with me was folded open to an article I was still musing over. It was about how easily money, no matter where from, can get things named after people. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had just rewarded his First Deputy Mayor and long-time top political adviser and strategist, Patricia Harris, in a fashion that was above, beyond and outside of the normal conventions of government employee compensation. He paid $1 million to put her name on a new academic center at her alma mater, Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. (See: A Mayor Prizing Loyalty Pays Costly Tribute to His Top Aide, by Michael Barbaro, September 1, 2009.)

(Above, Bob Diamond Building at Colby College)

Mayor Bloomberg's Purchase of College Honor For His Top Deputy and Political Strategist

This was irksome news because since Patti Harris started working for Michael Bloomberg, going back to at least 1979, she has overseen the distribution of the personal wealth he controls to enhance his political power, including behind the scenes manipulations to change the City Charter mid-mayoralty race, thereby specially permitting Bloomberg a previously proscribed third term. Making the news worse is that, as mayor, Bloomberg has plenty of conflicts of interest with his business enterprises. He engages in transactions with virtually every major business in the city as both mayor and corporate mogul. There is plenty of reason to suspect that those conflicts of interest have in turn, vicious circle-style, enhanced that same wealth Mr. Bloomberg dispenses for political control. In the office of mayor, Bloomberg became the city’s wealthiest individual, his wealth increasing ten-fold from the day he started pursuing politics. The increase in Bloomberg’s wealth could, alternatively, be attributed to the acumen with which he runs his Bloomberg computer terminal business but when he turns that same computer business acumen to city projects he has consistently gotten the city taxpayers fleeced.

Ms. Harris is not the only individual for whom Bloomberg has notable regard: Bloomberg has also promotionally saluted Mr. Diamond as his “friend” at the groundbreaking for the "Barclays" Ratner/Prokhorov basketball arena spearheading the Atlantic Yards land grab. (See: Tuesday, July 03, 2012, Flashback to March 2010: Mike Bloomberg calls Barclays' Bob Diamond "my friend"- which includes a video of Bloomberg’s statement of affinity.)

Colby College Code of Student Conduct

So what kind of careers and individuals get honored at college campuses these days so long as somebody is willing to put up the money? Back in 2009, I thought of looking up the codes of student conduct that apply on the Colby College campus (see: Colby College Code of Student Conduct.) and then making the case that Mr. Diamond’s then known about bad conduct wouldn’t make the grade but that would have been a cheap shot. After all isn’t this what everyone recognizes the world has come to, that adults, banks and the entire financial and political world now conduct themselves by standards we would never accept from or teach to young people? (The exception perhaps being a retroactive acceptance of the bullying student Mitt Romney leading a group to pin down and cut off another young man’s blond hair.)

Diamond and His Money Protested at Colby College

Will Mr. Diamond’s misdeeds catch up with him despite the paid-for honors? A few days ago a small group of demonstrators at the college, roughly a dozen, showed up to demand that Diamond resign from the college's board (he's chairman) and that the college not take money from Diamond again. (See: July 22, Colby College trustee chairman targeted by protesters, by Doug Harlow Maine Morning Sentinel, and Colby protesters decry association with banker tied to LIBOR scandal, Alex Barber, Bangor Daily News, Maine, Sunday, July 22, 2012 at 7:07 am.)

We'll see.

What’s In a Naming? Aspirations? Determinism?

What should go into the naming of something? There are names we associate with an aspirational attempt at determinism, naming things as we hope they might come to be. So we might find that we name a daughter Bella (“beautiful”), or Grace, Faith, Joy, Amity, Charity, Prudence, Felicity, Honor, Ruby, Sapphire (Ruby and Sapphire are actually the same stone in different colors) or Pearl. And maybe sometimes names bestowed might indeed have a deterministic effect: Take note that the last names of the heads of two of the very biggest banks Barclays and JP Morgan (both the subject of ongoing heavily reported scandals), both evoke the same sparkling gemstone (Bob “Diamond” and Jamie “Dimon,” respectively, sounding aurally very similar and both with an auric-ly similar cachet). Another person very involved in the Barclays scandal, the investment banking chief, is named Rich Ricci; not exactly “Ritchie Rich” but pretty damn close. (Image from Wikipedia.)

Maybe names do sometimes deterministically influence outcomes. I have a cousin whose last name is “Judge” and he is . . . A lawyer. A close family friend’s last name is Lawlor and he is also a . . lawyer. The wonderful professor with whom I studied economics in college is named Charlotte Price.

Honoring the Past With an Eye To The Future

With the probable aspirational hope for an influence we have long named things after what we honor. Cincinnati is named after Cincinnatus, the patrician Roman general honored as an example of civic virtue and service to the greater good because he immediately resigned the absolute authority bestowed upon him to defeat invading foreigners after the need had passed. We also honor multitudinous places and institutions, naming them after General George Washington, appreciated for having many of the same qualities of Cincinnatus, much the way we also honor Lincoln with the frequent invocation of his name for places and institutions.

Why do we name a medical school the Albert Einstein College of Medicine or a law school the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law? To honor the deeds of great and honorable men. It was once as simple as that.

Indulging In the Purchase of Names and Honor

Certainly, as we are all familiar with, names are sometimes granted as a `thank you’ to honor the giving of substantial amounts of money. But as we see with Ms. Harris the source of the money might not need be where the `thank you’ goes; Ms. Harris gets the honor of her name being on a college building although Michael Bloomberg (with all his business’s financial conflicts working against the city’s taxpayers) is the actual source. Nevertheless, is this practice as simple as it previously was?

In medieval Europe professional pardoners raised money for the church through the practice of selling indulgences, largely regarded (with the benefit of historical hindsight and the advent of the Protestant Reformation) as an abuse. But such “indulgences” went no further than saying that the recipient was freed of the stain of a crime after it had been confessed and repented, not a crime that was prospective or ongoing.

In our modern world of one-stop-shopping efficiency we’ve upped the ante: Now when you plunk your money down on the table you no longer get just an immediate absolution for past bad deeds, you are buying several steps up the ladder’s rungs to receive an “honoring.” You can get that “honor” even when your misdeeds are ongoing; no need for confession or repentance. Those steps get skipped entirely. You are already certified and good to go for the future, no matter what. In the process, bad deeds become presumably good ones.

Ratner’s Brooklyn Museum `Honoring’

So it was when Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner plunked down his money in return for an “honoring” by the Brooklyn Museum. That “honoring” was granted by the museum despite the fact that Ratner was in the middle of one of the most atrocious mega-land-and-subsidy grabs in the city’s history, significantly tailored to the developer’s benefit and the community’s detriment in terms of its out-of-scale, overly-dense design, street closures and seizure and privatizing of public space. Ratner's exchange of money for museum honor came about not so much in spite of the damage he was inflicting but because he wanted to inflict it and needed the assistance of the museum’s “honoring” to help assure that he could do so.

No Cleansing Intervals Now Needed

It is certainly true that wealth has always been able to buy acceptability in society irrespective of how that wealth was earned. But wealth questionably earned wasn’t always an immediate ticket to such access: Admission to society might only come after a decent cleansing interval following misdeeds. I recall coming across information when doing some previous research that during the Gilded Age it wasn’t always that easy for the newly wealthy robber barons and their families to get into society and that their business practices, including how society looked askance at monopolies cornering of the market*, could pose such an obstacle.

(* Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to navigate back to what I remember reading about this so if readers would like to leave more information in comment it would be very welcome.)

If only the wealthy in charge of this city (Bloomberg and Diamond included) would similarly shun monopolies rather than governmentally subsidizing them. But things have changed: In today’s world we can now buy the “honoring” of the very things we as society once shunned. This inversion where behavior which is bad becomes the behavior most likely to be in the public eye with “honorings” will probably accelerate: The disparity of wealth derived from misdeeds and the tilting of playing fields to favor the wealthiest is increasing. As we “honor” these things any societal discouragement of bad behavior goes by the wayside.

Doing the Math on Purchasing The Insurance of Reputational Scotchguard

Going back to the numbers used at the outset of this article for reference, translated into dollars, the “record amount” fine being assessed Barclays Bank by the U.S. and U.K. governments combined is $450 million. Compare that one-time $450 million record fine against annual compensation figures for Mr. Diamond of $98 million (pre-bonus compensation) plus $33 million in bonus compensation ($130 million or so a year?) and then recognize that Mr. Diamond was only one of Barclays executives getting flabbergasting compensation packages. Consider then what small fraction of Mr. Diamond’s compensation Mr. Diamond needed to donate to get an honoring with the naming of a Colby College building after him: a reported $6 million for the building with a total $14 million to the college in recent years (approximately 10%- tax- deductible- of what one year’s compensation might be). Ask yourself: With figures like this in the equation isn’t it worth the bad conduct to have millions left over after spending just a few million as the cost of buying back your honor?

Rescinding Honor?

Are any of these purchased honors likely to be rescinded? In the last few days we saw the unusual spectacle of Penn State, out of shame, removing the statue of Joe Paterno, its highly-compensated football coach and Brown, the university from which Paterno graduated, has removed his name from an award. In addition, in another unusual step the National Collegiate Athletic Association (N.C.A.A.) has erased 14 years of Paterno victories from its official record books. (For more about the Paterno scandal and an analogy with Atlantic Yards about how bad things happen when whistleblowers don’t come forward see Noticing New York’s “Sports Glummery” Series.)

In contradistinction what will happen to honors that have been purchased? Can the contracts for the namings be rescinded to rescind the honors? It’s unlikely that Mr. Diamond or Ms. Harris will one day be stripped of their bought-and-paid-for Colby College and Franklin & Marshall College honors.

Corporate Branding- The Cheap (and Ironic) Purchase of Reputational Honor

These purchases of personal honor for individuals come comparatively cheap. Bought-and-paid-for honor is also cheaply available for the questionable institutions with which such individuals may be connected. As covered by Noticing New York before, government officials are selling the right to corporately brand public assets and spaces. They are doing so inappropriately and for laughably little remuneration in exchange (See: Friday, June 29, 2012, Government Gets Branded.)

Now we are faced with the absolute absurdity that at the very same time there are multiple municipalities suing Barclays Bank and considering what losses and options they have in that regard, New York City will be participating in the promotion of the “Barclays” name with the opening of the “Barclays” Center, subsidized by the taxpayers (mostly the city’s). New York taxpayers have spent the better part of billion dollars in subsidies and incurred a net loss of hundreds of millions. Ironically, the same agencies enlisted to subsidize the financing of the Barclays Center are likely to have suffered LIBOR rate manipulation losses as a result of the bank's manipulations. (See: Friday, July 20, 2012, “Barclays” Center Opening Pending, Bloomberg De-Minimizes Envisioned New York City Lawsuit Against Barclays Bank. Is He Out On A Limb?)

The honor of having the Ratner/Prokhorov basketball arena and two MTA subway stations named after Barclays was sold by New York government very cheap. Technically it was two somewhat separate transactions. First, New York State and New York City gave away the naming rights to the developer for free. The developer, taking the entire mark-up for itself, was then able to sell the rights to Barclays for a $400 million package. Since the $400 million was being paid in over 20 years the present value of that package needs to be estimated as a lower figure, below $200 million. In a subsequent renegotiation, the arena naming rights package was negotiated down from $400 million to $200 million (the present value of that again being less). Stage Two of the transaction was for the MTA to “sell” (give away) the right to christen two of its key subway stations “Barclays” for the insultingly trivial sum of $200,000 a year with a twenty year lock-in of the deal. (See: Sunday, June 28, 2009, Naming a Problem: The MTA Gives Ratner the Right to Name Brooklyn Subway Stations “Barclays”.)

Once again, compare those sums with Bob Diamond’s compensation of perhaps $130 million in any given year.

The Inversion of "Honor"

The awkwardness of the present moment aside, why should subway stations or a publicly paid for arena be named “Barclays” at all. I wrote before:

. . . the name “Barclays” on the arena is merely advertisement with no association with its place or moment in time, no sense of history, and that there was consequently no valid reason for government to confer upon it the very special honor of making “Barclays” a place name in the city.

But even as I said that the granting of the name of “Barclays” on the stations would one day cause us to look back and recall a saga of deceit I probably shortchanged this assessment in one respect. As law professor Frank Pasquale writes in a July 19, 2012 Boston Review essay that is very simpatico with Noticing New York opinions:

Many naming-rights deals are not merely advertising. Rather, they are transparent efforts by dubious enterprises to buy goodwill by permanently associating themselves with famous landmarks.

(See: Names, Trains, and Corporate Deals: Why Public Transit Shouldn’t Sell Naming Rights. See also Atlantic Yards Report’s review of that article: Tuesday, July 24, 2012, Naming-rights deals, suggests law professor, are "transparent efforts by dubious enterprises to buy goodwill by permanently associating themselves with famous landmarks".)

In other words, once again the increasingly predicable inversion we see with “purchased honor” is that the honor of bestowing a name is not done to honor good that was done in the past; the honoring is done to serve as cover for the ill that people hope to get away with in the future.

Another Insert into the Music- Hands Joining Across Eras: Brooklyn Heights Unitarians and How a Historical Landmark Saved the Past For the Future

(Unitarian Universalist Congregation Church built 1838- Now the location of First Acoustics)

This post provides, in full, another insert we have written for a Noticing New York piece which is something of an extended idiosyncratic opus.

A recent Noticing New York post previewed a portion of another pending insert: See: Wednesday, March 9, 2011, An Insert Preview - Music Superstar Ethics: How Completely You Can Sell "You can say what you say, but you are what you are." Jay-Zzzzus! (Also, if you are keeping track you’ll be aware of some upcoming live performance’s that come with a Noticing New York recommendation:

Shepley Metcalf’s Fran Landesman show at the Metropolitan Room (two more performances this March):

Something Irresistible: New Songs by Fran Landesman
Music Director Ron Roy on piano
Chris Rathbun on bass, Gene Roma on drums
Sat March 19 at 7:00 pm
Sun March 20 at 4 pm

And Red Molly (with Pat Wictor) at the next First Acoustics event:

Red Molly
with Pat Wictor
March 19, 2011
All seats $30.00)

Where in the longer piece (Adding A few More Off Topic Notes (Or Are They Really?) does this insert come? It will be inserted after what is written about Jean-Paul Vignon and before the heading “Pasticheing With the Pizzarellis” under which heading there is Noticing New York coverage of two kings of England, one Roman emperor, the Academy Awards, and famous songwriters going to camp in the Adirondacks, not to mention Tony Bennet (except we just did).

Here we go. . . .

Unitarian Incubation of the City’s Historic Preservation

In hosting the First Acoustics concerts in its space at low cost, the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation is performing what urbanist Jane Jacobs identified as an incubator function, that is to provide assistance to the gestation of fledgling new enterprises. Decades ago the First Unitarian congregation (its minister who was involved at the time being Donald W. McKinney) provided the same space to incubate the launch of a local movement that became pivotal for New York City’s urban planning, a movement which, by its example, has also had significant import far beyond the city borders. The undercroft of the Unitarian Church is where Otis Pratt Pearsall, then a young lawyer living in Brooklyn Heights, met and organized with others in the late 1950s to fight for a law or form of zoning that would protect Brooklyn Heights as a historic district. (See: Old Brooklyn Heights: New York's First Suburb By Clay Lancaster, Edmund V. Gillon, Jr., Heights History: Brooklyn Heights Historic District, by Homer Fink on 13. Sep, 2006 in History, Landmark Preservation, New York Preservation Archive Project, Sages and Stages: Historic Districts, October 20, 2004 How Brooklyn Heights Became Our City’s First Historic District by Christopher Anderson (edit@brooklyneagle.net), published online 12-03-2005 and Battling for Brooklyn Heights, by Martin L. Schneider, Introduction by Anthony C. Wood.)

Crucial crew of 1950s Activists

The activists spearheaded by Pearsall included Martin Schneider (a producer for CBS News), William R. Fischer, Malcolm Chesney (an economist), Arthur Steinberg and Richard J. Margolis. Margolis, as publisher and editor of the Brooklyn Heights Press, provided a very essential form of support. In the 50s there were mimeograph machines but no blogs. (These days we do have blogs but the local papers have been bought up by developer (and Bloomberg) proponent Rupert Murdock and developer Forest City Ratner provides them with their office space. . . .apparently more cheaply than developer David Walentas did.)

Moses Supposes Erroneously

In the late 50s Robert Moses was breathing down the necks of these young activists and the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood with projects some then pending, some already underway, to tear down substantial portions of the Heights. Although there was enabling legislation for historic preservation already in place on the state level (the Bard Law enacted in 1956), New York City had not yet availed itself of this law to enact any actual legal protections. The group’s activism contributed significantly to the city’s finally adopting such historic preservation legislation. When it did so, Brooklyn Heights became the city’s first designated historic district in November of 1965.

Success went beyond that. Looking back, Pearsall wrote that one town meeting the group organized “was a major step in the downfall of Moses’s Slum Clearance Committee.” Let us go further and read into this that it was a major step in the downfall of Moses himself. It was an important time. The city was on the cusp of significant change in overall societal thinking about urban development. Moses had been in power implementing his mega-projects for multiple decades during which the city had suffered a sustained multi-decade downward slide in its population. The half-life of the negative effects from those projects persisted for years after their completion. This moment in history was the beginning of the end of an era when Moses in an accelerating decline would finally start losing most and then all of his power.

Cutting Edge Activism and the BHA as the Established Organ of Activism

Most of the crew of activists from the Unitarian undercroft were ultimately absorbed into the Brooklyn Heights Association, elected to its board as members. The activists had organized themselves as the “Community Conservation and Improvement Council” and the BHA very quickly initially constituted the “CCIC” in its entirety, a "special committee" of the BHA. Thereby the activists became the newest committee of the “oldest neighborhood association in the City.” Anthony C. Woods in his Preserving New York suggests that the activists formation of the CCIC was, however, important because the newcomers “were freed of institutional history” while the slow-to-react BHA “was fixed in its ways” and was slow to perceive the urgency of the unfolding threats.

What a difference a decade can make: The Brooklyn Heights Association is credited with taking an activist lead only a decade earlier. It was the BHA that in the early 1940s prevented Moses from running the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway straight through the middle of the Heights on Hicks Street. According to Woods, as that fight was fought it was even worried that the route Moses proposed for the BQE would result in demolition of- back to our starting subject- the First Unitarian Church. Maybe, in retrospect seeing what the church subsequently incubated, Moses may have wished he had succeeded in doing precisely that.* It was the compromise rerouting the BQE forced by the BHA that created the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

(* In a similar twist, New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan on November 13, 2008 unveiled the details of her plan to retake for pedestrians much of the city street space Moses had turned over to cars with her Great Streets Plan at the AIA Center for Architecture on Greenwich Village's La Guardia Place where, as she talked, architect and urban design consultant Jan Gehl sat wondering at how the beautiful building in which they sat would not even have been there if the Greenwich Village community had not defeated Moses's plans for a ten-lane Lower Manhattan Expressway destroying Greenwich Village, SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown. - That plan would have involved ramped clover-leafing midtown access from Fifth Avenue via Washington Square Park. See Gehl's essay "For You Jane" in "What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs.")

Beyond the Belief of Seeing?

There is a is a video about the history of designating the Heights as historic: “Brooklyn Is My Neighborhood/ The Story of New York’s First Historic District” produced by Martin L Schneider and Karl Junkersfeld and narrated by Mr. Schneider. (See: New Video: The Story of New York’s First Historic District, by brooklynheightsblog on 05. Apr, 2010.) You will note that Mr. Schneider is one of the original CCIC activists named in the list above.

Brooklyn Is My Neighborhood
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

The video has some fascinating images, including this rendering of a never-built multi-block “luxury” housing extravaganza Moses had planned to have replace a portion of Brooklyn Heights (see below). No wonder Moses’ policies were chasing people out of the city in droves!

Ready For De Mille’s Close-Up?

Can absorption into art and culture be a measure of the public’s overall appreciation of those urban environments which we succeed in growing or preserving? A very recent Brooklyn Paper article reporting about filming of a new film in the Heights, “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” has this to say:

Brooklyn Heights has long been Hollywood’s leading lady. Fabled for its gorgeous apartments, scenic streets and killer views of Manhattan, America’s first suburb has been a backlot for Hollywood’s great moments.

It then goes on to list a few, including “Moonstruck,” and “The Age of Innocence.” It leaves out “Scent of a Woman”(OK that was really neighboring DUMBO) or many others like the B-Horror film “The Sentinel” (and didn’t at least one Woody Allen film use the Heights?). Though it mentions Jack Nicholson entering 57 Montague St. in “Prizzi’s Honor” (to go up to his apartment) if fails to disclose the cinematic legerdemain that when Nicholson walked out on the terrace of his apartment he was actually on the roof of 80 Cranberry Street five blocks to the north. (See also: January 12, 2010, Meet a true film celebrity — Brooklyn Heights, By Gersh, Kuntzman, The Brooklyn Paper- some of the BP’s recent article was a retread.)

To the best of our knowledge, Brooklyn Heights earns all its adulatory screen time without paying product placement fees like some corporately created “places” do. (See: Friday, May 21, 2010, Not So “Just Wright” (Because It Is after All “Not So Just”.))

Not Only Contribution of Historic Preservation, but Historic Unitarian Contributions As Well

The Unitarian congregation has an even longer history of contributing significantly to the city and surrounding neighborhoods. In the 1880s the congregation gave a home to wealthy businessman and perspicacious philanthropist Augustus Graham although Mr. Graham never formally became a member of the congregation (in those days a “communicant”). It appears too that Mr. Graham, or Mr. Graham in conjunction with his ostensible “brother” John Bell Graham (together with John’s wife, Maria Louisa Graham) provided the church with a home as well.

Cover for a Sale

Augustus Graham was a benefactor to the church in various ways but it was John Graham Bell, his Presbyterian brother, together with Maria Louisa Graham, who bought the site for the church from Hezekiah Pierpont (that family later changed their name to Pierrepont as in the street named after them on which you can now find the church) and then the Grahams sold the land to a family that represented the church more openly. This interceding purchase by the Grahams is considered to have been a cover because it was feared that community hostility to the Unitarian religion (considered far too unconventional at the time) would otherwise have impeded a sale.

Covering a “Dark Secret”?

Augustus Graham’s not becoming a member of the congregation likely had to do with mysteries about his life that extended to his sexuality: Graham was probably gay or maybe even polyamorous. A deathbed confession to his banker about a “dark secret” revealed that he and his “brother” were not using their original given names and that they were not brothers at all, neither having the last name Graham at birth. In this regard, rumors had cropped up earlier that the two men and their handsome “widowed sister” Maria Graham Taylor, all living together in their Brooklyn home until 1829, were not related.

Tackling the History of Tangled Family Relationships

Augustus Graham it appears had begun life anew more than once. In England he was born in 1776 as Richard King. In America he married under the name of Augustus Graham in Maryland and had two children with Martha Cock. Augustus moved to New York when he met John Bell, who then adopted the last name of Graham, although Augustus continued to support the family he left behind. Eventually he did leave his surviving daughter, Elizabeth Rebecca Graham and her family a sum that made her wealthy after his death. (Elizabeth married a Mr. Chester Coleman.)

It is possible that Maria Graham Taylor, who lived with the “brothers,” was actually related to John Bell. She joined the two men in Brooklyn after they had already been living together for a while. Augustus and John ceased living together after Maria Graham Taylor died. John thereupon married his housekeeper Maria Louisa Thompson, and she is the woman who was on the deed with him when they acquires the land for the church. It is interesting to think that Unitarians felt they needed that cover to build in the community but that Augustus Graham’s reasons for refraining from formally joining the congregation were likely out of concern that it would be a taint to the religious community.

Seminal Benefactor of Burgeoning Brooklyn

Notwithstanding, Augustus Graham was well known as a seminal benefactor of the burgeoning Brooklyn of the time. Uniting their capital, Augustus and John first made money in businesses that included brewery and distillery operations. They may also have made money selling supplies for the troops during the War of 1812. Retiring from the brewery business 1822 and dividing their fortunes. Augustus then made much more money establishing an important factory in the white lead industry. Viewed now a pollutant, white lead was then a state-of-the-art coloring for paint. Augustus is said to have created the factory because he was “determined to use his money to create jobs for the unemployed.”

Also about this time Augustus, joined the radical temperance movement and took steps to found what would ultimately become the Brooklyn Museum: He started the Apprentices' Library to lure young workingmen away from gambling and grogshops with books, lectures and entertainment. The Apprentices' Library became the Brooklyn Institute and later the Brooklyn Museum. (With generational drift, the Brooklyn Museum now hosts a monthly singles-oriented “First Saturdays” evening event that, with wine and beer available for purchase, has a intemperate cocktail party aspect to it.)

A Naughty Brooklyn Museum Apologizing Naught (Bruce Ratner)

At this point we must fulfill our Noticing New York duty to point out how in 2008 the Brooklyn Museum besmirched the memory of Augustus Graham by awarding the Augustus Graham award to real estate developer/subsidy collector and eminent domain abuser Bruce Ratner.

Henry Stiles who, according to historian Olive Hoogenboom, wrote the standard book on Brooklyn history says that Graham was deeply motivated by a concern "for the poor, the suffering, the young, and those" neglected "portions of the community" and his determination to secure for them a larger “share of the great moral and intellectual privileges.” The Unitarian congregation’s website (in an article by Ms. Hoogenboom) points out how this “made him a role model for that church's great settlement work, out of which grew the housing reforms of Alfred T. White.” All of this is quite incongruous with the likes of Bruce Ratner. The Brooklyn Museum has yet to apologize to the community for its errant and profoundly community-damaging award “honoring” Mr. Ratner, whose firm is now implicated in the illegal bribing of public officials for favoritism in two recent instances: with respect to his Atlantic Yards mega-monoply here in Brooklyn and buying approval for the $630 million, 1000-apartment, 81-acre Ridge Hill Forest City Ratner Project in Yonkers.

In addition to bequeathing a substantial amount of his fortune to support Unitarianism and being regarded as the founder of the Brooklyn Museum, Augustus Graham founded the Brooklyn Hospital and, traveling back to England at one point, he founded the Modbury Library and Scientific Institution in Devonshire, using his birth name.

Most of what I have reported here about Augustus Graham is from Olive Hoogenboom’s "The First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn: One Hundred Fifty Years" or other sources of her work I’ve linked to above.

Unitarian Seth Low, Another UU Link to the Historic Preservation Laws

However spurned in their arrival, the Unitarians went on to make more great contributions to the community. Congregation members Seth Low (born 1850) and Alfred Tredway White (born 1846) were friends, neighbors and members of two intermarrying families and two of the better known congregation members. Seth Low (actually Seth Low III in the congregation) was mayor of Brooklyn for two terms, president of Columbia University and was then the first reform mayor of the entire city upon the ouster of Tammany Hall following the power shifts resulting from the 1897 consolidation of Brooklyn with the rest of New York. His reforms in city administration are credited with making possible the wondrous original Pennsylvania Station (completed in 1910). Without his reforms that project would probably have been bled by graft and corruption down to something mundane. Donald Trump, who has expressed strong antipathy to New York’s historic preservation laws, has asserted that the creation of those laws was due to an indefensible overreaching of the real estate industry when it tore down Penn Station. (Demolition commenced in 1963.) So you might view this as another link between the Unitarians and the establishment of those laws, as if Seth Low had reached out over multiple decades to join hands with preservation activist Pearsall.

Unitarian Alfred Tredway White’s Multiple Contributions

Alfred Tredway White, Seth Lows’s co-congregationlist (no relation to me despite the fact that we have both worked to create many units of affordable housing), is famous for his housing reform movement work. He built affordable, innovatively designed housing for over a thousand working class families. Much of what he built is still coveted today for its beautiful (albeit low-cost) design. Some of what he built was destroyed when Moses put in the BQE. More of it might have been destroyed had that expressway not been rerouted. White also founded and supported the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The BBG has an Alfred T. White Amphitheater “that honors BBG’s first benefactor, Alfred T. White,” but its website has no other mention of White. It does, however, show him, (photo also below) unidentified, mustache and beard, in this picture of the laying of the cornerstone of the Laboratory Building in1916.

Here is more about White from Olive Hoogenboom:

Credited with cutting Brooklyn's infant mortality rate by half, White was also a founder of the Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. In 1878 he became the co-founder of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities and was either its president or secretary for thirty years. . . . In 1893, while commissioner of public works in Brooklyn, White built the Wallabout Market which lasted until the nearby Navy Yard expanded during World War II.

It was also under White that the Unitarians expanded to build their Willow Place Chapel in 1875/1876. The Unitarians had a second offshoot congregation in Willow Town (in a downhill corner of southern Brooklyn Heights) which was established for the purpose of doing settlement-style social work for immigrants who lived near the docks. (Many low income people once lived in what is now considered Brooklyn Heights.) The Unitarian settlement school was moved into the new building. The Willow Place Chapel is no longer owned by the Unitarians but it too still exists and it also provides community art-incubating functions. Since 1962 it has been the home of the Heights Players a local theater group that often does musicals (playing Frost/Nixon February 4-20, 2011). That group’s website informs us that after White died the chapel passed through city hands and was for a time a brothel during World War II.

Here is an interesting tidbit with an echo of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” mentioned here elsewhere: In her history of the church Olive Hoogenboom writes that White got along well with the children participating in their theatrical productions and “especially delighted them with his portrayal of Andrew Jackson at the battle of New Orleans.”

Soldiering On

Otis Pratt Pearsall still actively soldiers on to protect the historic assets in and around the Heights. He is supporting a proposed new Brooklyn Skyscraper district, “the obvious extension of Brooklyn Heights historic district, and a bit of unfinished business from the days when he and neighbors waged war against Robert Moses . . ” (See: Brooklyn Sounds Off on Skyscraper District: Neighbors and developers weigh in on potential designation of downtown historic district, by Tom Stoelker, 12.15.2010) And he recently wrote to the Brooklyn Eagle elucidating how “Demolition By Neglect” should not be used as an end run around the Heights’ historic protections (See: Letter to the Editor: Why Was Heights Landmark Allowed to Deteriorate? 05-27-2008.)

In another link back to the Unitarians, Mr. Pearsall is currently a Trustee of the Brooklyn Museum. Mr. Pearsall also serves as a commissioner on the “New York City Arts Commission,” recently rechristened the “Design Commission” which change of name risks making a somewhat obscure agency unfortunately more so. The commission doesn’t deserves to be obscure, see: The Politics of Urban Beauty: New York and Its Art Commission, by Michele H. Bogart. (It seems that they decided to change the name of the commission just as soon as Ms. Bogart wrote the definitive book on it!)

At the commission Mr. Pearsall gets to work with James P. Stuckey, because this somewhat obscure little commission is where Mr. Stuckey somehow managed to wind up as Chairman after working for developer Bruce Ratner. Mr. Stuckey is best known to many as one of the early heavies in the Atlantic Yards mega-theft. Stuckey, was the predecessor to, MaryAnne Gilmartin at Forest City Ratner. Before his abrupt departure from that post he was, once upon a time, president of the city’s own Economic Development Corporation. The information he absorbed while working as a public official with the city should be assumed to have assisted Stuckey in designing the abuses of eminent domain and urban renewal pursued in connection with Atlantic Yards when he took his private sector Ratner job.

BHA Annual Meeting- Ravaged Educational Policies Critiqued by Ravitch
(Above, Diane Ravitch at the BHA annual meeting. BHA President Jane McGroarty is on the right.)

This year the spirit of the activist heritage of the Brooklyn Heights Association was more in evidence at the BHA’s annual meeting (Monday, February 28, 2011) than in recent years prior. The keynote speaker was Diane Ravitch, historian of education, Research Professor of Education at NYU, and author of the best-selling book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” (New York: Basic Books 2010). Ms. Ravitch was also the once-upon-a-time spouse of our just departed New York Sdtate Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch.

Ms. Ravitch’s book very consciously pays homage to Jane Jacobs' great book (which also helped turn the political tide for Moses): “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” The Ravitch book, the subtitle of which is “How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” takes aim at the Bloomberg school policies, including the charter school priviatizations (now figureheaded by Schools Chancellor Cathie Black) and G. W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind that have left Texas behind as now having one of the worst school systems in the nation. Ms. Ravitch attacked the statistics of the numbers-oriented Bloomberg/Black style approach and criticized the advent of a culture of educational blame and penalization in the system while a feel for true educational values are being shown the door.

Ms. Ravitch, a resident of Brooklyn Heights, is now making the talk show rounds so you are likely to catch her on something coming up, or you can see her YouTube style on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

(BTW: Not 100% related to Ms. Ravitch but I think one of the best contemplative hours about American education can be found on a prior-in-time This American Life: Episode 275: Two Steps Back, Originally aired 10.15.2004.)

BHA- Litigating: Brooklyn Bridge Park

Another important part of the evening vis-a-vis the BHA’s actions to protect the community was BHA President Jane McGroarty's report on the BHA's lawsuit (in conjunction with the Fulton Ferry Landing Association and the New York Landmarks Conservancy) against ESDC for its behind-the-scenes maneuvering to remove a portion of the Brooklyn Bridge Park from parkland designation without public knowledge or community input. (See: Groups Sue to Stop Transfer of Tobacco Warehouse to St. Ann's, by John Del Signore, January 18, 2011, St. Ann's Warehouse Gets Green Light on Tobacco Warehouse, By John Del Signore, February 15, 2011 4:24 PM and Review and Comment: Unfortunate Lawsuits, by Henrik Krogius, 01-26-2011.)

As Ms. McGroarty made clear, the lawsuit is not about opposing the immediate possible result that might be facilitated by such a demapping which, for the time being, involves a transfer of the St. Ann's Warehouse theater across the street into the now unroofed and open air Civil War-era Brooklyn Tobacco Warehouse. Instead, it is a matter of process. The first Gothamist article linked to above quotes a lawyer for the plaintiff’s putting it this way: “city and state officials ‘launched a secret plan to remove the Tobacco Warehouse from the park’s map so that it could be given to a private organization for free and for its sole and permanent use.’” After extensive public hearings on a park that was defined as including these acres those officials wrote to the Federal Government’s department of the interior without public notice or disclosure to request a demapping of the acreage. The plaintiffs have the support of a number of elected officials including State Senator Daniel Squadron whom the Gothamist quotes commenting on the lack of transparency and community input as saying, “If true, the issues being raised today are disturbing and call the process into further question; they must be dealt with swiftly.”

The BHA is walking something of a fine line with the park and park officials: A year ago the Brooklyn Heights Association was essentially promoting the officially touted version of the park at its annual meeting when it invited park designer Michael Van Valkenburgh to be its keynote speaker.

I’ve been informed that not all of the (some of them very powerful) board members of the BHA are pleased with the lawsuit and consider it, for instance, an attack on the integrity of ESDC-employed Brooklyn Bridge Park president Regina Myer. The Henrik Krogius “Review and Comment” article from the Brooklyn Eagle linked to above is essentially a promotion of those critiques of the lawsuit, calling the lawsuit “much ado about very little” that “impugns well-intentioned officials.” Krogius speaks up for Ms. Myers, saying, the park’s realization is "finally began progressing impressively two years ago under Regina Myer’s dedicated leadership.”

Noticing New York has another viewpoint: See: Monday, May 24, 2010, Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth? An Examination of Brooklyn Bridge Park in Terms of the Politics of Development, Part I . Ms. Myers has a history of being on the side of development and developers. It was she who made the city’s presentation of Atlantic Yards to the City Planning Commission and she was also central in the effort to substantially upzone Brooklyn’s downtown.

BHA- Atlantic Yards

And, of course, the BHA, as a member of the Brooklyn Speaks coalition of community groups, is now finally also involved in litigating against ESDC’s nefariously orchestrated approvals of Ratner's Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly before Judge Marcy Friedman. (More from those "well-intentioned officials" Mr. Krogius spoke up for above?)

BHA Community Service Awards- History to Blog About

With Tom Stewart (from Channel 13) as master of ceremonies the BHA also presented community service awards for to the Brooklyn Heights Blog and Riverside Tenants Association. (Tom Stewart's wife is the wonderful cabaret singer Maureen Kelly Stewart who will be performing as part of the First Acoustics 2011/12 season.)

The award to Riverside Tenants Association is for their fight in the courts to block the destruction and removal of a garden courtyard that is part of one of the masterpiece buildings for which we have Alfred Tredway White to thank. (The developer/owner want to put in a parking lot.) As the Brooklyn Heights Blog puts it:

. . . to preserve the Riverside Apartments, on Columbia Place between Joralemon and State streets, and, in particular, for the ongoing struggle to save the courtyard between the building and the BQE, and its grove of mature trees.

And the BHB recorded the award on video- If you are enamored of governmental acronyms you will have fun:

BHA Award To Riverside Tenants Association from Karl Junkersfeld on Vimeo.

And who is assisting the Riverside Tenants Association to defend the treasured Alfred Tredway White building in which they live?- - Historian and Unitarian Universalist Congregation member Olive Hoogenboom.

Adding Something Off Topic: A Few Notes

We are going to go off topic for a bit. But if we are clever enough about what we weave in, you might not even notice our departure from our usual themes. What better way to go off topic, however, than to get a chance to talk about music, something we love.

When Noticing New York is On Topic

As regular readers know, Noticing New York is an independent entity dedicated to the proposition that developing New York and appreciating New York go hand in hand. We watch New York City development, looking to call attention to what is good and what is not so good. We have an eye out for, and tend to side with, the interests of local communities in building or protecting good design in the public realm. These days we are often discouraged by what big developers with the support of City Hall try to get away with at the expense of our communities. (See: Monday, February 23, 2009, Un-funny Valentines Arriving Late: Your Community Interests at Heart.)

Advertising

This post is something in the nature of an advertisement for some good music. But you have to keep reading. You may have noticed that our Noticing New York site doesn’t have advertising. It is something we will probably get around to including but we have resisted it thus far, and there are reasons. One is that we don’t want advertising to create conflicts of interest. We always want to be able to speak freely and without the perception that something extraneous will be influencing us. (One reason we are not a not-for-profit is because we want to speak freely and that sometimes means being directly critical in a political way about the roles of NYC politicians roles in city development.)

When we do start to include advertising links, it will be for things we believe in. For instance, there are some good documentaries you might want to purchase about topics we believe in. One of them is Isabel Hill’s careful and thoughtfully produced “Brooklyn Matters” about the extraordinarily errant Atlantic Yards megadevelopment proposed for Brooklyn. Another is “City of Water,” a superb film produced by the Municipal Art Society about planning for the best possible uses of our city waterfront. That film is regularly shown in public venues and will be available for DVD purchase in April.

You may notice that we envision NNY advertising would not only be for what we believe in, but would also be related to the topics that concern our site. You might eventually find that there are certain carefully chosen purchases we link to with a New York theme. For instance, we recommend the neckties of Josh Bach. Some of them are New York-themed and when we go to a public hearing to protest rampant eminent domain abuse we like to wear their Constitution necktie. (Josh Bach also has a great Declaration of Independence necktie an Emancipation Proclamation necktie.)

Music

Would we advertise music, which we love, but which is not necessarily related directly to our major themes? We don’t want Noticing New York to be cluttered with advertising. We don’t want too many distractions. Our site should always load quickly and you should be able to find what you are looking for fast. Bur maybe because we love music . . . (We love Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, often heard on Prairie Home Companion. Vince now has regular affordable performances at the Edison Hotel.- We also love the Pizzarellis, particularly John Pizzarelli’s wife, Jessica Molaskey.)

A Special Locally Generated Concert Series: First Acoustics, a Live Concert Series

Here is what we specifically wanted to “advertise” by going off topic in this post. What we are going to tell you about is special because it is locally generated and has, not just marvelous music, but a rare personal and friendly feel. It is the new First Acoustics, a live concert series at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn.

We have been to two of the performance evenings so far and each was memorable. There are three more evenings coming up, each of which we plan to attend. The series began with a double performance evening: Livingston Taylor and Cat Martino as the opening act.

(Picture: Coco Wilde and Livingston Taylor)

Lots of people know Livingston as the brother of James Taylor. Livingston is such a preeminent performing and songwriting talent in his own right we have never been able to discern why James is so much better known. Similar in many ways, we prefer to catch brother Livingston as the less often heard. We also loved his quiet, quirky sense of humor. (He teaches stage performance at the Berklee School of music in Boston where our nephew is a student.)

The evening introduced us to fellow Brooklynite Cat Martino, something for which we are very thankful. Ms. Martino has a rich, luxurious, meanderingly flowing voice and does something magical and technically astounding where she accompanies her own voice with repeating loops of sound. She adds successive overlaps contributing rhythm, harmony and counterpoint for a complex tapestry of sound, all of which she herself has generated with voice alone.

We’re sorry we missed the next three evenings where the performers were Bethany & Rufus, Olympia’s Daughters and Christine Lavin.

The Valentine’s Day evening concert presented two Brooklyn neighbors of Coco Wilde, who is producing the series: singer Wendy Russell and jazz cabaret from bassist Bob Cunningham. Wendy, whose speciality is slow, silky renditions from the American Songbook, was great doing a humorously rousing “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” and an absurdly sultry “Rubber Duckie” the song you know best sung by Ernie of Sesame Street. Bob Cunningham begins many of his pieces with stories relating them to the many jazz greats with whom he has played in the process of building his long, distinguished career: Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Benny Carter, Sun Ra. .. the list goes on. The evening concluded fittingly when Wendy joined Bob for a rendition of “My Funny Valentine.”

(Picture: Wendy Russell, Coco, Bob Cunningham)

We also must say something about Coco Wilde, the producer of these evenings. She is a natural, relaxed host and her joy for what she is doing (and for her husband Bruce, who is helping her) is transporting.

Here are the scheduled performances coming up (also available at the website where there is ticket information).

March 7th, 2009: Holly Near
March 28th, 2009: Priscilla Herdman
May 9th, 2009: Leon Redbone

As for Leon Redbone, we do love his Christmas album, “Christmas Island,” a gift from one of our illustrious musician family members.

Really So Off Topic?

Is this post really so off topic? Perhaps not. A lot of what we write about concerns the importance of working from the community level up to generate an authentic urban experience. How to do that well in a performance sense (including music and theater) is exactly the kind of challenge that faces us, for instance, in terms of acting from the community level up to rescue Coney Island from the destruction which the city seems to be systematically bringing to it.

How do we incubate and build the warp and woof of our local culture?

We suggest that we all should be on he lookout for the opportunity to enjoy performances such as those that are being put together at First Acoustics. They are relatively economical and we have been able to buy signed CDs while chatting with the performers. (It sure beats going to some of the questionable “free” events sponsored by the Brooklyn Borough President and funded from the “charitable”/political contributions he takes from real estate developers he should be keeping at arm’s length.- There! Did we get back on topic?- See our very on topic: “Charity?” We Begin to Groan, Monday, October 20, 2008)

Even better yet, in terms of a good locally incubated performance bargain, First Acoustics is planning a summer Thursday performance series which will be even more economical and will focus on “up and coming” performers.

Enjoy! For tickets go to the website or contact:

BOX OFFICE: (718) 288 5994
For more information:
EMAIL: info (at) firstacoustics.org

Proceeds Benefit the First Unitarian Congregational Society, Brooklyn.

On topic again, the venerable Augustus Graham was important to founding the First Unitarian congregation and was devoted during his life to doing good in Brooklyn. We once wrote about how the Brooklyn Museum’s Augustus Graham Award should never have been given to a certain real estate developer.

(Click to enlarge any images in this post.)