The Brooklyn Ink

Red Hook Plays the Muse for Acclaimed Novelist

By Keith Olsen
Red Hook was once a place where men disappeared into black cars with drivers hired by the mob, boys hit Spaldeens that bounced between cobblestones, the docks teemed with longshoremen, and a tall metal pyramid, where sugar was refined, loomed in the background.
Stories have long been told about the harbor community, from [...]

Urban Farming Sinks Roots in East New York

By Matthew Kelly
Standing over her garden, Joyce Dixon leaned down to weed the soil, tending to her patch of young tomato plants. The summer air was thick and sticky with 90-degree heat. Dixon stood up to wipe the dark skin of her brow, she shook the dirt off her t-shirt and gave a [...]

Talking and Listening Across Crown Heights’ Dividing Line

By Kelly Boyce
Monica Parfait, a 16-year-old immigrant from Haiti who attends Paul Robeson High School in Crown Heights, had never met any member of the neighborhood’s large Jewish population until Herb Weitz.  A secular Jew aged 76, Weitz entertained Monica with stories of his rebellious childhood, telling her how he and his friends used to [...]

A Neighborhood’s Weathered Field Gets an Overhaul

By Jennifer Jenkins
When the batter popped a fly ball toward right field, Larry Glick, alert and ready in the outfield, was pretty sure he had a handle on it. And on any other diamond he might have made an easy catch. But playing on the Leif Ericson Park baseball field, Glick lost sight of the [...]

Transit Cuts Strand Brooklyn’s Elderly

By Keith Olsen
Rita Pellicano, a lifelong resident of Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, regularly took the B71 bus: to see her doctor, to go shopping on Smith Street, to attend social events. She only had to wait for it to come, and then get on and off at the right stops.  Now, the B71 line has [...]

Working Last Summer, Jobless This One, A Brooklyn Teen Embodies A Citywide Crisis

By Kristofer Ríos
Last summer Mahmoud Farraj worked his first job as an assistant engineer at Lutheran Medical Center through the Summer Youth Employment Program. The 15-year-old, who lives in a small Sunset Park apartment with his parents and three siblings, enjoyed working because he had money to buy the latest video games without depending on [...]

Sidewalk Soccer Becomes An Unlikely Ecuadorian Tradition

By Sharyn Jackson
When Christian Alvarez moved to Brooklyn in 1999 at the age of 18, he missed the food, the language and the culture he left behind in Ecuador. His brother Carlos Alvarez, who had emigrated here seven years earlier, had the cure. He brought Christian to a stretch of broken sidewalk outside a school [...]

Marina Plan Roils the Waters in Sheepshead Bay

By Shlomo Friedman
On a scorching day in July, it was easy to see why Misim Fortanov thinks the Breakers development on Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay is the best place to live in Brooklyn.  Even as the rest of the city was sweltering under 95-degree heat, the deck by the Breakers, facing the [...]

Cooking Up Unity in Crown Heights

By Danielle Hester
When Betty Bogan opened the front door of her mother’s apartment for 17-year-old Mushky Bruck, the aroma of fried chicken flowing from the kitchen struck Bruck’s nose. As she continued down the narrow hallway that led to the kitchen, the portraits of Bogan’s southern African-American family, draped on the walls, created a welcoming [...]

On a Dusty Gridiron in Brownsville, Football is the Mo Better Path

By Laura Marsan
On a hot June evening on the track of Betsy Head Park in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Coach Chris Legree spotted a 15-year-old boy running toward him without a cotton undershirt beneath his purple football jersey. “You need cotton to absorb the sweat,” Legree said, his voice rising above the elevated [...]