SHORT SHORTS:

BY STAR-REVUE STAFF

Cemetery News

This upcoming season, Green-Wood will once again present a range of opportunities for visitors of all ages to learn, to discover, and to enjoy. We’re bringing back all our perennial favorites—Nightfall, Open Doors, and Spirited Strolls—but also introducing some new experiences, from captivating tours to compelling conversations in death education. You can learn about all of the events and programs—and register—at www.greenwood.com/calendar.

Among the highlights on GreenWood’s fall calendar:

On Sunday, September 24th, GreenWood presents Open Doors, a selfguided tour where visitors can step into the secrets of the past by exploring some of the Cemetery’s most impressive and elaborate nineteenthcentury mausoleums. This is the one day a year when visitors can learn the mysteries of mausoleums usually closed to the public.

The Concerts in the Catacombs series, curated by acclaimed experimental singer and songwriter Gelsey Bell, returns on Wednesday, October 4th and Thursday, October 5th, with Anaïs Maviel, a vocalist and composer who combines traditional and experimental approaches to investigate the transformative power of music. Through song, choral and instrumental music, and creative staging, Maviel navigates sound and speech rooted in oral traditions.

The story of BWAC

The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC) is celebrating its 45th year. What began with a handful of artists in DUMBO/Vinegar Hill in 1978 is now an artist-run nonprofit organization operating the BWAC Gallery on the Red Hook waterfront. BWAC has been a resilient presence in the Brooklyn arts community for four decades, including after the extreme conditions imposed by Superstorm Sandy and more recently, Covid. The original group of artists negotiated with landlords to put on exhibitions in vacant spaces in DUMBO. Within the first few years, the group had successfully installed exhibitions in what was, at the time, raw space at 68 Jay Street, then 20 Jay Street. The early exhibition spaces had no amenities, and no electricity.

By 1980, BWAC was hosting annual outdoor sculpture shows at the Empire Fulton Ferry State Park. The small group of artists had grown and gained a reputation for staging large-scale events. BWAC continued presenting outdoor sculpture shows in the park alongside the Brooklyn Bridge for more than a decade.

In 1992, the original founders were in contact with Greg O'Connell, president of the O'Connell Organization. Mr. O'Connell generously invited the group to exhibit in Red Hook, so since vacant real estate in DUMBO was beginning to disappear, BWAC made the move. In the first few years, exhibitions were held in different locations along Van Brunt and Beard Streets, with the common denominator of being within the waterfront buildings owned or managed by the O'Connell Organization.

It was a few years later when BWAC settled into its current location at 481 Van Brunt Street, a Civil Warera warehouse built in 1869. BWAC manages 25,000 sq. ft. of art exhibition space on two floors. Mary Bullock, a long-time member artist who came to BWAC in the beginning of the 2000s, recalled when she first came to the gallery. "They told me to be sure I was out of the area by 5 pm," said Ms. Bullock. Red Hook was a rough and tumble neighborhood decades before BWAC moved in, but the times were changing. Soon Fairway Supermarket and IKEA would make the area a destination for New Yorkers who rarely crossed Hamilton Avenue, separating the waterfront neighborhood from the rest of Brooklyn.

To mark this auspicious occasion, BWAC is hosting three exhibitions at the BWAC Gallery — Reunion: Celebrating Artist Members Past and Present; Color, a national juried exhibition; and Visions of Glass, a solo exhibition by featured artist Renee Radenberg, opening at the Red Hook gallery on Saturday, September 9 from 1-6 pm. BWAC president Alicia Degener states, "We've been able to bring the artwork of more than 25,000 artists to an appreciable audience over the past 45 years, and our tradition continues on September 9th."

Visit BWAC for a real art experience in a setting overlooking the Statue of Liberty that is second to none.

A scholarly take on the Gowanus shitshow

We received an online comment from Jerome Krase. He said: Some readers might be interested in “Symbolic Icons: Conflicting Visions of the Gowanus Canal” from Lenape to Gentry. This is an article he recently published in Urbanities – Journal of Urban Ethnography and can be accessed online here: bit.ly/3sw2SLV

From Wikipedia: Jerome Krase is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Murray Koppelman School of Business.Professor at School of Humanities and Social sciences. President of European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

He is an expert in sociology and gentrification, ethnic groups and ItalianAmerican politics, especially in Brooklyn and its neighborhoods, culture, class, urban life, Urban culture, ethnicity and race in New York City. This begins his article:

The four-hundred-year history of Brooklyn, New York, has provided opportunities to observe many conflicts and competitions over how neighbourhoods are symbolically presented and represented which significantly affect the lives of local residents and businesses. In recent years, conflicts and competitions over representation have resulted in heated public discourse such as over historical place names, and monuments. One of the most contentious of these discourses has been about gentrification and displacement in and around the Gowanus Canal. Over the centuries the area has changed from a primitive uninhabited marshland to its current actively developing urban neighbourhood. In each epoch, changes have been captured in images, and those images have impacted the area itself.

Creating the Public Advocate was a big mistake

A recent call by NYC Councilmembers Robert Holden and Democrat Kalmany Yeger to abolish the Office of Public Advocate makes $ense. Too bad a future voter referendum was not placed on the 2023 General Election ballot to abolish the Office of Public Advocate. Any public opinion poll can tell you that the average citizen believes taxpayers would be better off if this useless office was abolished. It has only provided temporary employment for past Public Advocates Mark Green, Betsy Gotbaum, Bill de Blasio, Letitia James and currently Jumaane Williams. All have previously used this office as a stepping stone to run for higher office, either Mayor or State Attorney General. Only Ms. Gotbaum was unsuccessful in staying on the public payroll. Mr. Williams is all but an announced candidate for Mayor in 2025.

All engaged in a non stop series of press conferences, news releases, issuance of various reports, letters to the editor, guest columns in newspapers and publicity stunts for years. I’m not aware that Williams is on any terrorist watch list. Yet his office comes with the perks of a taxpayer funded police security detail and private driver. Why not use public transportation to get around town like millions of his constituents do? He resides on the Fort Hamilton Brooklyn Military Base. All of this was at taxpayers’ expense to raise their respective name identification with voters and grease the wheels for running for another public office. NYC has a $107 billion budget with over 300,000 employees. This is greater than most states and many nations. Members of each 59 community planning boards, their district managers along with every municipal agency provide better customer service to residents that the Public Advocate. The same is true for NYC Council members, Boro Presidents and City Comptroller. They periodically conduct audits of municipal agencies. The Office of Public Advocate just duplicates these functions with taxpayers paying twice for the same service. No one would notice if the Office of Public Advocate was abolished. Life for NYC residents would go on without any significant adverse impact. Funding for the Office of Public Advocate would be better spent on more critical municipal services such as transportation, police, fire, sanitation, or education.—

Larry Penner

Our amazing article

We the residents of 63 Tiffany Place would like to thank you for this amazing article. For more information and updates on our situation we’d like to invite you and your readers to our website, http://www.Save63Tiffany. com

Working NYers who have paid their rent for the last 30 years, even through a pandemic, and have been good residents, should never be forced out of their homes. Forced into homelessness just so a multi-multimillionaire sitting in his mansion in Long Island can make a few more millions. This is wrong. People that moved in in 30s, 40s & 50s are now in their 60s, 70s and 80s , and we even have a 92 year old couple who fought in the Korean War, where will they go now? Many are now retirees, sick and disabled, etc.. Shouldn’t they be allowed to live out their final years in the homes they’ve lived n for decades,, in dignity?

This fight is bigger than us. This is a fight for housing justice. This is a fight for all working NYers who are slowly being priced out of our beloved city. Please join us in this fight.

Thank you for your time and consideration.—John Leyva

More on Gowanus

Gowanus has lost its charm and no one talks anymore about the EPA cleaning up the canal. Now developers are building low income housing (what angels they are) on top of toxic land where people should not live. It’s all so corrupt and soulless. .— Michael

Leaders, though not to the delegates; it was posted on a website, without any publicity, and those who asked the party where they could obtain a copy were ignored, though the Party did send out a press release congratulating itself on the report, which it refused to distribute, hailing it as a major move for transparency.

This report contained some concerning observations, in particular about possible bias by one of the judges ultimately nominated. Strangely enough, it was the “Roe” judge, although one wouldn’t know that from the subsequent media coverage, which ignored these allegations entirely.

When excerpts concerning this were emailed to some leaders, this was mostly condemned as unsporting, the Party position apparently being that it was a great report, but that no one should actually read it, and few actually did.

So, the only report that counted was that of the screening panel, which only sets a floor. Beyond that, the “process” is most analogous to a bazaar, with elements of the bizarre.

Bargains and tradeoffs are the coins of the realm, and like any seemingly foreign and daunting process, it sometimes helps to retain the services of sherpas. In Manhattan, this has practically become a cottage industry, while in Brooklyn, it is neither the exception nor the rule.

So, for a few months, party functionaries barely known outside the professional political class are courted and feted, and become the recipients of calls by Rabbis, ministers, community leaders and donors in a process as transparent as an unventilated hookah bar. Deals are sometimes literally made over whiskey in the backroom of a clubhouse following a cigar party. Is this any way to pick judges?

Well, it is pluralistic. Although some years, like 2023, produce tickets that are disproportionately white, and others, like 2022, produce tickets than are disproportionately African-American, over the years things tend to even out, and generally, the conventions, while still underrepresenting Latinos and Asians, generally do better than primary elections in producing a court that looks like the Borough. And reformers have real influence on the process; their caucus endorsed five candidates for the six open slots, and all those candidate won.

But can we do better?

Reformers”, in this instance, divide neatly between those who seek to implement “merit selection”, i.e, making the judicial selection process less democratic (by eliminating elections), and those who want to make the selection process more so (by having real ones).

At the Supreme Court level, the current process combines the evils of both systems with the virtues of neither. Some “reformers” will settle for either extreme against the present muddled middle, and I have to concede that even selecting names from a hat or casting lots at Purim time would probably eliminate some of the current system’s flaws.

What then?

Appointive systems have traditionally underrepresented minority groups, though this has been getting some- what better over time, at least when it is Democrats who have been doing the appointing. But having the Governor appoint all Supreme Court judges is likely going to produce courts a good deal more “white shoe” than most who call themselves reformers in today’s Brooklyn might desire, as well as courts a good deal more conservative in those years when then GOP obtains the Governorship, which will inevitably occur.

While a better way is not readily apparent, there are some suggestions that won’t necessarily improve things. Many of today’s reformers are now proposing to improve the conventions by making sure they are no longer a sham, empowering the delegates to make the actual choices. This would have the detrimental effect of making the power of the screening panel merely advisory and adherence to them voluntary.

And, beyond that, let’s be clear; you don’t fix the judicial convention process by empowering the delegates (who will still mostly be handpicked by the same district leaders); that’s like trying to fix the Presidential election process by empowering the electors. The way you fix the convention process is by eliminating the conventions. We need to pass a law.

In the meantime, I’m not necessarily objecting to folks trying to beat the fix, and use the floor to install different nominees (provided they are better nominees) The allocation of delegates better reflects where Democratic voters lives than the party’s Exec Committee does, and real fights are potentially good fun.

Just don’t call that “Reform.”

Personally, I’d like to overhaul judicial election completely; elect judges from smaller, equal size districts, about the size of an Assembly District, which would ensure better representation of the Boroughs various constituencies, and I’d combine that with retention elections for incumbents, ensuring that, once elected, judges can be less political.

If we are to elect judges, let’s actually elect them.