Last week, an uproar ignited on a discussion forum for Prospect Heights parents, where mothers complained about pushy ice cream vendors in parks and playgrounds. Now, the vendors are pointing fingers at one another too.

Kazi Uddin, a native of Bangladesh, had his New York City Department of Parks and Recreation sticker prominently displayed on his cart, certifying that he is a licensed food vendor.

“This costs my boss $8,000,” he said, gesturing toward the decal.

A simmering resentment from one ice cream vendor to the next is brewing in Prospect Park, and it all has to do with a sticker – or the absence of one. More than tempting kids with sinful treats or causing temper tantrums, some ice cream vendors have a problem with unlicensed vendors underselling them on the price.

Uddin, who sells ice cream and hot dogs on the corner of 7^th Street and Prospect Park West, is still bristling over the unlicensed pushcart vendor who had left the vicinity nearly a half hour earlier. He says illegal vendors, who sell basic flavors from pushcarts, do not pay the licensing fee and can get away with only charging $1 for ice cream, while his cheapest item is $2, and up to $4 for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream bars.

While 83 percent of an estimated 10,000 unlicensed vendors in New York City are immigrants, according to Street Vendor Project and the Urban Justice Center,  they are also well represented among the regulated vendors. Brandishing a Good Humor rocket ship to his next little customer, Uddin said he immigrated to the United States on a green card lottery eight years ago and recently obtained his U.S. citizenship.  He does not understand why some other immigrants are not obeying the law.

“They just come here and say, $1, $1 for ice cream!” Uddin said, virtually stealing customers from under his nose.

Rebecca Ellis / The Brooklyn Ink

Vickie Karp, spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, says that licensed vendors, once they obtain their permit to vend in the park, have to sign a five-year contract acknowledging that the Department of Parks and Recreation can not take full responsibility for illegal vendors.  “We clearly state that there could be competition around you,” she explained.

Aside from paying the Department of Health a total of about $300 in fees for a two-day food safety course, as well as for the required ID. In addition to the initial DCA fees, prospective vendors have to solicit a license to sell anything in New York City’s parks. These licenses are limited and there is no price ceiling on the bid. Once a vendor has a license, he or she can operate several stands in different parks.

“The fees are for a public service,” Karp said.

Karp explained that the bids, valid for five years, can reach multiples of thousands because  the department auctions a limited number of vending licenses and issues the license to the highest bidder. But with unemployment rates doubling for native-born and immigrant New Yorkers alike since 2008, foregoing a license and selling wares ad hoc and on the cheap in parks and in the streets may become an even more attractive option – for both vendors and customers.

Although the parks service has mobile crews that monitor children’s playgrounds, Karp emphasizes that illegal ice cream vending is a law enforcement issue, especially on playgrounds, where adults unaccompanied by a child are not allowed to enter. Karp explained that enforcing far-reaching measures to curb illegal ice cream vendors on all 1,800 of New York City’s playgrounds would be a huge expense for taxpayers.

Added to the expense of enforcement, the fines are hard to collect.  New York City has collected only $900,000 out of the $15.8 million in fines levied in 2009, while spending $7.4 million on enforcement, according to a New York City Independent Budget Office report in 2010.

“It’s for those very screaming mothers. We should be fixing the swings for when their kids are not eating ice cream,” Karp said. “But if there are complaints, we would love to have a chance to answer them.”

Meanwhile, the hidden ice cream war in Prospect Park continues. Uddin pointed toward the next park entrance in front of the playground on the corner of 9th Street, about two blocks away.

“That’s where he headed,” he said, referring to the “pushcart vendor” he had recently spotted nearby.

Stationed at the entrance to the playground, the no-frills ice cream vendor was handing a small cluster of kids vanilla cones and accepting crumpled up dollar bills in return. The vendor, who spoke both English and Spanish, did not want to give his name.

“I do not want to talk,” he said. “I respect your job, please respect mine.”

Rebecca Ellis / The Brooklyn Ink

CORRECTION: All food vendors, including ice cream trucks, need a Health license.  They do not need a DCA license.

Photo: msnbc.com

CNBC’S Mad Money host and frequent Squawk Box guest commentator, Jim Cramer is well known for his savvy insights, investing know-how and feverish financial stock rants. His latest hot tip:  pump money into Brooklyn housing.

Cramer surprised fellow Squwak Box anchors Wednesday when he voiced his belief that the housing market in Brooklyn was the best poised to bounce back across the city. As the market slowly starts its uptick from the recession, Brooklyn will become one of the most valuable place for housing investors, Cramer claimed.

Calls to Cramer were not returned, but a quick look at last quarter house price indexes across the area does indeed seem to support the analyst’s predictions. Average price per square foot for Brooklyn was $328 at the end of the first quarter of 2012, a decrease of 5.5 percent compared to the same period last year, real estate web site Trulia.com reported. “The median sales price for homes in Brooklyn for Dec 11 to Feb 12 was $512,012 based on 1,443 home sales. Compared to the same period one year ago, the median home sales price increased 0.8 percent, or $4,012, and the number of home sales increased 2.4 percent,” it claims.

“There are currently 8,782 resale and new homes in Brooklyn on Trulia, including 498 open houses, as well as 4,584 homes in the pre-foreclosure, auction, or bank-owned stages of the foreclosure process,” the site reports.

The average listing price for homes for sale was $650,112 for the week ending Mar 21, which represents a decrease of 1.1 percent, or $7,162, compared to the prior week. The most popular neighborhoods in Brooklyn include Bedford – Stuyvesant and Park Slope, with average listing prices of $483,543 and $962,827.

Statistics conclude that Brooklyn is teeming with youngsters looking for bigger spaces at relatively cheaper prices, but recently the Brooklynite trend seems to be pushing prices in the other direction: Grand Theft Auto star Dan Houser, for example, purchased Truman Capote’s mansion – valued at $12.4 million – in Brooklyn Heights last week, The Observer reported. In an article published earlier this week, The Huffington Post  also claimed that Sarah Jessica Parker and husband Mathew Broderick are reportedly hoping to combine two adjacent homes to construct a 7,000 square-foot mansion on State Street near Sidney Place.

Real estate websites such as trulia.com advertise current housing trends around the borough. For a listing of house prices per distrct in the area, visit their website.

Restaurants offer excellent deals on multi-course meals during "Dine-in Brooklyn." (Sarah Munir/The Brooklyn Ink)

In today’s slow-paced economy, getting a three-course lunch for approximately $20 and a dinner deal for $25 may seem almost too good to be true. But that is the idea behind the 10-day “Dine-in Brooklyn” that boasts 195 restaurants and cafes offering bargain meals.

Food connoisseurs can enjoy cuisines from all over the world, including juicy burgers, cheesy gnocchi, grilled hiramasa and spicy Indian curry.

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz started “Dine-in Brooklyn” after 9/11 as a way to assist businesses in tough economic conditions. Now, it also serves as a great marketing tool, driving traffic from all across New York to Brooklyn.

“We want to publicize and promote Brooklyn’s restaurant scene, not only to Brooklynites but outsiders as well,” said Jon Paul Lupo, director of communications at Markowitz’s office. Lupo also boasted that the restaurant week, now in its ninth year, has grown to be the biggest in New York City.

Mathieu Reboul, owner of Cadaques, an 18-month-old tapas bar in Williamsburg, estimates the increase in customers to his restaurant at approximately 25 percent.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Maslanka, executive chef at 67 Burger, who is participating in Dine-in Brooklyn for the first time, sees the deals as a way to show “customer appreciation.” 67 Burger, a classic burger joint, has reworked its menu to meet the criterion of multi-course meals for Dine-in Brooklyn.

“Previously, we didn’t participate because our menu didn’t fit the traditional multiple-course criteria. But seeing the benefits of the venture over the years, we decided to innovate and tailor something specifically for this,” Maslanka explained.

The burger joint’s $20 dine-in lunch special, which includes two sandwiches or salads, regular French fries, two soft drinks and two ice cream sundaes, would cost approximately $26 on a regular day. The prices are reduced to attract more customers and compensate restaurants for lower margins through a larger volume of sales, according to Lupo, Markowitz’s communications director.

But Mimmo Capiello, owner of Baci & Abbracci, a 6-year-old Italian eatery that has participated in Dine-in Brooklyn every year since it started, is of a different opinion.

“We do it because we can afford to do it. No business owner would take part in anything that incurs him losses.”

Capiello explained that he can’t offer steak or veal to his customers with the pricing structure, but he can offer an equally tasty palette of chicken or pasta. He also emphasized that the lower prices do not mean a compromise on the quality of food or ingredients.

Lailah Mejnoon and Roberto Gravitae, Manhattan residents who occasionally go to Williamsburg for shopping, are not particularly excited about the week. According to Gravitae, the prices are not as great as they seem at a glance, especially if the restaurants are not offering organic food.

“Most of the non-organic food that food joints sell are mass produced in third world countries at one quarter of the price. So unless, these places are offering organic food, I don’t think the prices are that great,” Gravitae said.

Lisa Fontaine, a graduate student and food fanatic living in Williamsburg who is experiencing the week for the second time, disagrees. She thinks that the affordable prices encourage customers to be more adventurous with their choices.

“It is not pleasant having to pay a huge bill for something that you might hate,” Fonatine said, “but with $25 you can take that risk.”

Tumbador Chocolates ready for the Easter holidays. (Jessica Hartogs/The Brooklyn Ink.)

It’s nearing the end of the day at Tumbador Chocolates, and most of the workers have gone home. Only a couple employees remain to wash up the chocolate covered pots and pans; the scent of chocolate wafts through the air as you walk up the four steep flights of stairs of 34, 34th Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Inside, rows and rows of little chocolate bunnies and chickens solidify in the cooling room, ready for Easter.

“I was a 100 pounds lighter when I started here,” laughs Chester Almonor, a sales associate at Tumbador Chocolate, as he gives a tour of the factory.

The 26-employee company makes those fancy handcrafted chocolates you find on pillows at the Pierre, Setai, Mark, Mandarin Oriental and Trump International hotels, to name but a few.

But this isn’t just a typical chocolate factory. Since Michael Altman and Jean-Francois Bonnet, a former pastry chef at the three Michelin-star restaurant, Daniel, opened Tumbador in 2005, they have hired about 60 employees through programs that rehabilitate ex-convicts into society.

And Bonnet admits, although the two partners are committed to giving back something to society, sometimes the process has not been easy.

“You would send someone on delivery, and because they have the freedom of having a car, they would slip up and go hang out with friends,” said Bonnet, “We had one guy who was threatening the other one he was working with, saying, ‘I want to see my friends in the Bronx and if you say anything, I’ll kick your butt.’”

However, Bonnet and his partner stuck with the idea. “Just because you were 14, you killed someone, it doesn’t mean you are a rotten apple,” Bonnet said.  “You were bad at that time and now you’ve learned.”

Chester Almonor in his office at Tumbador Chocolates. (Jessica Hartogs/The Brooklyn Ink.)

That’s the philosophy of both men: giving people like Chester Almonor a second chance.

And Almonor is grateful for this opportunity, after spending 16-and-a-half years in prison. Asked what he was incarcerated for, he says, matter of factly, “Murder.”

Almonor started working for Tumbador as a driver making $8 an hour, earning less than $20,000 for the year. He was quickly promoted to maintenance manager and then as the assistant to the vice-president of marketing.

He’s now a sales associate, a position that requires he reaches out to new clients and confirms existing ones. He makes above $60,000 a year.

“Not bad for someone who was in jail five – six years ago,” said Bonnet.

Brooklyn-born Almonor was released from jail in 2008. Upon his release, Almonor approached the Fortune Society, an organization that helps people integrate with society, who told him about a driver position at Tumbador Chocolate.

“The next day [that] I was released, I went to get a license back,” said Almonor. “Lots of people try to get rich quick, and it puts them into a cycle, and they keep going back [to jail]. They don’t know that it’s better to get a job.”

Not that it was easy for him however.

“It was a little difficult, re-adjusting to a 9-5, but for me, prior to being incarcerated, I was working, and paying taxes, and voting, so I had a structure,” he said.

“It was just [about] re-adjusting to how times have changed and not trying to play catch-up with what I missed. It was just taking it from that day forward,” added Almonor.

A couple dines at the Burger Guru in Williamsburg Sunday night. The restaurant hopes that the customers it gained during the football season will keep coming back. (Scott Eidler/The Brooklyn Ink)

So, the Super Bowl is over. What’s a burger joint, a bar, or a wing place to do?

The Giants’ victory last week not only capped off a successful playoff run, but also a very busy few months for Brooklyn bars and restaurants. Now, owners are looking to keep up some of the momentum.

On Super Bowl Sunday at the Burger Guru in Williamsburg, “the whole place was packed,” recalls Tommy Arvanitidis, one of the joint’s owners. It offered a special – $40 of limitless wings and beer on tap – that filled both its main dining area and a larger indoor backyard with 85 sports fans.

But a week later, the place appeared noticeably emptier in the late afternoon, with under a dozen diners at the restaurant seated (the owners blamed the cold weather, and football burnout for the slow day). “The Super Bowl did bring us a lot of fans and a lot of customers,” said Arvanitidis. “But it doesn’t mean that the fans and customers we made over the football season won’t continue coming back.”

To make up for the football crowd, the Burger Guru plans to rely not only on special holiday deals, like a candlelit dinner with burgers, fries, and a milkshake for two on Valentine’s Day tomorrow, but a menu overhaul to boot. The owners are getting into the brunch business, putting the finishing touches on a new menu that premieres next Sunday.

For the Burger Guru, and other restaurants and bars, the Super Bowl is more of an occasion to showcase itself than cash in. The profit margin, explained a manager, is smaller on the specials than if people were to order them separately. “It wasn’t to make money, because we didn’t,” said Arvanitidis.

He isn’t the only one who believes specials aren’t necessarily moneymakers. Felice Kirby, who owns Teddy’s Bar and Grill in Williamsburg, also says major sporting events aren’t always profitable for bars, since beverages are often discounted. “People don’t actually spend that much money because you give them drink specials,” explains Kirby. But she adds, “The football season being over is sad for the Monday night bartender.”

Yet hyping Super Bowl specials may have worked as a long-term strategy for other nearby restaurants. At Wingstop Brooklyn, a three-month old restaurant downtown, shift leader Shonda Maton said specials for the big game, which included a pre-order option, and a 30 percent discount off menu items, brought a steady stream of new customers.

For the week after “It was a lot of people coming in that we had never seen before,” said Maton. “I’ll bet the Super Bowl really turned us around.”

Though she predicts that Sundays will be less busy, it may mean that the restaurant can save on variable costs such as extra hands on deck to serve customers. “We won’t need as much staff and we don’t have to use as much,” she says. “We won’t have an incident where we don’t have enough chicken.”

Meanwhile, the Burger Guru might have a new draw: basketball “It’s not just football,” says Arvantidis. “We’ve got the Knicks.” Then he started chanting, “Lin, Lin, Lin,” referring to the NBA’s latest phenomena Jeremy Lin, the Knicks point guard who after successful starts last week has breathed new life into the struggling team.

However, the Knicks’ turnaround may not translate into success for many Brooklyn bars. A cable dispute between Time Warner and MSG has resulted in a Knicks blackout for Time Warner subscribers, like Teddy’s Bar and Grill.

Felice Kirby, Teddy’s owner, says it’s too early in the season to tell whether losing the Knicks will affect business, but she suspects it will. “We lost something that helps us,” she said.

Steven Thompson and his studio's color (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

I | Art, To Start

Locust Hill, South Carolina is not a town. The small community on the outskirts of Greenville has a population barely large enough to register on a Google map. There are two roads and one lake. There are houses, but not many of them. Steven Thompson spent his first 18 years along these winding narrow roads, where everybody knew everybody, and nothing seemed to change.

Then one day he opened his front door and walked out. Destination: Clemson University. There were massive libraries there – appropriate, for someone intent on majoring in literature. They had a football team – Thompson was a huge fan. But one month in, still fresh in his dorm, his journey began to slow. Feelings obscured. Anxiety set in. On his own for the first time, Thompson broke down.

“Everything just became so bizarre to me…things were fundamentally without understanding,” he says today, fiddling with the wheels of a toy skateboard in his cluttered Williamsburg studio. “I don’t think I’m an artist BECAUSE of the nervous breakdown, but it definitely helped.”

Indeed, it took Thompson five years (and a transfer to the College of Charleston) before he took his first studio art class – a one-month short course on printmaking. He spent those five years as a pendulum. Sometimes a recluse, sometimes gregarious. Always, though, with a deep, unabiding, and simply unexplainable internal pain.

Slowly, tentatively, Thompson applied oil paint to plexiglass for his first project. His inner dialogue, still turbulent years after his Clemson episode, began to calm. Each brush stroke brought Thompson closer to secret places in the deep recesses of his person. Each color sang to him. In art, he could get lost in discovery. Thompson took a deep breath.

“You could say ‘I’m going to walk out this door and go into the city. I plan to go to a bar. I hope to meet my friend.’ But when the day comes around, you never know,” he says. “You could walk out the door and get smacked down by a car, and you’re gone forever.”

“When I sit down to make a work of art, it’s kind of like I’m stepping out of my door. I don’t really know what is going to happen. I have an idea of where I want to go, but I don’t know exactly where I’m going to end up.”

20 years after his first class, and it’s others who discover Thompson. They see him at galleries in New York City. In Georgia. In North Carolina. And on a cold December day, a former exotic dancer from Austin, Texas will walk into Oslo Coffee Roasters in Brooklyn and discover Thompson herself.

Merget, Ben, and the bean machine (Alexander Abnos/The Brooklyn Ink)

II | Brooklyn’s Roaster

Downtown Williamsburg may be a brick-and-mortar neighborhood, but glass and metal are beginning to loom large. Their smooth, silvery surfaces provide the facade for many an upscale condo building popping up in the area, monuments to gentrification for a community in flux.

Things begin to change to the north and west of McCarren Park. Here, glass shards powder the streets, lined with nothing but warehouses. A faint rumble emerges from one building on the corner, with chipping grey paint and a creaking front door. Motorcycle logos plaster the outer wall, appearing faded in the afternoon sun. Inside, mountains of dead metal and tools lie scattershot throughout the concrete floors. The rumble loudens. It smells like morning. In a side room, a door slides open, and within a single step you find yourself at the epicenter of one of Brooklyn’s most successful independent coffeehouses.

“Coffee always changes. It’s never the same,” says J.D. Merget, the founder and owner of Oslo Coffee Roasters. He has to raise his voice to be heard above the din of the roaster, currently cooking beans from a far away land. “It has a life at each stage. It has a life when it comes to us, it has a life when it’s roasted, and it has a life when it’s been brewed. It’s constantly evolving…or devolving, as the case may be.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is the roaster itself. The model in Oslo’s partition of this warehouse was made in the early 1980s, but the design has not been fundamentally altered since the early 20th century. Encased in dark red metal, a giant barrel rhythmically revolves. The coffee beans inside tumble like laundry, visible only through a tiny porthole on the front of the machine. Temperature and timing are paramount here. Cook the beans one second too long, one degree too hot, and the taste will suffer. Merget periodically removes a small metal bar from the front of the machine. It contains a sample of the beans within. Placing it near his nose, he inhales deeply. Not quite time yet.

Merget tuned in to this process some time ago. Formerly head of quality control and roasting at Kobricks Coffee in New Jersey, he started Oslo in 2003 at the insistence of his wife Kathy. The rationale for their shops location – on Roebling and Metropolitan in Williasmburg – was simple. It was cheap. Soon they found other advantages.

“It used to be you couldn’t get me to cross the bridge and visit my friends in Williamsburg. Now you can’t get me to cross the opposite way and go to Manhattan,” he says. “That happened pretty quick. Once we opened the store it was just like ‘What were we doing? This is such a great neighborhood.’”

Merget takes a sip of a new brew. This time, from the tiny African country of Burundi. Placing his nose inside the small glass tester cup, he inhales a sweet, floral bouquet. Taking a sip, the sensation turns to tart grapefruits, a short pause, and a finish of burnt sugar and tobacco. He nods approvingly, sets the cup down, and waits. In five minutes, he says, this same cup of coffee will taste noticeably different.

“The neighborhood is constantly changing, too,” he says. “It’s not what it was 10 years ago. It went from a sleepy little town that swelled on the weekends with visitors to the hustle and bustle of New York City.”

What has always remained, though, are the residents and their stories. When he started Oslo, Merget worked behind the counter all day, six days a week. He met customers from all walks of life, all pursuing their passions just like him. He got to know them. What they do. How they think. Where they’re going, and where they’ve been.

“At some point,” he says, “Brooklyn became this machine that attracts more and more and more creative people.”

The time has come. In one fell swoop, Ben (Oslo’s roaster operator) opens the door to the machine’s barrel, allowing an avalanche of steaming hot coffee beans to land on the platform below. Through air holes on the surface of the sifter, steam is sucked out while mechanical arms stir and jostle wave after wave of beans.

Merget observes this and takes another sip of the now-lukewarm Burundi coffee. The grapefruit is still there, but less pronounced. The pause between start and finish extends at least twice as long as it did previously. The taste experience ends with a new, flowery finish. In short, it tastes like a completely different cup of coffee.

“Ultimately, [the community] is simple,” he says. “It’s like-minded people coming together because we have passions and Brooklyn has the facilities for us to do what we want to do.”

A lever is pulled, and the now-cooled beans fall through a trap door in the roaster and into a grey plastic trash can. Another machine will sift through the beans to remove any rocks or debris that could ruin the grinders. Within a day, they’ll be up for sale in brown paper bags.

Brown bags and business (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

III | Fashion and Function

The acid-washed denim vest needed some spicing up. That’s all Nayantara Banerjee knew. It needed flash. Pizazz. Style. Something feminine and eye-catching. Something fit for a Barbie doll. Because that’s exactly what the vest was.

“It was basically just a tube of fabric,” Banerjee says of the doll’s garment, the subject of the first sewing project she ever completed. Using a needle, thread, and advice from her mother, Banerjee added lime green lace trim to the collar and arm holes. She was six years old.

“I was not a prim and proper type of kid,” she says now, at 27. “My little brother, a little boy, thought I was disgusting.” She places special emphasis on “I,” as if her brother had no room to talk.

“He used to make me wash my hands before I played his Nintendo.”

So Banerjee’s hands turned to sewing instead. Her personal wardrobe expanded to include custom creations – constructed by herself, still with the help of her mother. Even with a bigger canvas, the Barbie doll aesthetic remained.

“I started getting really particular about what I wanted,” she says.” I wanted really girly things like huge full skirts and puffy sleeves.”

She wore them all with sneakers, to run around in.

Banerjee says this seated on a chair in the middle of her studio apartment in East Williamsburg. She sips at a cup of Oslo coffee. Banerjee glances around and apologizes for the haphazard look of her front room. “I used to live across the street…I only moved in here a month ago,” she says. There is nothing to apologize for. Her apartment is well-kept, outside of the pins, needles, thread spools, and scissors that smatter the surface of a wide wood table pressed against the wall.

But those things are to be expected in the home of a door-to-door seamstress.

“As friends started to be bridesmaids, they would ask me for alterations, then friends of friends started asking and I got requests for custom made things. Then one day on a whim I was just like ‘I’m gonna quit my job and see if I can make this work.”

Her job at the time involved posting instructional sewing videos and managing the web site of a fashion design start-up. Before that, with the ink still drying on her degree in fashion design (Syracuse), she worked for a company making women’s suits. In both jobs, marketing and trends directed the work. Banerjee’s mailbox became stuffed with magazines, their smooth pages dominated by advertisements and the smell of various perfume samples. Her Twitter feed became a tangled web of “what’s hot now” and “the next big thing.” It became too much to handle. Banerjee cancelled her subscriptions, and embarked on a simpler path.

“I get fed up with the branding and marketing of clothing sometimes,” she says. “We live in a world where people want something new, something more, and somebody’s going to give it to them. But a lot of times they’re just expressing that they want to look a certain way, not that they are a certain way.”

Today she trades under the title “The Williamsburg Seamster” – a play on the “scenester” title bestowed on so many of North Brooklyn’s more fashionable, event-attending types. When she started the business six years ago, Banerjee was a bartender, too. Now, she is the same as when she was six. She sews garments, and runs around.

“I don’t know that I could do it in another neighborhood,” she says. “There’s something about this North Brooklyn area. People are open with their homes, I offer a unique service…it just fits in with everything this neighborhood is about right now.”

Banerjee hasn’t left the design game completely. But now she plays it on her own terms. Just after quitting her job and before The Williamsburg Seamster matured, Banerjee began custom-making garments again. This time, for her friends. This time, it needed to be simple. Functional. The antithesis of everything the fashion and design industry was marketing towards.

Within a year, she nearly sold out her batch of customized aprons.

“They’re like giant pockets,” she says.

Banerjee and the tools of her trade (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

The Ehlers adjustment (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

IV | To Learn To Turn

At one point, Barb Ehlers greeted her clients in full rock climbing gear. Rugged boots, thick pants, and, sometimes, jackets with untold amounts of pockets. Ehlers, 5 foot 11 inches with fiery red hair and relentlessly focused expressions, had climbed Mount Everest on a whim. People paid her to get them in top shape now, and with no company dress code to follow, she would wear whatever she damn well pleased.

Today, in a studio on the 16th floor of a Manhattan high-rise, Ehlers dons a light blue tank top and black tights that cling to her slim, toned frame. Hair up, her expressions remain focused, even while laughing at the scene she finds herself in. She stands well over 6 feet now, the extra inches courtesy of a pair of black patent leather platform heels that lace up nearly to the top of her knees. It’s Wednesday night – time for her stripper class.

“I’ve been a jock all my life,” she says. “I know how to use my body. I know the muscles. But there’s this sexiness to using your body that I was never taught.  I can do push ups and pulls ups with a guy. I can dead-lift 205lbs, but to do a little sexy turn? That’s work for me!”

Ehlers, a personal trainer living in Williamsburg, takes this class each week with seven other women. Their instructor, Kimberly Smith, leads them through an array of moves that involve gyrating hips, slow leans forward, and dipping tooshes. Ehlers’ partner sits on a low-lying wicker chair while Ehlers uses the back of it to lift her body up with her arms. Carefully, Ehlers places her knees across her partners lap and shifts the weight from hand to hand. The goal here is to bob enticingly over the subject, lift up with the arms, extend legs, place toes on the ground, and slide the torso down slowly. Very slowly. And very, very close.

This is a bicycle, into a James Brown, into a full body slide.

“It’s just like a mountain climber!” Smith says as she demonstrates for the class.

“Yeah, I know,” says Ehlers. “That’s what I’m good at!”

Born in Bremen, Germany, Ehlers came up in a family where even her grandmother biked from place to place. Time passed by with roughhousing sessions from her sister. Eating took place at regular intervals, in controlled amounts. Breakfast. Big lunch. Something small in the evening.

At six, she moved to Queens. The transition was easy, but the kids seemed…different.

“It was like ‘Why aren’t you rolling around in the mud? Why aren’t you riding your bike around like a race car?’,” she says. “I felt tomboyish. There’s more of a gender difference here than there was there.”

There’s an atmosphere difference as well. In Queens, the Ehlers lived close by JFK airport, where the roar of passing jets (and their resulting pollutants) imbued the air. Just after moving to a new country, Barb developed a severe case of asthma.

“It hit me like a truck,” she says. “I couldn’t play, and I loved playing. I loved being outside, and I couldn’t do it. It takes your childhood life away.”

Soon, regularly scheduled pills went along with her regularly scheduled meals. A new character – an inhaler – added itself to the cast in her pockets. By 12, Ehlers had enough. She would breathe when she damn well pleased. She became a vegetarian, and her mother enrolled her in a karate class. At the beginning, she couldn’t make it through without reaching for her inhaler.

“I just couldn’t breathe,” she says. “Every time I got active, it got worse.”

Her sensei, an imposing man named Lee Ireland, would have none of it. Even as Barb gasped for air on his mat, the message rang firm.

“Breathe it out,” he commanded steadily, regularly.

“Just breathe it out.”

She did. Ehlers has not touched an inhaler since.

“A good teacher can show you a vision of yourself that you didn’t know was possible,” she says. “That’s something that I try to do with my clients, too, as a personal trainer. It’s the gift that [Ireland] gave me.”

Today, Ehlers trains so much, so vigorously, and in so many different ways that she needs to have clothes adjusted twice a year to account for her constantly changing body shape. TRX training, for example, has taken in her abdomen a couple inches. This is good. But now her little black dress poofs out at the sides. This is not good.

So at 10 a.m. the morning after her stripper class, Nayantara Banerjee pays a visit to Ehlers’ cozy one bedroom apartment in one of the last-remaining old style walk-ups by McCarren. Standing in front of a mirror in her living room, Ehlers lifts her arms up over her head as Banerjee carefully marks her body’s outline with safety pins.

A series of dead weights lie neatly on the floor next to the mirror, ordered according to size.

Kimberly Smith at work (photo by Halston Bruce / courtesy StripXpertease) and Thompson's work at rest (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

V | The Cycle

The man carried stacks of money. Each stack contained one hundred dollars. All in ones. He sat in a low-lying chair in dim light, throwing bills on the strip club’s stage for whichever dancers he liked the most. Swigging vodka, the man leaned back in his seat. It creaked under his considerable girth. He liked Kimberly Smith. So when she came around to collect her tip, he told her a few things.

Smith looked at the man with wide brown eyes. She smiled with disarming grace. Then she walked away toward the manager of the club, demanding that the man be thrown out immediately. The manager remembered the stacks of money, and where his customer was currently spending it. He declined. The man would stay right where he was.

“Every single night there’s so much – you’re groped, you’re touched, you’re talked dirty to – there’s too much happening in one night to remember one situation,” Smith says, struggling to recall exactly what it was the man said that drove her to quit after 10 years of being a stripper. “That’s when I felt like I should move on. Nobody was on my side.”

Smith went home early, and angry. Sleep evaded her. At 3 a.m., she called the club, and told them to find a new dancer. Five years later, with StripXpertease, she teaches women from all walks of life the moves she learned.

There is an important caveat, though. Nobody is ever, in any way, encouraged to strip professionally.

“I get calls all the time from people saying ‘I want to be a stripper’ and my response is ‘Well, we can’t help you,’” she says. “I’m turning away money, but I just can’t justify helping some naive girl get into that industry, and then lord knows what happens to her. I don’t want that on my conscience.”

She knows all too well the cyclical, absorbing nature of the profession. Smith was in 6th grade in Austin when her drug-abusing mother moved them into a halfway house. Both of their housemates worked as strippers. One was still using. Both frequently strutted the hallways fully topless, as if it was the most normal, natural thing in the world. After all, they were just breasts.

“Looking back, it was bizarre to be living in that situation,” Smith says, emphasizing that she suffered no abuse or wrongdoing during her stay there. “I mean, they were strippers. It just wasn’t an ideal situation for a child to be in.”

But even as the women around her toiled in search of a better life, Smith couldn’t help but admire them a bit. These women were confident. They were in control. They had amazing bodies and exuded potent sexuality. In the comfort of the gaze of others, they could be the stars of their own intimate stage. For Smith, who long aspired to be an actress, these were significant qualities.

At the age of 18, she got a job as a dancer at a local club. Her 10-year journey through the seedy underbelly of strip clubs began.

“Girls are constantly getting evicted, getting their phones turned off, not being able to pay their bills, and they’re in this constant cycle,” she says. “That’s why girls dance to really sad music or really hard music. They’re angry. It’s just a horrible job. You’re getting paid to rub your crotch, your butt, your boobs on his penis. Nobody really wants to do that.”

Smith’s StripXpertease lesson plan simply removes money from the equation. Women, she says, want to know how to move, feel, be sexier. Victoria’s Secret rakes in countless millions based on that very concept. So do make-up companies. And hair salons. Buy this bra. Apply this mascara. Take on this expensive style. Even pole dancing classes, popularized by actress Sheila Kelley, market themselves as a physical fitness regime. There are tangible, physical results.

Smith’s aim is entirely mental. In the eyes of many, this makes it all the more dangerous. StripXpertease has been kicked out of multiple studios and received negative press, while pole dancing flourishes (despite the fact that most women do not have a pole in their homes). A YouTube video of Smith performing a routine with annotations explaining how she was moving and why was taken down by site administrators. Meanwhile the exact same video, without annotations, remained live.

“Apparently it’s more offensive to teach people how to do this nasty stuff than just doing the nasty stuff,” she says.

The solution would seem to be to open her own studio, but it’s easier said than done. The two main ingredients – money and time – are in short supply for Smith at the moment. In Williamsburg, though, she has a liberal, open neighborhood more likely to accept her enterprise with open arms.

“When I first moved out here I didn’t like it at all,” she says. “It’s like…everyone’s white. Everyone has a decent amount of money. Everyone’s ‘cool.’ It just seemed so pretentious. I said ‘If I’m going to live in the white suburbs, I’m going to go back to Texas where it doesn’t snow.’”

“It’s grown on me, though. I like the small, mom and pop feel here. I think a studio would do really great.”

Smith lives with her boyfriend in an apartment just off the hustle and bustle of Bedford Avenue. On a cold December day, she walks through the light drizzle into Oslo Coffee Roasters. The barista greets everyone who enters, including Smith, with a pleasant, familiar “hello.” Several pieces of art hang on the walls of the cafe, including one large web of wood and plastic suspended across from the front counter.

Smith’s eyes squint as she examines the sculpture. At first, it looks like little more than a series of translucent plastic bags suspended by planks. She inches closer.

“Oh!” She exclaims. It has become clear that inside the plastics are countless small woodcut figures, with intricate swooping patterns drawn in pen on top of them. Smith’s eyes settle back into their wide gaze. Her raised cheeks begin to relax with understanding.

“That’s a lot of work right there,” she says. “That’s so cool.”

There is a pause.

“What’s the artist’s name?”

Seven developers are in the running to obtain sole possession of building 180 luxury condos units, and a hotel with 225 rooms. The developer has not been named as of yet, but the Post reports that construction would begin in 2013 and finish by 2015.

BookCourt is something of a visual aberration for anyone walking down the northern part of Court Street. Sandwiched between a deli, a UPS store and a Starbucks, the bookshop stands out against the background. It’s too indie to be there, only blocks away from Barnes & Noble – and too nice.

The store was already quite the oddity when Henry Zook and Mary Gannett opened it in 1981. Not because it was surrounded by chain businesses: it simply was one of the only shops on the street.

“The number of people walking by was nothing of the order of today,” Mary says. “People told us we were crazy when we opened BookCourt. But then people came in and bought our books.”

They still do.

In theory, the business model behind independent bookstores is flawed: the product they sell isn’t anything different from what chains – and Amazon.com – provide. Places like BookCourt, three decades and still standing, appear to be an anachronism. So why – how are they still there? Oran Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association resorts to quoting Mark Twain: “the reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.”

A less literary answer would point to the fact that some people actually prefer buying their books from small brick-and-mortar stores. It’s called localism – a community’s hostile response to “the corporatization of economy,” according to Prof. David Hess, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University.

Brooklyn would seem an ideal place for reading – and buying — local. But this alone doesn’t explain BookCourt’s success, given that so many other stores in the borough (including their former Smith Street neighbor Heights Books) have failed. The shop has expanded three times. When it opened, its gross income was $75,000; now Henry says it’s “in the millions: let’s say I’d like it to be three million someday.” The staff has increased from the two original founders to 20 employees, including their eldest son, 27-year-old Zack. Although the couple is separated now, they still run the place together.

While selling books isn’t a lucrative enterprise – if anything, it only provides single-digit profit margins, Henry says – the store has found a way to endure, and prosper.

Hess says that a bookshop needs to differentiate itself for localism to function. This means three things: selling products that can’t be found elsewhere; offering lower prices than the competition; and most importantly, turning the business into what sociologists call “third spaces” – public gathering spots that function much like bars or barbershops. What independent shop owners need to sell is a sense of identity.

And that’s precisely what BookCourt set about trying to do.

From the start, Henry and Mary had an eye toward selecting books that would grab the attention of an already literary Brooklyn. The couple wasn’t entirely new to the book business: they’d moved to New York to go into publishing, and had previously worked at the Wordsworth bookshop in Boston. After a year and a half in the city, they realized they missed “the excitement of all the books as opposed to one publisher’s books,” Henry says. They rented an old barbershop near their Cobble Hill apartment and made the transition to bookselling.

It was a bold move for two 27 year-olds. BookCourt was on the wrong side of Atlantic Avenue, closer to Smith Street’s crack dealers than to wealthier Brooklyn Heights. But the couple didn’t see it that way: though some places were “sketchy” at night, they say, the neighborhood was otherwise “friendly” and “solid.” It had a strong community of publishers and literary people who started going to BookCourt. Some never left.

Tom Jory, now a close friend of the family, walked past their door on the day of the opening. He says he was immediately “struck by the quality of the stock: literary, current and important non-fiction.” For him, Henry’s and Mary’s strength always lied in their ability to adapt to their customers’ tastes and provide them with titles from small and university presses difficult to get from other places, especially from chains.

Zook and Gannett, though, explain their success in a more pragmatic way: they’ve owned the building since 1984.

“The ‘biggie’ is the rent,” Henry says. “That’s what kills a bookstore.”

He’s right. St Mark’s bookshop, in the East Village, just went through months of negotiation with Cooper Union to get its rent reduced and avoid closure. Yet Henry and Mary wouldn’t have been able to purchase the store in the first place had they not managed to pay off their initial investment in merely three years. Granted, the cost had nothing to do with current real estate: they bought BookCourt for $160,000.  Still, Henry says they had to “work like dogs” to get there.

***

Zack Zook with Michael Moore

It was more than a clever business decision. Replacing the rent with a mortgage sheltered the family from the sharp increase of housing in Cobble Hill. It also anchored them in the community as they moved above the store. The situation came with more advantages than drawbacks.  While the demands of work never slackened, regular customers became friends. Mary says the bookshop became the place where her two sons’ friends “always gravitated.” Zack remembers the “terrible influence” the staff had on him as a nine year-old; he enumerates early reads: the Cursed Poets – Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautréamont.

BookCourt grew with the area. In 1990, it added space in the basement. Six years later, the store expanded to the contiguous flower shop as their neighbor moved away. Meanwhile, the neighborhood grew wealthier. Families who’d been there for generations could no longer afford the rent. “Wall Street people,” Zack says, moved in. And so did Barnes & Noble, on Court Street — Zack and his friends went to throw eggs at it. The family thought their time had come, but it was the customers who kept coming.

“People made it a point to tell us: ‘we’re here, we’re not there’,” Mary says. “That Christmas was one of our best ever.”

By the late 1990s, BookCourt had built a community of loyal customers, both for its general stock and for the children’s section built by Mary. But competing with a chain remained a challenge. Mary says they pushed back where they could: customer service and special orders. “Special” meant that Henry could hand deliver the 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary to a client’s house.

While Barnes & Noble made them work harder, having their son enter the business made them more creative. “When Zack decided to join us, that was a big thing,” Henry says.

Before Zack started managing BookCourt in 2005, the store did host the occasional event. He pushed to make the readings regular events and brought in famous writers like Don De Lillo, filling the store to capacity. At the beginning, the readings took place twice a week; now, they happen every day. The store has become so quintessentially “Brooklyn” that it was featured in the third season of the HBO series “Bored to Death” written by Brooklyn author Jonathan Ames. When the series premiered at BookCourt at the beginning of October, the shop was packed. A week earlier, Michael Moore had “occupied” the place to give a reading in front of a crowd of nearly a hundred.

Zack and his parents do not charge for events – even as some bookshops have resorted to selling seats. Publishers cater for the readings; customers can buy the books.  On a good evening, they manage to sell a hundred copies.

Zack has also created a literary magazine, “Cousine Corinne’s Reminder,” where he publishes Brooklyn authors, poets and photographers. Some of them, like Emma Straub, the author of “Other People We Married,” work at BookCourt, too.  Future plans include building a new website for the store, where events will be live streamed, and opening a café if Zack gets his way. Henry and Mary aren’t convinced.

“We didn’t open a bookstore to sell coffee,” Henry says. “Zack is more of a social animal than his parents.”

The truth is that BookCourt has already turned into a social hub. For the space it has grown to offer, for the authors it attracts, for the community it has built along the years. During the readings, Zack isn’t the only one who shakes the hands of regulars – the whole family does. But success is not taken for granted: their last extension opened the day the stock market collapsed in 2008. “It’s ironic,” Mary says, “ Our most successful time is also the most unsettling: we don’t know where the economy is going.”

Related articles:

Michael Moore Occupies BookCourt

Praise for the Good Book (Store)

Over $1,000 is spent every day on food for over 5,000 people at Occupy Wall Street (Ravi Kumar/ The Brooklyn Ink)

Peter Dutro, 36, of Brooklyn is one of the members of the finance committee at Occupy Wall Street. Dutro, a business technology management undergraduate at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, has been helping the protest since September 20. He is well-built and wears reading glasses. He works part-time as a tattoo artist in Queens. He spoke with The Brooklyn Ink’s Ravi Kumar last night at Zuccotti Park.

The Brooklyn Ink: How much do you receive in donations daily?  

Peter Dutro: In the boxes, we have been getting $7,000 a day. And a lot of online donations. But there are some issues with the accounts, we are waiting (for funds) to be released by our fiscal sponsor.

The  Ink: How much have  you received overall so far?  

Dutro: We have a little over $100,000.

The Ink: And where does the money go?

Dutro: Food is our biggest expense. We spend roughly $1,000 every day.

The Ink: Are there any plans for the future and what you will do with the money?

Dutro: There is a lot of thinking about long-term sustainability in the minds of a lot of people. We haven’t made any decisions. We are trying to figure out a way to have a body that deals with financial decisions.

The Ink: Do you have an official title?

Dutro: We have no leader, so we really don’t have titles.

The Ink: How did you get involved in the finance committee?

Dutro: Basically Victoria Sobel (one of the members of the committee) started a finance committee. I heard her plead day in, day out for help. I felt so bad for her. Finally, I felt morally compelled to help her.

The Ink: How many people are there in the finance committee?

Dutro: There are six people.

The Ink: How are duties assigned in your committee?

Dutro: Well, we use responsibility assignment metrics, a tool that is used to assign tasks. Very often, we need to report to a legal or fiscal sponsor. We define tasks and we put in the time frame.

The Ink: Who is your fiscal sponsor?

Occupy Wall Street, the newspaper: The Numbers (Source: KickStarter)

Dutro: The fiscal sponsor is Alliance for Global Justice, a 501c3 organization.

The Ink: How do you get funds?

Dutro: The money comes through the donations. We have been getting lots of online donations.  Although we’ve been having some trouble with our online accounts.

The Ink: What kind of trouble?

Dutro: When we were first trying to organize and figure out the banking aspect, it was very ad-hoc. People were just doing things. We have now got our paperwork in order and are organized. It’s really chaotic, really hard to do something like accounting.

The Ink: When do you have meetings?

Dutro: It’s been a little hard for us to meet at the same time because most people in finance committee have a job. Usually, we have been meeting after general assembly meetings at night.

The Ink: How are you going to make sure you are spending responsibly?

Dutro: That is why we have budget proposals.

The Ink: Are your transactions public?

Dutro: We are in the process of making it public. In the next couple of days, we are going to post it online.

The Ink: There has been a concern that the issue of sanitation has been ignored in the park. Given the large donations, why are there no portable restrooms here?

Dutro: We are not allowed to have structures in the park. Talk to Mayor Bloomberg about this, and give us the permit.

 

 

***

>> BACK TO FULL COVERAGE

Contact The Brooklyn Ink

Have you been to the Occupy Wall Street? What did you think? Email us at thebrooklynink(at)gmail.com.

Tweet your thoughts@thebrooklynink

Post to our Facebook page.

The Williamsburg design on promotional Camel Blue packs (Image courtesy The Ballast NYC)

By Elisabeth Anderson

Some Brooklyn residents and politicians have had—forgive us—smoke coming out of their ears the past two months over a promotion involving Camel Blue cigarettes.

The reason?  The pack included an illustration of the brand’s iconic camel on what looks to be Kent Avenue, in front of a Williamsburg Bridge backdrop, with Williamsburg itself as a selling point.  “Some call it the most famous hipster neighborhood,” the package copy begins.  “But it’s not about hip.  It’s about breaking free.”

City officials, echoing perhaps the toughest-on-tobacco mayoral administration ever—the City Council voted last week to expand the city smoking ban to parks, beaches, and Times Square—were furious, citing yet another attempt to make smoking seem cool in the eyes of the young and impressionable.   Health Commissioner Thomas Farley led the charge to block the cigs from city stores, telling the Daily News “I am particularly disturbed that this effort to recruit young smokers exploits the name and image of Brooklyn’s vibrant Williamsburg neighborhood.”  The packs did live to see the light of bodega shelf days, however, although the promotion itself ended at the end of the January.

But one question remains unanswered: Why Williamsburg?

The Williamsburg packs, it turns out, were born of a larger promotional campaign by R.J. Reynolds, the nation’s second-largest tobacco company.  The campaign, known as The Break Free Adventure, was built around the notion that the camel had left the pack and gone of a journey around the country.  The promotion was launched exclusively online in September, behind the wall of the Camel consumer website.  The Ink tried to gain access to poke around, but was denied.  In the increasingly-regulated world of consumer-facing tobacco marketing, Camel requires third-party age verification from any consumer who opts in to joining the virtual Camel community.

Consumers with access, meanwhile, were encouraged via e-mail and direct mail—there was no point of sale or print advertising for this particular campaign—to guess the camel’s destinations.  Each guess, right or wrong, represented an entry into a sweepstakes for one million airline miles, the winner of which was announced in November.

“The primary driver of the promotion was to drive traffic to the site,” David Howard, a spokesman for R.J. Reynolds, explained to The Ink. “Which it did, successfully.”

R.J. Reynolds then expanded the promotion to the product side, announcing ten locations that would be featured on packs of Camel Blues, formerly Camel Lights.  The Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which was signed into law last year to give the Food and Drug Administration regulatory oversight in the industry, bars tobacco companies from using words like “light,” “mild,” and “medium” to describe their products.

Packs of Camel Blues featuring locations were shipped nationally in December and January.  All the locations—including Austin, Tx., Las Vegas, and Route 66—had an element of ‘cool.’ They’ll remain on shelves until they sell out, but distribution has ended.  The goal, Howard said, was to pick “culturally unique locations that we thought would be entertaining for adult tobacco consumers.”

To Howard’s knowledge, R.J. Reynolds did not send scouts to the selected locations to conduct research.  No matter.  The Williamsburg pack copy tried to capture the neighborhood’s mood: “It’s about last call, a sloppy kiss goodbye and a solo saunter to a rock show in an abandoned building.  It’s where a tree grows.  It’s Camel in the Williamsburg corner of Brooklyn.”

That copy was cringe-worthy to some Williamsburg residents.  “I don’t know whether to be offended as a smoker, a Williamsburger, or a human being,” wrote The Brooklyn Paper’s Andy Campbell last month.  It’s “…as if Camel marketers went to the Wikipedia, looked up ‘hipster,’ and then hired my grandfather to design a cigarette box.”

The packaging also angered those who care about kids.  Yes, they say, Camel was within its rights to create the Williamsburg pack.  But to some there was no denying that the packaging would have a visual appeal to any child who saw it in a store, or any teen whose friend had a pack. “I don’t like it,” Jeff Ewusi, A high school guidance counselor, told NY1. “Not around this neighborhood, with plenty of schools close in this area and students flooding this neighborhood everyday, hitting the corner stores.  It’s definitely not a positive.”

It’s a concern that resonates in a particular way at a time when statewide anti-tobacco spending is down, Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts notwithstanding.  According to Tobacco Free Kids, an advocacy group, New York will only be spending $58.4 million on tobacco prevention in fiscal year 2011, a paltry 23 percent of the $254.3 million the Centers for Disease Control are allotting to the state this year.  The funds are the result of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, whereby the tobacco companies agreed to settle with the states in the form of annual funding toward anti-tobacco initiatives, especially youth smoking prevention; states have only used a portion of their funds in the years since toward the ends they were intended.

Meanwhile, smoking has declined in the United States in the past ten years.  The reported smoking rate has hovered around 20 to 21% since 2005 according to the Centers for Disease Control, a drop from as high as a Gallup-reported 28% earlier in the last decade.  The Bedford Report, which provides analyst research on equities, reported last week that American demand for cigarettes is down 4.7% from last year; still, revenues have stayed flat as tobacco companies continue to increase their product prices.  Camel held 19 percent of the coveted “ASU30” bracket, or adult smokers under 30, in 2010, according to the publicly available ReynoldsAmerican Investor Day presentation from November 2010.  Forty-four percent of its buyers were under 30, and the brand saw 10% of tobacco consumers in that category switch from another brand to Camel.

As far as the Break Free Adventure is concerned, the remaining packs are selling out as we speak, and the campaign will likely fade from the Brooklyn consciousness over time.  The camel has left the borough.