The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
NOV 2007
Local
The Blight and Plight of Condoburg
by B. Colby HamiltonLocal
I visited Phil DePaolo to talk about development. Part of me wondered if Phil didn’t feel like a broken record. He’s been involved in virtually every development fight in North Brooklyn from the People’s Firehouse to the waterfront re-zoning.
In Staten Island, a Teenage Tour Guide of the Maritime Wastes
by Alexander CuadrosLocal
I walked through a split in the reeds. The narrow beaten path was strewn with flattened plastic bottles, brown and green shards of glass, and withered shopping bags half-submerged in the dirt or impaled by a desiccated reed.
7 + 3 is 9
by Samantha BerkleyLocal
She smiled with braces and not with her burgeoning teenage lips. She flapped her hands in class like an anxious toddler about to try something new. Cynthia is twelve with hairy armpits; she’s not a kid anymore. But she speaks in baby tones to me and says things like, “Ms. Berkley, can I tell you something?”
A College Grows in Williamsburg
by John BredinLocal
As a resident of Hoboken, New Jersey and dedicated Manhattan cultural tourist, I had always kept Brooklyn at arms length. Though vaguely aware of the borough’s cutting-edge artistic enclaves, I was never sophisticated enough to be too aware of them until recently. I admit that the relentless assault of bad tabloid press—skewering Brooklyn as the “murder capital of the world”—coupled with events like the Crown Heights riot, caused me to write off the entire county of Kings as a scary, dangerous place.
