Cleanup Woman (is a great song by Betty Wright)

We're just gettin' started round here...cleaning up, that is. First up, this Saturday is cleanup day for the multi-use Wingate Park, which stands in the shadow of Kings County Hospital, where Rutland Road to the north and Winthrop to the south meets Brooklyn Avenue. Wingate's got something you don't see a lot of in NYC - a full-on track, like in, for running, um, track, and a regulation (euro or american) football field. It's also a swell place to catch a concert, with some of the Q's favorite artists ever having played there in the last few years. (Funkadelic, Ohio Players, Aretha Franklin, Salt 'n' Pepa - yes, the Q does enjoy to shake his booty, literally and figuratively, and has been called Funk Mountain by Mrs. Q, which I think means she tolerates my love for the deep grooves more than fully endorses it.) Here's the deets on the cleanup:

and here's a stolen image of the park:

Yes sir, that's a track all right. So I suppose if you have some shots you want to put, or javelins to throw, this would be the place to do it.

Singapore Judgment

From a Caledonian reader comes word that the Singapore Day in Prospect Park this upcoming Saturday is for Singaporeans and their immediate families only. Which would be cool, except that it breaks park policy to hold an event for members of a specific group only - a/k/a discriminate. As in, I guess I'll have to cancel my "Obese People Only" event later this summer in the Lake. Here's Elizabeth C.:

Have you seen the signs for "Singapore Day"? I was all excited to attend--except apparently it's ONLY for Singaporeans! It's a cultural festival only for people of it's culture! NO SHARING ALLOWED!

https://app.singaporeday.gov.sg/index.html

It was presented to Prospect Park as a day open for everyone...you just need to register. But when you register, if you AREN'T from Singapore...you get rejected! Prospect Park just realized this today, when it reminded everyone to "register" on FB, and people replied that they tried and got rejected.

It's a juicy story and I'm sure other actual "news" outlets will get the full story. I'm just passin' it on...sounds like a massive misunderstanding, OR someone tried to pull the wool over the Alliance's eyes. Here's their response as of a few moments ago, though the point is moot, cause the event's gonna sell-out the Nethermeade no problem:

Regarding the Singapore Day post below...

We are sorry for the confusion. The information we posted about registering online is incorrect. The event is open to the public when you register for the event at the event.

We are double checking the procedure for the day of the event and will let you know.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Personally I find the "closed" registration incredibly obnoxious, but hey, Singapore's a police state. I wonder if there will be a public flogging display? And don't DARE litter!

It's quite likely the event will reach capacity before you get in. If you're non-Singaporean and happen to swing by and try to attend, shoot me a note and let me know if you get in!

Cleanup, Cleanup, Everybody Cleanup

In my catbird seat over at the ol' Community Board, the Q has noted a marked uptick in the number of people actively doing something to combat messy trashy messiness in our neck of the borough. From the Mad Mommas of PLG Civic's Cleanup Days to NAMA's efforts to make Nostrand more appealing to shoppers, now FEPMA's joined the ranks and is organizing a weekend of beautification along Flatbush, from Empire to Parkside. (And the Q hopes that the many businesses just off Flatbush and along Parkside will join in as well!) For its part, the Lefferts Manor Association will be cleaning the side streets and painting flower barrels.

The full letter from FEPMA's  leaders is below. Feel free to shoot an email to executive director Delroy Wright if you'd like to know more or sign up to get some free paint for your gates or storefronts. Or just show up on the morning of April 28th or 29th from 8am at 653 Flatbush.

If you're part of a neighborhood or block association and would like to join the effort, you will be welcomed with open arms. Should be a great day to show some pride for the neighborhood and get to know your local merchants.

                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                         

April 9^th 2012                                                                               

Dear FEPMA Merchants:

On April 28^th & 29^th 2012, a neighborhood clean-up and graffiti removal will take place. The effort is spear headed by FEPMA and NAMA (Nostrand Avenue Merchant’s Association).  Two other Merchants Associations (Kingston Avenue and Utica Avenue) and the Lefferts Manor Association will also take part in this effort.  Your participation will not be a lost cause on the neighborhood.

What are we asking you to do?

• To sign up to participate. Consent form is attached.
• To clean and prepare your shutters for the repainting and graffiti removal.
•  To sweep, collect trash and wash down your store fronts
•  To remove clutter and old posters from your windows.

What will we provide you with?

•  We will provide you with paint and painting supplies such as: Paint Brushes, Rollers, Drop Cloths, Roller Frames and Paint TraysBrooms, Shovels, Rakes  and, Garbage Bags

What will we require of you?

• To prepare shutters, by cleaning over night for the next morning’s graffiti removal.
• To  provide at least one person to assist in the morning effort.
• In addition, FEPMA organizers will provide some neighborhood volunteers to assist in the effort. However, we do expect merchants’ labor in cleaning and removing the graffiti from their locations. We also request that you provide some light refreshments and snacks for the volunteers.

What is the time frame of the main effort?

• The time frame of the main effort is 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. on Saturday April 28th  and 9:00 a.m to 11:00 a.m. on Sunday April 29th 2012.

Dust-Biters: Pizza joint and Ditmas Park Blog

Neighbors seem divided about the (temporary?) loss of Mike & Tony's Pizza on Flatbush, presumably over poor health grades. But what of this joint on Parkside?

Sure the pizza was dreadful, but the location should have given it a fighting chance. It wasn't open even a year. An insider tells me that the owner of Parkside Donut Chicken Pupusa & Coffee Shop is tricking out the old pizza place so he can move his Donut/Chicken/Pupusa powerhouse into larger digs - though larger by not that much - unless a wall is planning on coming down. As to the Flatbush pizza wars, I'm back to Family Pizza, though M&T's had a miles-better crust going (when they bothered to fully cook it - which was most of the time). Slim pickin's 'round here for top-notch anything but Caribbean fare, though we DO do that better than any City north of Miami. The Q doesn't eat out enough to care that much, but it's still a mystery how Brooklyn can have literally exploded food-wise and our Hood stays blithely unawares of the culinary cacophony mere bike rides away. By the way, have you noticed that the beloved Ditmas Park Blog became the Ditmas Park Patch? Seems the founder Liena Zagare lost control of the old blog to her short-lived gig at AOL/Patch and let her popular neighborhood newser change hands and looks. Thus, she and Mary Bakija, Liena's protege and author of offshoot The Flatbush Blog, started Ditmas Park Corner to continue posting with the folksy charm that led DPB become one of the most read neighborhood webzines around. In fact, it was after reading a few days worth of DPB that the Q decided to try blogging himself. Not that I ever had any desire or business acumen to try to turn a profit, but for awhile there DPB was so successful that AOL's Patch Media hired Liena to help lead its nationwide "local news advertising strategy." How is that working out, now that 1,500 or more people are on Patch's payroll and AOL has sunk more than $150 million into it annually? Not so good - seems advertisers aren't biting, but the CEO holds fast, but most analysts say it's only time before Patch pulls the plug, leaving hundreds out of work and a whole plethora of blogs to fend for themselves. And now Liena is back running a publishing empire in Central Brooklyn. Seems fitting - she's great at it.

Does it matter? Probably not. Weirdos like the Q will probably keep blogging for fun and for reasons of civic curiosity. I just don't believe that readership will ever be large enough for small-town blogs to interest serious advertising or investment. Most of the things that made local newspapers money - ads, classifieds - are better handled by Google and Craigslist. And the news itself comes is free and easy to come by via le internet. The Q will stay non-profit and independent, because frankly I'm too lazy to hustle advertisers, and too proud to fail miserably at anything but home repairs.

That said, you should feel free to write me anytime with ideas for posts, or new businesses, or recommendations for businesses you trust. I'm @ theQ.

Speaking of Loony...

Surely you've noticed the "all night" tattoo parlor that just opened up in the basement of Envy Nails, on Flatbush tween Parkside and Clarkson on the east side? This block is fast becoming one of the zaniest in the 'hood, what with Peppa's all-night smoke-fests, Jamaican Pride's killer food but outrageously loud backyard overnight heavy machinery, Closeout Heaven's awesome but chaotic daily Algerian Bazaar, the wildly popular and vigilante-style cell phone hut (highly recommended by the Q and Mrs. Q), that Flatbush Fashion joint that no one ever shops at and the owner sits out front all day, our wonderful holdout from the pre-digital days Global Electronics, the two urban boutiques each with the name Brooklyn Finest whose owners used to be partners but now rivals, the former Gran Bwa owners sidewalk incense stand, the fabulous teensy weensy balloons 'n' parties shop Kupid's, and now a barely legal though strangely beguiling tattoo parlor that insists on leaving its metal basement gates open all night. Ladies and Gents, I give you Envy Tattoos:

Delirious New York? Try Delirious Flatbush...you just can't dream this stuff up!

Kingsboro Psychiatric to Stay Put

If don't have health insurance and were planning a lengthy nervous breakdown, good news came recently in the form of a last second reprieve for local longterm psychiatric care facility Kingsboro. Fans of the B12 know it's on Clarkson just east of the main Kings County buildings. Local lawmakers are being given credit for saving the facility from the chopping block of the current NY State budget. Forgive me if I sound cynical, but I've often wondered if said lawmakers don't allow such closings to show up in the budget, just so they can come in like white knights and save the day, knowing all along the such closure was absurd. I mean, how do you close a place like this and send dozens of seriously ill people into other crowded conditions miles away? You'd think that everyone would know a closing like this wouldn't fly, but like I said, maybe I'm drawing too many jaded conclusions.

Regardless, I've had a chance to see the NY City mental health system up close (your joke about the Q goes here, though let's just say yours truly is not the patient - this time anyway). I've come away impressed by the level of care that can come at the hands of government-financed hospitals. I mean, it's no Club Med, but given the fact that we live in a country without a coherent health care system, the uninsured at least have options, and not all of them stink. Bellevue, for instance, does a pretty good job. Kings County's short-term mental health and substance abuse inpatient building, also on Clarkson, is a major improvement on the old facility, one that regularly made the news for incompetence. Though I suspect there's still plenty of indifference in some quarters, signs point towards a major improvement. So, when shopping for loony bins, don't forget your local options.

Q's School Tool: Part 1.5: Explore Charter School - A Closer Look

In which the Q begins to go tour and meet with as many schools in the nabe as possible within the next year or so. Explore's up first, and here's why...happenstance.

The pesky thing about being a curious blogger who writes about things he's curious about is that every time said blogger learns about something, he wants to know more about it, but given the limited hours in the day he starts to feel like he's only skimming the surface of every issue, and maybe that's just how it is - only PhD's ever get the opportunity to truly understand something, and even then, they end up kickin' up more questions than they answer. And so it is with education, and in particular, the schools situation in the immediate vicinity. Lots to learn. Lots of questions. And a lot of counter-intuitive surprises.

When the Q wrote about the recently relocated Explore Charter School on Parkside Avenue and how it was taking applications for its upcoming lottery after moving from its old digs on Snyder, I got more and more curiouser about the school and its leader Morty Ballen, since he's the sort of rip-up-the-playbooks kinda guy that folks in the reform movement seem to be looking for. Then, out of the blue, Morty shoots me a note and says hi. Guess he saw the post. And we made a date to meet...at the school. So I got a tour and a talk with the founder and head of the Explore Network - all for writing a silly blog post. How awesome is that? And I thought I was just keeping a stupid journal...

Morty's great. You'd like him instantly. Informal. Genuine. No B.S. He loves helping kids learn, and he's created a positively quaint little school on the 4th Floor of a building that initially didn't exactly welcome him. You can thank the teacher's union for that. Charters rub the union the wrong way, since most charter schools are non-union, and they often compete with other public schools for space. I'll expound more on unions in a bit, but let's just say that Morty and Explore's current principal Trace Rebe have created a very comfortable medium-sized K-8 school that's teeming with smiles and good vibes. They favor co-teaching with classes of 30 so they can split up by level or have one teacher up front and the other supporting. The "office" is small too; just a couple of stern-but-sweet women who know all the kids names and probably all the parents to boot. I'm betting if you matriculated at the school you'd know everybody's name in a week-and-a-half. There's about 60 kids per grade; there's a music teacher and an art teacher. They share a decent gym and cafeteria with their co-habitater school. Some complain about how much testing kids do these days, but on the day I visited kids were happily taking individualized computer tests that had cool graphics tracked how far they'd gotten and it looked pretty much like standard in-class work to me, with a digital flair. The staff was fairly young, idealistic like the charter network itself, and Ballen stresses things like balance in teacher's lives. Probably not a bad place to work, though work they clearly do.

So what's going on here? Is it a "revolution" in education? Far from it, says Ballen. It was refreshing to hear him say that there aren't a lot of BIG new ideas in teaching. I've heard it said that great ideas get co-opted and used immediately across a spectrum of teachers, schools and leaders - it's hard to keep secrets; when something works, it gets used. Is the population at Explore different than the other public schools around here? No, not really, though you do have to have the wherewithal to sign up for the District 17-favored lottery (which happens next week) so you might end up with a slightly more motivated parent body. Students are predominantly children of children of the islands, much like the neighborhood around it. I didn't see any Asian or white kids, if that's the sort of thing that matters to you. Actually, you know who it DID matter to? There was a writer, Sonny "N.R." Kleinfeld of the NY Times who was doing a piece on the school, and he and I chatted for awhile and all he wanted to talk about was how segregated the school system was, far worse than the South pre-busing. I was shocked that someone from the Old Gray Lady would actually find this to be "news," but he seemed honestly outraged that most schools are all minority when the neighborhoods around them have been fully or partly gentrified. (I guess he's never heard of private schools? Or lying about where you live? Or hypocrisy? Or rather, he must not have kids methinks...nice guy though.)

No, no revolution happening at Explore or its sister charters. Unless by revolution you mean giving smart committed teachers the tools and support they need to succeed. During Morty's teaching days, he saw and resented the apathy and bloat that clogs the system. He was even naive enough to think that if he could start a school un-tethered to the Union's perverse systems he could just hire great teachers and press go. But in fact, a school is like a business, and it needs leadership, incentives, love (tough and soft) and even professional support in order to thrive. That's why all of the back office functions of Explore and its sister schools are handled centrally, outside the school buildings. Teachers therefore have resources - need supplies or new curriculum tools? Call headquarters. Got some cool new ideas you want to try out? Share them with the network. Need money for a new program? Call the fundraisers. Etc. Teamwork. Incentives. Flexibility. A school system WITHIN a school system.

Bottom line...go check it out for yourself. Don't rely on the Q, or Insideschools.com, or word of mouth. There's simply too much bad or parroted information out there about schools, and I for one would LOVE to have people write in to the Q with their personal experiences with schools so we can really share honestly, rather than the grab bag of quotes one hears again and again about schools, principals, teachers and the cultures that may or not still apply. Personally, I think competition is great for the massive NYC educational boondoggle. But I will say that using a lottery rather than simple neighborhood zones for the Charters has created a perverse luck element that runs counter to the idea of creating quality schools close to home, especially in troubled nabes. Districts are big! And if you want your kid to go to a school within walking distance, with his/her friends from the neighborhood, you can't count on getting in to this charter or any other, and if you do you may have to take a bus past a number of closer schools to get to your "lucky" charter. My opinion, for what it's worth, is that charters should accept locals first, perhaps from a smaller "zone", no lottery, then open it up. Not like anyone's asking me, but...the luck thing bugs me.


Then of course there are many arguments pro and con about Charter Schools, but the one argument I buy hook line and sinker is that the unions - for all the good they may provide for teachers as workers - have not been particularly good at helping make schools better for the kids. The Q's a good union-loving liberal like the rest of you, but after years of hearing teachers I trust say they too are super-frustrated with the union, you gotta wonder. When rank and file thinks the union protects bad teachers and stifles innovation, I'm thinking the union is actually working at cross-purposes. Where it gets tricky is that teachers unions, unlike, say, the Teamsters, are charged with serving a very intense deeply intimate interpersonal function in the lives of our future citizens. And they're asked to be truly creative and flexible and compassionate at every step of the way. All day every day they're helping mold the next generation, and interacting with families, sometimes in a very intense manner. So while the Teamsters Union has made life easier and more humane for the Teamsters themselves, most people don't care about the stuff of the trade - the trucks, dollies, log sheets and equipment - the way they do their own kids, who are the "stuff" of the union. Am I making any sense? I hope so, because I've been looking at this problem from a lot of angles now for quite a while, even sitting on an unsuccessful charter school board and learning the ins and outs of school budgets, curricula and work rules. I'm no expert, but I'm starting to see things a bit clearer.

What teachers need is SUPPORT, and not just like those back-saving belts that go around a UPS guy's waist. Ballen et al seem to have their focus on all the right things. The school's not too rigid, nor is it too loosey-goosey. It puts a huge emphasis on parental involvement, and it rewards teachers who show great skill and creativity. It's small enough to feel like a community, and it's facilities are reasonably sufficient to the task. Check it out. The Q is curious (as always) to hear what you think. And if you or someone you know attends the school - please share your experiences. Night, night...

Caledonian Block Ass Meeting Tomorrow Nite

All Invited!!!

~~~~~~~~~

 

 

Woodruff Avenue Block Association

&

The East 21st Street Block Association

 

Host a Joint meeting " Working Together for a Safer and Healthier Community"

 

Wednesday April 4th, @ 7:00pm

Flatbush Dutch Reform Church

Flatbush & Church Avenue

 

Special Guest

70th Precinct

plus other elected officials

 

Bring Your Hazardous Waste to the Park Day - May 6

Have some HazMats in your basement or closet? Bring 'em to Prospect Park! Not to dump them in the lake, mind you, but for a special one-day Danger Dump at Park Circle (where Parkside meets PPSW). It's May 6, 10am - 4PM rain or shine.


Old jugs of Sunny D do not technically qualify, but will be accepted just the same.

The Deets on the Dump Day.

The Q's band had a song called Hazmats and a proper nonsensical mid-90s video to go with it. Here 'tis:

Hazmats by Babe the blue OX

In Bold Move, DOT To Turn Flatbush Into Pedestrian Mall

As the Q mentioned back in February, DOT is in the midst of a major study of the Flatbush corridor many of us call "Main Street" or the Flabenue. After discussing the major issues, including suicidal Dollar Vans, rampant double-parking, lawlessness at intersections and psychotic jaywalking, both DOT and the Mayor's Office on European-Style Civic Improvements (MOESCI) have decided to cut their losses and completely ban automobiles from Empire to Church. Below, the agency's CGI rendering shows what they have in mind:

While palm trees may seem out-of-context now, DOT officials note that within five-ten years time winters and freezes will be a thing of the past, making tropical flora the go-to choice for northeastern urban planners. Spokeperson Cameron Carswell says "Most commercial buildings will opt for adobe construction, and Spanish-style architecture will dominate NYC south of the Bronx and Northern Queens, both of which will likely opt for a more North African, or Moorish, approach."

The Q is uncharacteristically speechless and writeless. I'm all for change...but couldn't we just put a couple of traffic cameras in for starters?