It’s Like “The Doors Of Georgian Dublin” Except It’s Aluminum And Vinyl Siding. And It’s In Greenpoint.

I love it — first, Best of Greenpoint Aluminum and Vinyl Siding, now the remix [Link via].

Where’s Robert Moses When You Need Him?

Will anyone ever be able to figure out Red Hook? Unlikely; it seems to be a case of the blue-collar businesses against the box stores against the artists against the developers against the factory owners — did we mention that everyone hates the box stores? — except for the residents of the housing projects, who want the jobs in the box stores! — yet then there are the musicians who aren’t like artists but who need cheap rent (and seem to be unaware of any other borough) and . . . and everybody hates the Jews* . . . !

No, seriously, it sounds like that:

Red Hook is poised to receive stores like Ikea and Fairway, million-dollar condominiums, humming factories and bustling docks, and even a pier for the 1,132-foot Queen Mary 2 and other cruise ships. Yet, its future is caught up in a battle royal.

Developers want to convert waterfront warehouses and factories into apartments, even though the areas are zoned for manufacturing. But factory owners and cargo haulers fear that well-heeled apartment dwellers would not take kindly to their trucks barreling through Red Hook’s narrow cobblestone streets or their middle-of-the-night foghorns and bright lights.

“You’re going to be doing something they don’t like, even if it’s interfering with a guy barbecuing on the block,” said Michael DiMarino, owner of Linda Tool and Die Corporation, a precision metal fabricator with clients like NASA and Boeing. “I don’t blame him, but we were here first.”

Many factions dread the prospect of big-box stores like Ikea, which plans to build a waterfront furniture emporium with 1,500 parking spaces by 2007. Blue-collar businesses fear that Ikea’s shoppers would clog Red Hook, stalling their trucks. Homeowners worry that Ikea would shatter the quiet.

Yet residents of the housing projects, whose 8,000 tenants represent three-quarters of Red Hook’s population, are eager for the 500 jobs Ikea is dangling. Dorothy Shields, 74, the president of the Red Hook Houses East Tenants Association, who has taken a liking to Ikea’s Swedish meatballs, supports the store because one of every four of the projects’ tenants is unemployed.

“It’s the jobs,” she said. “I have so many people who needs jobs.”

Artists and craftsmen trickling in from Dumbo and Williamsburg fear any change because they suspect they will end up priced out of another blossoming neighborhood. Madigan Shive, a 29-year-old cellist, moved from San Francisco into a rental house with three other artists.

“There’s a good chance we could lose our house in the next year,” she said. “If I lose this space, I don’t know that I can stay in New York.”

*As per Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week”.

A New Brand Of Hemispherical Bluster And Bravado

New York is the biggest, bestest city on the planet and we have the busiest Target store in the state — no, country — no! — hemisphere! Yes, one of the busiest in the Northern Hemisphere:

Just about any weekend or weeknight, the Target Store in Atlantic Terminal Mall is packed with shoppers. Lines leading to cashiers extend down the store’s wide aisles.

“I can’t tell you how often I stop here on my way home from work. It’s becoming a bad habit for me,” said Lucy Valderon, a Bedford-Stuyvesant hair stylist who lives in the Bronx.

Published reports say the Brooklyn Target is one of the busiest in the Northern Hemisphere.

“We understand the store is doing extremely well,” said head researcher Hitesh Kuvelkar of First Global.

Leaving Brooklyn? Fuhgeddaboudit!

In Mark Lotto’s story about the latest Brooklyn boosterism, this nugget about how Peter Braunstein’s dad knows what he knows:

It’s not Whitechapel during Jack the Ripper, but ever since the former Women’s Wear Daily reporter allegedly assaulted a woman in her Chelsea home on Halloween night, Peter Braunstein, or his unlucky doppelgänger, or some mass-hysterical hallucination, has been spotted sipping lattes and annoying dry cleaners all over Cobble Hill. Every day the police dragnet continues, and every day drags nothing up.

But Alberto Braunstein, the suspect’s dad, knows that Peter wasn’t the suspicious coffee drinker or the irate dry-cleaner customer. His son, Mr. Braunstein assured the Daily News, wouldn’t be caught dead outside Manhattan. “I have never known my son to even go to Brooklyn,” said Mr. Braunstein. “So I was stunned.”

Forget the massive manhunt. Is Peter Braunstein the last freelancer in New York who thinks he’s too good for Brooklyn?

Then again, there is that counter-intuitive thinking: I’ll just hide out in Brooklyn — no one would expect it!

Damn That Moses!

The feather in every city reporter’s cap — the Times’ Nicholas Confessore finds a subject who still curses Robert Moses:

To survey the history of Frank’s Department Store, you need only look at the merchandise scattered and stacked about the place. A partial list, in no particular order, includes children’s sailor suits, bone knitting needles, thermal underwear, truckers’ caps featuring the 1980’s sitcom puppet Alf, corduroy slacks with blue piping, newsboy hats, bicentennial American flags, gray plaid knickers and black nylon stockings preserved in tissue paper.

Since the 1930’s, Frank’s has carried a little bit of everything for everybody, crammed into a single long, musty room on Union Street in Brooklyn, one block from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Today the few leftovers layer the shelves and counters like rock strata.

. . .

Now Frank’s, too, is a relic. These days, if you want pantyhose, you go to Duane Reade; if you want corduroys, you go to Old Navy. (If you want knickers, you’re pretty much out of luck.) Some time in the coming days, when it finishes selling its stock, Frank’s will go dark.

“A store like this is really passé; it’s an antique,” Mrs. Milea said. “Business has not been good.”

Once, Frank’s was part of the thriving commercial district along Columbia Street. With the nearby waterfront booming, and pushcarts filled with fruits and vegetables lining the streets, Frank Sacco borrowed $1,500 from his in-laws in 1937 and opened the store in a space a few doors west of its current location.

. . .

Construction of the expressway in the 1950’s, however, sliced the area in half, cutting Frank’s off from many of its customers. “I wasn’t too fond of Moses,” says Mrs. Milea, referring to Robert Moses, New York’s master builder and prime mover of the expressway, among many other projects. Then the shipping industry began to trickle across the harbor to New Jersey, taking jobs with it and sending the Columbia Street area into a slow decline.

And big, big bonus points to dropping in a totally organic reference to Alf trucker caps . . . !