Brooklyn Heights Blog

The hot mess that is One Front Street in DUMBO has lost its bid for a cabaret license, the Brooklyn Paper reports.   A Community Board 2 committee gave the application a big thumbs down last night.

Brooklyn Heights-DUMBO Brahmin/ Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition board member/ former Fulton Ferry Landing Association president Gary van der Putten is quoted in the report saying, ““I have lived in the neighborhood for 25 years and I have never objected to any new restaurant or establishment … But what happens is that these kinds of places get cabaret licenses then, all of a sudden, they deteriorate into clubs.”

In a blog post prior to the CB2 meeting, the FFLA reports that “over this last weekend, local Fulton Ferry residents complained about booming vibrations and shouting in the street from what appeared to be two all-night events at One Front.”

One Front owner Marcelo Pevida claimed that dancing [for the community!] would only be offered on the second floor of the venue while the first would remain dedicated to dining. Upon hearing that one DUMBO resident in attendance shouted “we don’t want to dance!”

Our pal PezzKandy caught this pic of Martha Stewart filming her TV show  at the Brooklyn Flea in DUMBO today.   Reports earlier this week suggested she’d be hitting Saturday’s flea in Fort Greene but we guess yesterday’s weather moved the whole shebang to our neck of the woods today.

Two Trees has listed the super-fantastic Clocktower apartment at One Main Street in Dumbo for sale at $25 million dollars. Recession? Feh!

Check out the apartment in all its glory at clocktowerny.com . The New York Times wrote about this 3,000 sq foot triplex earlier this year.

A group has filed a lawsuit in order to halt the Dock Street Dumbo project, alleging that the School Construction Authority didn’t conduct a proper, objective selection process for the site, as required by law.

The lawsuit, filed by the DUMBO Neighborhood Foundation, also said that the private developer, Two Trees, and New York City officials “made a number of public misrepresentations about the proposed Dock Street middle school in order to advance the re-zoning application.” Read more »

Newly released documents reveal that Department of Education architects felt that Two Trees’ controversial Dock Street DUMBO project “would yield a very small school (compromised from our standards) with premium costs due to the mixed use with the high-rise residential building.”

However, the two-year-old internal e-mails do not address the current plans for the site, according to the School Construction Authority. Read more »

The DUMBO Arts Center presents its thirteenth annual Art under the Bridge festival, beginning tomorrow evening, September 25, and continuing through Sunday, September 27. According to DAC’s press release:

The three-day multi-site neighborhood-wide event is a one-of-a-kind art happening: where serendipity meets the haphazard and where the unpredictable, spontaneous and downright weird thrive. The now teenage D.U.M.B.O. Art Under the Bridge Festival® presents touchable, accessible, and interactive art, on a scale that makes it the nation’s largest urban forum for experimental art.

Art Under the Bridge is an opportunity for young artists to use any medium imaginable to create temporary projects on-the-spot everywhere and anywhere, completely transforming the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, New York, into a vibrant platform for self-expression. In addition to the 80+ projects throughout the historical post-industrial waterfront span, visitors can tour local artists’ studios or check out the indoor video_dumbo, a non-stop program of cutting-edge video art from New York City and around the world.

Locations and times of the various art projects can be found here. Many DUMBO based artists will be opening their studios to visitors. A list of these artists and their studio locations is here.

The acrid odor of smoke in the area this morning is wafting in from a three-alarm fire in a vacant building in Long Island City.  Lots of people in our area, however, are calling the Fire Department, hence the cacophony of sirens.  No major conflagrations here, though.

Photo by Marc Hermann/BHB

It made a sound, and there were plenty of people around to hear it.  Read more »

Illuminated by the faint flash from your correspondent’s cell phone camera, Maximilian Pelzmann’s sculpture “Windwave”, located in Brooklyn Bridge Park near the foot of Main Street in DUMBO, looks like some huge creature that’s just emerged from the East River.

“Windwave” is part of the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (”BWAC”) annual Outdoor Sculpture Show, which can be seen in Brooklyn Bridge Park and neighboring Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park through September 7.