Former Wall Street banker Tom Vasquez left the hustle and bustle in downtown Manhattan and opened Perfect Paws, a pet grooming shop in Brooklyn Heights, to embrace his love for animals. Now he finds joy in keeping man’s best friend cleaned and well groomed.

Her new show, “Oprah’s Next Chapter” will air on OWN and reportedly will focus on Oprah interviewing real people, newsmakers, and celebrities outside the studio.

Riders, particularly the elderly, say the MTA has failed to fulfill multiple promises after the down escalator at the High St. A/C station broke down on Thursday, Sept. 9.  MTA officials said the escalator will be up and running today.  State Sen. Daniel Squadron (D-Brooklyn Heights) led a rally at the station yesterday to demand repairs for the escalator.  He said to press that “a broken escalator is frustrating, but missed deadlines and broken promises make a bad problem a whole lot worse.”

From Verrazano Bridge to Borough Hall. (Alexandra Alper/The Brooklyn Ink)

The sign, “Welcome to Brooklyn, the fourth largest city in America,” hung on the Verrazano Bridge only for a few years, over three decades ago. But in that time, it became a national symbol for Brooklyn, seen on television screens across the country in the opening credits of the hit 1970’s sitcom, “Welcome back, Kotter.”

As of this week the sign has a new public home, on display in the lobby of Borough Hall. In a ceremony last week, current and former borough presidents Marty Markowitz and Sebastian Leone pulled off a red cloth to unveil the wooden sign, bearing  Leone’s name in small black letters, 35 years after he ordered it put up on the Verrazano Bridge.

A fond piece of history from a period darkly remembered for urban decay and racial tensions, the sign reflects the borough’s revitalization.

“It’s a piece of Brooklyn history and really represents the great ethnic diversity of a borough,” said Markowitz. “Brooklyn has changed a lot since 1975.”

Leone commissioned the sign in 1975 and order it put where everyone driving over the bridge into Brooklyn would see it. He did it, he said, “to remind visitors and residents of Brooklyn that our borough would be the fourth largest city in America.”

Would be, because of course Brooklyn was then and still is a borough. The fourth largest city honor, after New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, belongs to Houston.

The sign that appears in the sitcom credits amid outdoor scenes of 1970’s Brooklyn was slightly different, either an earlier version or the same one, lacking embellishments added for the 1976 bicentennial.

The sitcom starred John Travolta and Abe Kaplan and ran on ABC from 1975-1979. The story line revolved around a teacher, Kotter, played by Kaplan, who returned to his alma mater, fictional James Buchanan high school, to teach remedial classes to a new generation of mischievous kids, called “the sweathogs.” In an era plagued with race riots, protests and busing, some cities refused initially to air the show, but the sitcom put a positive face on urban youth culture.

“Those were not the best days in Brooklyn back then,” said Markowitz. “This show brought a smile to us and it still brings a smile to us.”

To get to its new home in the lobby of Borough Hall, the sign took a circuitous route. Leone first commissioned it in 1975 to welcome visitors across Hudson Bay from Staten Island and boost morale among Brooklynites. From its perch on the concrete southern wall of the bridge, it became immortalized by the sitcom. The sign came down in 1977 when a new Borough President, Howard Golden, took office, and wanted his name to appear on a newer version.

At Leone’s retirement dinner that year, the outgoing Borough President gave it to Russo, owner of one of his favorite restaurants, Garguilo’s, in Coney Island. There it was etched with dozens of customers’ initials until Russo eventually took it down and stored it in the basement.

In 2002, Russo showed it to Markowitz, the new borough president, who was attending a dinner for the Cyclones, Brooklyn’s baseball team. Markowitz asked for it, Russo initially refused, but eventually gave it to him last January after he had won a third term.

“I didn’t want to give it to him,” said Nino Russo after the ceremony. “I didn’t want to part with it. But then I said at least people appreciate it more here [in Borough Hall] than in the basement of my restaurant.”

Retired schoolteacher Jack Zukerman, 86, interviewed on the street, was happy to hear about the sign’s new home. He said he still identifies with the show’s main character. “What Kotter did, which was excellent teaching– trying to reach out to [the students] with what they knew,” he said. “[That] is what I tried to do.”

John Casella, 57, a realtor from Long Island City, said the show’s use of the sign, “brought a lot of good attention to Brooklyn.”

Markowitz is known for his own love of signs promoting his borough. The signs, posted along Brooklyn gateways like the Williamsburg Bridge, Gowanus and Brooklyn-Queens Expressways, were inspired by the original Kotter show sign, he says. They include “Leaving Brooklyn? Oy vey,” or “Fuhgeddaboudit,” “heart of America,” and “believe the hype.” But the BP’s favorite among the signs he has commissioned is “Entering Brooklyn: How Sweet it is.”

“It’s from the Honeymooners, 1955,” he said. “And it was all themed in Brooklyn.”

More on “Brooklyn, the fourth largest city in America”:

Houston may pass Brooklyn as fourth largest American city

Cleanup in Prospect Heights (Manuel Rueda/The Brooklyn Ink)

By Manuel Rueda

If you thought solidarity was dead in the borough, think back to Sunday, when small clusters of Brooklyn residents joined a global day of action against global warming.

Glove-wearing volunteers with big black trash-bags carried out street clean-ups in Red Hook, Fort Greene and near the waterfront in Brooklyn Heights.

Solar panels were installed in Park Slope homes, bicycles were fixed in Williamsburg, letters for assembly members were written in Prospect Heights and in Gowanus, residents of one apartment building handed out energy efficient CFL light bulbs, for free.

The unusual activities were part of a Global Work Party, promoted by the environmental website 350.org, which provided maps to make it easy for participants to find locations and times of activities.

In Brooklyn, where volunteers held 13 separate activities attended by anywhere from two to 50 people, three strangers met in Prospect Park to share their knowledge of sustainable lifestyles.

“I’m happy I came because even though it’s a small group I feel like I got to share a lot of things that I know about that need to be shared” said Margaret Rose de Cruz, a massage therapist and longtime resident of the area, who talked with her new friends about environmental literature and personal energy saving measures after showing them how to sow damaged socks using a gourd.

“As far as this occasion turned out I was a little bit disappointed,” said event organizer Colin Reis “it made me sad but it’s a bit telling of the movement at large.” he added as he reflected on the difficulties of making people more environmentally aware when they are not under the threat of an immediate ecological disaster.

In nearby Park Slope, about 35 members of a local Buddhist temple,the Zen Center for New York City, took to the streets with large black and transparent trash bags, picking up plastic bottles, soft drink cans and old flyers and separating recyclable trash.

Kohl Suddeth, an actor who attends the temple and participates in its recently established Green Dragon group, found a car battery lying amongst the bushes in Gore Park.

“Realistically it’s a small gesture, it’s a small thing” he said of the cleanup initiative.  “But I can’t even count the number of people we talked to on the street that asked us about what we were doing…It’s as much about the visibility than about the gesture of the work itself.”

The 350.org website was funded by environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben, and it is part of a campaign to pressure global leaders to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

“’If we can get to work on solutions to the climate crisis,” the website reads, “so can you.”

350.org -–the number stands for the lowest number of carbon dioxide parts per million that experts say the atmosphere can handle– claims that people in 181 countries carried out environmentally friendly activities as part of the Sundays days of action, such as planting trees, campaigning against the use of plastic bags and forming human mosaics with green messages.

More than 7,000 separate activities took place worldwide according to the website, which shows pictures of Vietnamese volunteers planting a tree and a group of about 30 Israeli youngsters, posing with their bicycles in a lonely desert road.

More on environment:

Newton Creek needs massive cleanup

Fare hike threatens “Green” Goals

Construction of an addition to the Robert Fulton School in Brooklyn Heights is expected to be finished by Spring. (The Brooklyn Ink/Alex Eriksen)

By Alex Eriksen

After seven years of seeing their enrollment swell and their available space dwindle, relief is now in the works for The Robert Fulton School in Brooklyn Heights.

Construction of an annex, which began last year, is due for completion in seven to eight months.

“Space has gotten really tight,” said school principal Seth Phillips. “Where other schools have art rooms and other kinds of room we don’t because we don’t have the space for it.”

The school on Hicks Street, part of District 13, was built to serve 430 students. Today they have 550 enrolled in classes pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. The boosts in enrollment are all thanks to an explosion in the child population of Brooklyn Heights. DUMBO is also seeing new families move in and send their children to local schools. The Robert Fulton School has seen its population jump every year in the seven years Phillips has been principal.

The staff has nearly doubled in size to match demand, growing from 24 to 40 full time teachers. Due to the lack of space, teachers work without a lounge. They’ve taken to eating lunch in the library. Teachers have developed several methods for coping with the squeeze. A tight schedule is in place to shuttle students to different classes, to lunch, and to recess.

Some fixes, however, are not perfect. The art teacher pushes a cart of supplies from room to room. The dance teacher moves the desks against a wall to turn a classroom into a dance floor. The drama teacher teaches class in the auditorium. None of them have ever had rooms of their own. Everyone on the faculty is affected. For the past year, the principal shared his office with his assistant principal. He also held every staff meeting there, in a room that looks like it could hold ten people at most.

“It’s a scheduling nightmare,” says the school’s librarian, Amanda Green. Teachers are unhappy having to jump over so many hurdles she says, but can see the finish line up ahead. Green looks forward to moving into a brand new library once the annex is finished.

Teachers aren’t the only ones feeling the strain. For the students, the school’s playground says it all. To make way for the construction, the jungle gym was dismantled. All that remains is a small basketball court with a single hoop and a narrow stretch of concrete next to it. Trailers installed for the school’s two pre-kindergarten classes further shrank the playground. Luckily, this year, the New York State Parks Department allows the school to use the nearby and newly renovated Squib Park for recess.

School principal Seth Phillips looks at the building plans. (The Brooklyn Ink/Alex Eriksen)

Back in the classroom, the noise of a construction site intrudes. When the foundation was laid last February the noise was so loud and lasted so long that classes had to move and doubled up in rooms away from the site, jamming 50 into a room meant for 25, half sitting at desks and the other half on the floor.

“The entire building shook,” says Phillips, but says its gotten better over time. Most work now is done early in the morning before students arrive and on weekends. Rarely is their noise during classes, according to Phillips.

Local residents, however, hardly enjoy beginning their mornings to the sounds of jackhammers. The school lies in a far corner of the Brooklyn Heights’ historic district, surrounded on all sides by brownstones. “It’s pretty annoying, you can’t sleep in,” says Aaron Harnley, who lives directly across from the construction site.

Phillips says he gotten mixed reactions about the construction. “Some people are very supportive, some people are not,” he says. “As a whole the neighborhood is behind it, they understand a good school building makes a better neighborhood, it helps housing prices, it helps everything.”

While residents ask when the construction will be finished, teachers are asking why it didn’t begin sooner. Overcrowding has been a longtime problem and only after six years of it did the Department of Education decide to expand the school.

There have been some delays and unique problems when it comes to building. The school is over a hundred years old and so was built using asbestos. Special measures are taken to prevent exposure to it, which has been proven to cause mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer. Tents are used to seal off areas and work is often done on weekends and during this past summer, says Phillips. The School Construction Authority, who oversees and runs the project, could not be reached for comment.

Building codes are stricter in the historic section of the Heights, where things like telephone poles are strictly forbidden as to preserve the neighborhood’s iconic image born out of the mid-19th century. Gas lamps instead of electric ones line some streets.

The project first got it start when Phillips asked to downsize, not expand. When he asked permission to no longer have pre-kindergarten, the Department of Education said they would build instead.

“I never expected something to get built,” says Phillips. “District 13 is an undersized district, we’re the only school in District 13 that’s over crowded, and they usually give money according to districts by how overcrowded they are, so we’re a aberration.”

When the four-story annex is finished it will boast nine new classrooms, a library, and an exercise room, adding a total of 18,000 square-feet to the school. The addition will expand the schools capacity to 590 students, which Phillips says the school will likely reach in two years.

Pastor Beth Waltemath (The Brooklyn Ink/Alex Eriksen)

The First Presbyterian Church on Clark Street in Brooklyn Heights has seen a few pastors in 188 years, and today it is losing yet another. Beth Waltemath is giving her last sermon as associate pastor. She’s leaving in three days for a church in Georgia
where she and her husband will be co-pastors.

The choir sings “This Little Light of Mine” accompanied by piano, drums and bass.

Everyone is smiling and shaking hands before the service begins. A man with snow-white hair grasps a stranger’s hand and says, “It’s a blessed morning!”

There are about a hundred people in attendance: families mostly, a few young couples. The choir finishes singing and the sermon begins. Waltemath appears behind the pulpit and looks down at her congregation. The stole she wears matches her yellow hair.
Amidst the uprooting of her adult life she’s still found time to write a full sermon.

This is the last she will ever address the people with whom she’s spent over seven years. The sermon lasts for about an hour and is tied to her favorite Biblical passage — John 4:18: “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”

She admits perfect love is a tough concept to get one’s head around but asks her congregants to try. It’s her answer to a tough question: “why are you leaving us?” She speaks about it directly; telling them it was a difficult decision but feels that leaving is part of God’s plan. It was her decision to leave. The church in Georgia requested she come and she accepted. She doesn’t have to go but she is.

At the reception afterwards it’s a mixture of happiness and sorrow, celebrating a life and accepting the end of things.  Congregants tell her how much they’ll miss her.

Some of them are too choked with tears to speak. Waltemath asks for a hug from everyone in the room. All of them oblige.