A rendition of what a deck over the BQE trench might look like. (Image courtesy of Dland Studio)

The bright sun was perfect for a bit of shopping. Bundled up in a coat and scarf, Heather Roslund joined the Saturday crowd that was walking the gauntlet of stalls on Union Avenue that comprises the McCarren Park Greenmarket.

McCarren Park is the only public green space of any size in North Brooklyn, but activists like Roslund are working hard to get the City to create new areas.

Union Avenue runs north into the park and dead-ends into Driggs Avenue, cutting off a small recreation area—on maps, a green triangle—from the rest of the park. But each Saturday, this part of Union Avenue hosts the local farmers’ market. The section of blacktopped road between the intersections with 12th Street and Driggs Avenue, normally accessible to automobiles, is blocked off with cones. Up and down the street, vendors sell seasonal produce, free-range eggs and grass-fed beef.

Although the market will remain, before long the road itself will be gone—literally wiped off the map. When that happens, this stretch of Union Avenue will be rezoned as parkland, and a space that is currently available for public use only for a few hours each Saturday will become permanently open.

Eventually, the blacktop will be torn up, but rezoning must precede any physical transformation of the land. A lot of paperwork remains to be done before the road can be demapped, as the procedure is called, but Roslund, who is chair of the Land Use Committee for Brooklyn’s Community District 1, can already envision uses for the open space to come.

“The idea of having it be a plaza space is really nice, which is the idea I’ve heard put forward most often. It could be really useful [even] without literally being more grass,” she said.

The transformation of Union Avenue is one of several initiatives currently being pursued by local officials, non-profits and citizen activist groups to address the severe lack of open space in this historically park-poor community. These initiatives range from the renovation of a vacant lot owned by the Parks Department to the construction of an ambitious elevated park over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that will reunite a long-sundered Williamsburg.

According to an open space study conducted by the Greenpoint Waterfront Association for Parks and Planning, a non-profit coalition, Brooklyn’s Community District 1, which encompasses Williamsburg and Greenpoint, has only 0.6 acres of open space per 1,000 residents. The Department of City Planning suggests an open space ratio of at least 2.5 acres per 1,000 residents.

In Community District 6, which includes Park Slope, Red Hook and Gowanus, 6.1 percent of the total land area is set aside for open space. District 1, with Williamsburg and Greenpoint, is far more populous with far less open space—only 4.4 percent of the land area.

Every open space project in North Brooklyn proceeds in the long shadow of Bushwick Inlet Park—a park that exists mainly in the realm of political promises.

In 2005, Mayor Bloomberg made the promise—that the City would build a 28-acre waterfront park—to pacify opposition to the controversial rezoning of North Brooklyn. Bushwick Inlet Park was intended to revitalize the waterfront and provide more open space for the increased numbers of residents attracted by the rezoning. As envisioned, the park will be a series of open spaces and private developments linked by an esplanade, and will extend all the way from the Williamsburg Bridge to the tip of Greenpoint.

Six years later, however, Bushwick Inlet Park still has not materialized.

Roslund says it may take another 10 years or more for the new park to become a reality. At the time of the 2005 rezoning, six entities owned the land that that would make up the park. So far, the city has been able to buy out only three. On two of these properties, no ground has been broken for the park development.

“It’s been six years since the rezoning, and they’re only working on the first parcel,” said Roslund, who is also the president of 2plus3 Architects.

As progress toward Bushwick Inlet Park’s completion drags on, alternative open space projects become increasingly attractive.

So far, the Open Space Alliance, a local conservancy group, has spent about $50,000 on consultants and feasibility studies for the Union Avenue project. The rezoning process is a long and arduous one that winds its way through numerous city agencies. Before the community board’s Land Use Committee can approve the measure, it has to be certified by the Department of City Planning.

Another property under development is a vacant lot at 50 Kent Ave., once the site of a Department of Sanitation truck depot, which the City demolished in 2009. Now the Parks Department is turning the property—located on an industrial street a block from the East River—into open space.

An empty lot at 50 Kent Ave. that is mapped to become a part of Bushwick Inlet Park. (Photo by Brian Eha / The Brooklyn Ink)

Unlike Union Avenue, 50 Kent is already mapped as parkland—it will eventually form part of Bushwick Inlet Park—but it’s not currently useable by the public. The lot where the sanitation garage once stood is now a vast stretch of asphalt surrounded by a chain-link fence. Considerable imagination is needed to see it as a public space where people will want to hang out.

“Zoning-wise, it’s parkland. We just have to do some things to it to give people a reason to come and use it,” Joe Vance, a board member of OSA, said.

According to Stephanie Thayer, executive director of OSA and the Parks Department administrator for North Brooklyn, the Parks Department doesn’t have the funds to turn 50 Kent into a green park, so in the short term OSA is planning to turn the site into a space for concerts and other community events.

Roslund is excited by the possibilities, but wants more than rock concerts in the new facililty. “OSA has been working to move the focus away from just rock concerts to more varied programming. If the diversification is successful, that could be a really good thing for the community,” she said.

Vance cautioned, however, that remediation of the land may be necessary before anything new can be developed. There is a possibility that toxins from the sanitation plant leached into the soil. Still, the timetable for renovation looks good.

“More than likely the concerts will be held there next year,” he said.

The most ambitious open space proposal under consideration in North Brooklyn will do much more than provide opportunities for recreation: it will reconnect two halves of Williamsburg. The plan would create a green park to “deck over” a trench section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway between Broadway and Grand Street, thus undoing the bifurcation of that part of Brooklyn that occurred decades ago in one of the grand undertakings of famed urban planner Robert Moses, then chairman of the Tri-Borough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.

The hope is that the new elevated park would reduce air pollution, end the division of Williamsburg’s Southside, ease the overuse of other recreation spaces, such as McCarren Park, and provide a draw, if not additional real estate, for commercial activity in the area.

The plan has political support, including from Councilwoman Diana Reyna (D–34), among other local politicians. Her deputy chief of staff, Bennett Baruch, called the BQE a “blight,” and drew a connection between the high rates of obesity and asthma in North Brooklyn and the lack of park space.

Parks already exist on either side of the BQE, and the goal of any new development, he said, will be “joining those spots and making it a more active and enjoyable experience for people.”

Ever since the construction of the BQE, residents on both sides of the highway have referred to those on the far side as being from “the other side”—a habit of speech that has become an ingrained and alienating attitude toward their ostensible neighbors.

Architecture firm Dland Studio has produced a conceptual plan for bridging the divided community. The plan breaks down into stages what will surely be a monumental and expensive undertaking. The first stage calls for the planting of trees on streets bordering the BQE and for the addition of greenery to the trench walls. Ultimately, a park would bridge the below-street-level trench, providing air-cleaning vegetation and much-needed recreation space.

There is also talk of providing space for residential or commercial buildings on a platform over the expressway. “This could be potentially very beneficial economically for this area,” Baruch said.

As for the expansion of McCarren Park, that little green triangle—which includes a dog run and a picnic area—may not be isolated for much longer. Once Union Avenue is rezoned, Vance said, the sidewalks will be taken up and the fences separating the former roadway from other areas of the park will come down. But people will be able to start enjoying the new space even before these changes take effect.

“We have physical changes we would like to see made. But the reality is, we can put up barriers [to block off the street] and it’s instantly usable by people,” he said.

Vance said that OSA has kept the plans for Union Avenue quiet until now because the organization doesn’t want to get people’s hopes up in the event the proposal might fall through. But signs are positive, and residents of Williamsburg and Greenpoint may find themselves with new parkland inside of a year or two. The big question remaining is what to do with the space.

“As soon as it’s certified and we’re sure it’s for real, we’ll start a public process to get ideas and start designing what it could be,” Vance said.

Jason Jones and collaborator Constantine Prishep at their art collective, 'Not An Alternative.'. (Photo by Brian Eha/The Brooklyn Ink)

Williamsburg’s hard-won reputation as a center of artistic production is becoming increasingly threadbare. The relocation of an art collective and the shuttering of several galleries and event spaces in recent months have called into question whether the neighborhood will remain the rough and ready haven for artists it once was.

The recent casualties—Not An Alternative, Cinders Gallery, Monster Island, Secret Robot Project and other evocatively named arts organizations—have all shut down or left Williamsburg in the last 12 months due to rising property prices.

“There’s a trend that’s been in place for a while now,” said Sto Len, former co-owner of Cinders Gallery, which shut its doors in December 2010. “Many artists and art spaces that I dearly love have had to move in the past year.”

Williamsburg, like other now-upscale neighborhoods before it, was once a welcome retreat for artists.

In 2003, when art collective Not An Alternative set up shop at 84 Havemeyer St., the neighborhood “was a totally different place,” said co-founder Jason Jones. Rents were cheap, and there were plenty of abandoned factories whose landlords were happy to rent them out as studios, production spaces and loft dwellings.

Beginning in the 1990s and continuing through much of the 2000s, the possibility inherent in these gritty conditions drew a wave of artists like Jones and his associates.

That wave has all but rolled back. The artistic community that forged the cultural identity of the new Brooklyn is largely gone, pushed from Williamsburg by the very thing that drove its members from Manhattan to Brooklyn in the first place: astronomical rent prices.

The Not An Alternative team, whose most recent project involved an installation and signage for Occupy Wall Street, was hit with a 240 percent rent spike and two months ago relocated to Greenpoint. Jones and his wife and business partner, Beka Economopoulos, are among the latest group of artists to discover they can no longer afford to live and work in the place that once nurtured them.

“Same story that we’ve seen time and time again in the East Village and the LES and SoHo before that,” said Len.

Young creative types began to trickle into Williamsburg in the early 1990s, reversing decades of flight from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Their numbers quickly grew, and the neighborhood’s image was transformed.

Before long, cultural tourists, drawn by the new energy of the revitalized Williamsburg, began to transform the neighborhood from an authentic haven for artists into a place that manufactured what sociologist Sharon Zukin calls “an identifiable local product for global cultural consumption: authentic Brooklyn cool.”

With this newfound broad appeal came displacement—first of residents and manufacturing businesses that predated the influx of artists, then, increasingly, of the artists themselves.

“Displacement is central to the process of gentrification,” wrote DePaul University geography professor Winifred Curran in an Urban Studies paper that took Williamsburg as a case study. Curran and others, notably Zukin in her book Naked City, have detailed the process whereby Williamsburg’s growing cultural capital in the last decade brought financial capital in the form of big developers.

To some, the coup de grace came in 2005, when the city, with the enthusiastic support of Mayor Bloomberg himself, approved a major rezoning of North Brooklyn, converting the area from a primarily manufacturing zone to a commercial and residential district.

Now, property prices are six feet high and rising. According to a third-quarter report by The Corcoran Group, a real estate firm, average prices for Williamsburg condominiums have increased 16% per square foot from their average at this time last year.

West Street near Greenpoint waterfront, where 'Not An Alternative' is now located. (Photo by Brian Eha/The Brooklyn Ink)

On a recent evening at their new workshop and offices on industrial West Street near the Greenpoint waterfront, Jones was surrounded by friends and collaborators, including several members of activist design studio DSGN AGNC, which shares the space. All were refugees from Williamsburg. Their new space is unglamorous—one of their neighbors is a porn studio—but affordable.

Cinders Gallery was not so fortunate. The brainchild of young artists Sto Len and Kelie Bowman, it had operated at 103 Havemeyer St. since 2004, but closed in the face of a significant rent increase.

“It went on for six and a half years in that one space, a different exhibition each month,” said Len, a youthful Asian man with the improbable hair of a Japanese anime character. “Amazing people came through those doors.”

Bowman and Len felt the rent increase was too much, and decided to leave.

“It was a hard decision because we had so much history there, so many great memories and such a wonderful community had built up around it,” Len said.

Other Williamsburg-based art collectives and event spaces have recently moved or closed down for similar reasons. Among them are Monster Island, an arts center that shut its doors in September, and art gallery Capricious.

A number of galleries were displaced when Monster Island closed, including artist-run space Live With Animals, and have yet to find new homes. For most, it’s unlikely that their next home will be in the old neighborhood.

In their place, however, many of the retail stores and restaurants that serve cool-seekers continue to thrive—and new ones are being added all the time.

One of the latest ventures on which critics have smiled is Maison Premiere, a “barstaurant” that scrupulously recreates the ambience of the oyster and cocktail bars of fin-de-siécle Paris and old New Orleans. Despite $1.00 oysters during happy hour, it isn’t hard to run up a large bill on expensive cocktails and other scrumptious seafood dishes that are manifestly not aimed at starving artists.

In the newWilliamsburg, gentrifiers, by their very presence, have made existence impossible for the artists who made the neighborhood desirable in the first place.

Len and Bowman still haven’t found a new permanent home for Cinders, but, since leaving Havemeyer Street, they have experimented with temporary spaces and other projects, including a pop-up restaurant with a friend who is a traveling cook from Japan. Their events are grassroots and low-profile in contrast with Maison Premiere’s slick branding and promotion.

So what does the future hold? At least one new business is trying to sustain Williamsburg’s artistic identity. Paper Box, a 5,000-square-foot performance and studio space, will be opening soon at 17 Meadow St. According to marketing director Corrie Zaccaria, the landlords, who only rent to artists and musicians, are giving Paper Box a break on the rent. “They’re really cool, and we just ended up in a great situation,” she said.

It seems unlikely, however, that other art businesses will find equally sweet deals in today’s Williamsburg. Moreover, the Paper Box team is planning to install a café, making their business a hybrid foreign to artists like Jones, Len and Bowman.

With most artists gone, Len foresees a loss of cultural memory.

“We’ve all known that it was only a matter of time before the rents were going to  get too exaggerated for most artists and art spaces to be able to afford. Once everyone’s lease is up, most of the exciting things will be gone,” he said.

Asked whether he has considered what he’ll do if rent prices in Greenpoint reach Williamsburg levels, Jones is unperturbed.

“I’m sure they will,” he said. “I’m happy to move to the next center of gentrification, because I think it’s actually a good place to organize from. I’m happy to ride on the crest of that wave.”

Siblings Daniel Blanco, 32 and Claudia Blanco, 35 launched Magenta Creative Networks.

Sixteen years ago Roberto Gill, the founder and owner of CASA Kids Design Company, moved from TriBeca to Brooklyn because his rent was too high.

He discovered he was not alone.

Brooklyn has become a magnet for designers —173 new design firms were launched in Brooklyn between 2001 and 2009—the latest available data, according to a report by David Giles, research director at the Center for an Urban Future, a New York think tank. “These artists,” he says, “flock to Brooklyn.”

They have come to DUMBO, Greenpoint, Park Slope and Bushwick, setting up shop, Giles says, in old warehouse lofts abandoned by manufacturers. Brooklyn offers lower rents than Manhattan. But there is, something more at play says Fennie Chow, 28, a graduate student in the communications design department at Pratt Institute.

“Hipster culture is incredibly trendy at the moment and most people seem to think that all hipsters live in Brooklyn, preferably Williamsburg,” she says. “There is a stigma about Manhattan that it is too expensive, too corporate, too impersonal. She adds that Brooklyn has warmth and a neighborhood vibe that doesn’t make it feel so urban.  Chow says designers are people who want to connect with each other and form a bond. Open spaces in Brooklyn provide that opportunity.

“In many ways, Brooklyn is the ‘new’ downtown, geographically better connected to Manhattan,” says Matilda McQuaid, deputy curatorial director and head oftextiles at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Gill, 53, a father of two, launched his furniture company in 1992 because he liked the idea of being independent. He says when he was studying architecture at Harvard he did not know he could a make career out of design. “It was a discovery to realize that I love design,” he says with a smile. A native of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Gill plans to stay in Brooklyn and expand his design business. He recently designed a child’s room in Dumbo. His design consisted of a loft bed and a storage area. As a minimalist designer, he decided to use only a few colors. He says kids get easily tired of lots of colors and when they grow up they don’t like it. He says an average project usually costs somewhere from $8,000 to $10,000.

But business is not necessarily dependent on proximity to clients – nor on having office space, thanks to the Internet. In 2007, for instance, siblings Daniel Blanco, 32 and Claudia Blanco, 35 launched Magenta Creative Networks, a company that delivers motion graphics, print and media campaigns. In 2008, the siblings created a media campaign for New York City Health Department called, “ NYC Condoms: Get Some.”

They work from their apartment in Ditmas Park. “So, we are like the Internet, we can be everywhere, and team with other designers when the project requires it,” Daniel says. “We can be as small or big as necessary.”

Still, the recession has taken its toll on the design industry. Giles says design jobs have decreased since 2008. “Design companies depend on consumer spending,” Giles says. “ When consumer spending decreases—jobs decreases.” Gill, for one, has downsized his firm from four employees to two because, he says, business was slow.

But Giles adds that the recession did not have as much of an impact on the design industry as it had on other industries because the Internet has allowed designers to take advantage of rising consumer spending in places like China and India.

The decrease in the price of technology has also helped design firms in Brooklyn and other places. “Designers by nature are nimble and are smart to find new niches when old ones become obsolete or no longer pertinent to the time and economy,” says McQuaid.

Virtually all design firms have a web presence and use social media tools to communicate with their clients — Gill says the Internet drives 70 to 80 percent of his business. The developments in technology and lower cost of communications have also allowed more artists to become freelancers.

Esteban Perez, 29, is a freelance graphic designer with his own company, Hemi Studio. He has been living in Brooklyn for two years. He finds Brooklyn slower, quieter, a lot simpler than Manhattan. “Brooklyn’s design crowd looks for participation, social involvement and has a strong link as a small community,” says Perez.

Perez says as technology becomes more advanced, designers will have to become more creative as computers will be able to take care of menial jobs. Even though he is having a hard time finding bigger contracts, he remains optimistic about design industry and his colleagues.

Grace Fuller, 55, smiles for the camera. Photo by Neha Banka/BI

When St. Vincent’s Hospital, a private institution in Manhattan closed its doors amid a citywide uproar in April 2010, medical technician Grace Fuller thought she and other qualified employees would quickly find new jobs. The hospital, founded by the Sisters of Charity, was the last Roman Catholic general hospital in New York City and was known for its service to the poor and uninsured.

The hospital was important to the city’s residents. It was a major supplier of health care to the homeless and poor, who came from across the city to seek treatment, according to an administrator in one of the many reports written about the hospital’s closure in the New York Times. In the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, the hospital also played a major role in providing medical assistance to those affected.

Fuller, who lives in Greenpoint, had been at the hospital for 20 years administering tests using specific technical equipment known as an electrocardiograph and Holter. “We were told that we would be placed into other hospitals, but there just weren’t enough placements for everybody,” Fuller said.

More ominously, she said, the available jobs themselves had changed in ways that no longer fit her long-acquired technical skills. At St. Vincent’s Fuller was responsible only for her specific job running two kinds of tests. Searching for a new job, however, she discovered that one individual must be equipped to do multiple jobs.

“They were combining our jobs with nurses aides,” she said.

She recalls a job fair at which she learned that the job she had done, working the EKG and Holter machines, now required a license. Moreover, hospitals were seeking practitioners able to perform other technical jobs such as drawing blood.

“After working for 20 years, I don’t think I should start again,” Fuller said. She said she would lose the seniority status she had acquired after devoting 20 years of her life to her job.

She also lacks computers skills and was not familiar with other technological advances that took place in the last 20 years.  Nor does she have a college degree, having entered the job market immediately upon graduating from high school.

One option is to enter a training program at hospitals offering jobs that do not require a college degree. Her union also offered retraining when the hospital closed, but at 55 years old she doesn’t want to go through training.

Fuller has been unemployed now for almost two years, and it is unclear when or how she will rejoin the workforce. She said she considers herself better off than most unemployed people she knows. She receives the maximum for unemployment from the state, which is $405 per week, but that will run out at the end of the year. Her four sons, in their mid-to-late 20s and 30s, all have steady job and provide additional assurance. She is convinced her sons would provide assistance if her situation became dire.

It is just Fuller and her husband in the household, and she manages. “I don’t splurge on buying things. I just buy what we need,” Fuller said. Her husband retired from his job as an emergency medical technician in the Fire Department in October, and the couple is waiting to receive his pension by the end of November.

Rent is not a problem since she and her two sisters share ownership of a three-family brownstone, which they inherited from their parents.

She is still bitter about the closing of St. Vincent’s. “We were really angry when we were laid off. Because we really thought somebody would come in and save the hospital,” Fuller said. “I think the problem was that [the other hospitals] weren’t willing to pay me what I was being paid in St. Vincent’s. My salary was higher than that of the newer set of people coming in.”

Fuller was getting paid about $20 an hour, she said, while the newer people were getting around $13-14 an hour. According to Fuller, it was natural for them to hire somebody for less money.

“We were told that the money was gone. But we were never told what happened to it. When did it disappear?” she said. “They were installing flat-screen TV’s by the elevators and we wondered where in the world did those come from if they had no money! They were always doing ‘renovations’ but they kept telling us that they didn’t have money.”

She is also angry with her union, 1199. She recalls the union doing nothing about the entire situation. “In fact, some of the [union] people started looking into other hospitals [for jobs] themselves months in advance. By word of mouth if they heard of jobs opening in other hospitals, they would transfer all of a sudden to these hospitals”, said Fuller.

By the time the hospital closed down, there really weren’t any jobs available, Fuller recalled. But that is what the situation looked like to her. What actually happened will remain an inside story.

“The union was willing to train me but I didn’t want to do those jobs. They wanted me to do patient care. And at my age, I wasn’t going to hurt myself doing that. I’ve seen what some of the women I know had to do. And with my knees and back, its ridiculous,” said Fuller.

“I loved my hospital. I was in a job I loved to do. I was doing it for many years and I was good at it. I didn’t have any problems. I felt betrayed”, she said. “It was made to sound so hopeful that some other hospital would take us over and St. Vincent’s would never close. But they just gave me a pink slip and told me I could clear out my locker today or come do it the next day. That was it.”

If a pair of strangers had not met on New Years Eve of 2009, Good Yoga would not exist in Greenpoint.

That night, Flannery Foster, 33, went to a party at the apartment of Ray Gonazales, 34. The apartment looked like a loft with white walls and a skylight illuminating the rooms. “ I joked with Ray that this place will make a good yoga center,” said Foster.

Earlier that evening the two had met at a concert. Foster liked that Gonzales is relaxed, tall and genuine. Gonzales liked the fact that Foster wasn’t shy and was wearing boots to her knees. After the concert, Foster went to the party at Gonzales place.

Three weeks later Foster moved in to Gonazales’s place with two goals: starting a yoga business and living together as a couple.

The decision to move in together was made on whim. Foster e-mailed Gonzales. Gonzales said that it made sense for him.

Now, some two and half years later after that meeting Good Yoga has become a hangout and yoga center on a quiet corner of Calyer Street.

Foster’s interest in having a yoga center as a business developed over several years. She had worked as a restaurant manager and actress. “I had been working 80 hours a week at times,” Foster said. “I didn’t want to wake up every morning and catch up the 7 a.m. train to Manhattan for work.” After 13 years of changing jobs and surviving in New York, she said she was worn out. On her 28th birthday, Foster asked herself: “ If I had never ending source of money, how will I spend my time?” She told herself, ‘I would be doing yoga, making art, and travelling.”

She had been introduced to yoga when she was 18 by a college professor at Boston University. She found it too slow, and did not like it. But, In her mid 20s, she realized that she was discontented with her life despite working as an actress and living in New York. During this time her father died. She started doing yoga again and read spiritual books to comfort herself. She hurt her back while working as a waitress. Yoga helped her decrease the pain, she said.
“I did further training in New York and then I went to Sri Lanka to teach yoga,” said Foster. She spent six months in Asia starting November of 2007. “I was learning about things that I could not find in pure form here,” she said. She spent time with gurus and Buddhist monks.

She returned to New York and started formulating plans to make money through yoga.

Meanwhile, Gonzales liked the idea of creating a yoga center as soon as Foster presented her plan to him.

Gonzales had come to New York in 2003 after graduating from Humboldt State University in California. As a student in college, he had tried different majors but ultimately graduated with a degree in studio art. He is laid back, confident and supportive of new ideas. He started a graphic design business with two of his cousins but the recession hit his business hard. In 2008 he shut it down.

On New Years Eve 2009, a mutual friend of the two texted them individually to come to a My Morning Jacket concert in Madison Square Garden. During the concert, Flannery and Gonzales were taking pictures of themselves together. “Your eye is dead,” Foster said to Gonzales after looking at a photo image. Gonzales confidently said that he has glaucoma in his left eye. “I was so embarrassed,” Foster said, “but he made me comfortable.”

They continued to see each other and decided quickly to launch a yoga business. Foster had been teaching yoga as a private tutor in New York City and was planning to start a yoga business. Gonzales liked the idea of a partnership because at a yoga center he would be able to use his graphic design skills developing and maintaining the website for their business.

It was challenging to start a business, said Foster. They had neither a business plan nor permission from their landlord to start a business at the apartment. Their landlord was in Barcelona. “It was horrible to feel that something might not go through,” said Foster. She had been asked by one of her students in France to come and teach yoga. From France the couple flew to Barcelona to get their landlord’s OK.

Upon their return to New York, they used their credit cards to invest in the business. Gonzales had to break his 401 K to get more money.

According to Gonzales, they spent approximately $3000 to fix the windows. Gonzales fixed the leaks, welded metal and put plastic bars into the windows to insulate the house. Foster started to invite people via word of mouth to teach yoga. Gonzales made the logo and the website to promote the business.

As number of students increased, Foster started to teach 25 classes per week because she could not afford to hire teacher. Foster said, “Overworking was a huge problem.” They started to delegate work to students who were not able to pay for yoga classes. Foster said, “We used yoga as a currency.” Also, according to Foster, there are a lot of yoga teachers in New York. Some yoga teachers start teaching for free until they started attracting more students. At Good Yoga, the teachers don’t get paid when they first start. “Our teachers who stay longer get $15 an hour and then $5 person up to $40 dollars,” said Foster. “ I look for quality, confidence in instructive styles and a strong technique assisting with their hands.”

When the students started to come in, Gonzales and Foster realized that there was no place for students to hang out. Gonzales rearranged part of the first floor into a lounge and created a sliding door so that students can enter the lounge area from the main door.

Now, Good Yoga has the feeling of a meditation center or ashram and is filled with the fragrance of incense. Yoga classes are conducted in various rooms and on the rooftop where you can view Manhattan’s skyline.

One of the yoga teachers is Leona Ross, 34. “Good Yoga has a sense of community that I haven’t really got at other centers,” she said. Leona teaches 3 yoga classes and one meditation class. She also takes training classes taught by other teachers.

The partners said they have struggled to pay bills until the last few months, subletting part of their apartment helped. Recently, the two were able to afford to donate 10 percent of their profits to Fistula Foundation, a non-profit committed to helping women who are injured during pregnancy, Foster said.

According to Google Maps, there are 10 yoga centers within a 1mile radius of Good Yoga. She found out that the 10 a.m. classes attract a lot of students and she changed her class time accordingly. Good Yoga charges $15 for introductory sessions. “There is a standard pricing for Yoga—some studios in the neighborhood charge higher,” said Foster.

Over the next few years, she and Gonzales would like to purchase the building that hosts the yoga center.

Interior of loft where Lacy Davis, 28, lives (Brian Eha / Brooklyn Ink)

From the fire escape of Dave Mitchell’s building, an industrial space on Dobbin Street now converted into residential lofts, you can look across a gray roofscape to the end of the block. On this industrial badland, wild parties were once held, but no longer. Now a gated metal fence—one of several baby-safe upgrades to come—cuts off the fire escape from its surroundings.

“This used to all be open,” Mitchell said. “You used to be able to get on the roof.”

The reason for the change is that residents of the building, located in an Industrial Business Zone in Greenpoint, filed an application with the New York City Loft Board to have their units declared legal residences. Although the application is still under review, their landlord has already begun bringing the building up to code.

As more buildings like Mitchell’s file for residential status, the famously bohemian culture of Brooklyn loft-dwelling is mellowing into something only slightly grittier than regular apartment life. It isn’t exactly the suburbs, but already, Mitchell says, families with children have begun moving in.

For decades, illegally converted loft buildings have been a fixture of New York City housing, drawing people who like living off the grid. Mitchell, a 27-year-old skateboarder who has shared a Greenpoint loft with several friends for the past six years, is such a person. Loft-dwellers like him gain privacy and low rent in exchange for a lack of basic services, rent stabilization and other tenant rights.

The loft law, passed in June 2010, has begun to change that landscape. Based on a similar 1982 law that focused on Manhattan loft-dwellers, the new law makes it possible for occupants of commercial buildings in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg, North Brooklyn and Maspeth IBZs to obtain full residential rights. One requirement of the application is that at least three units of the building must have been occupied continuously from January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2009.

In Mitchell’s building, the one leading the drive for legalization was Leah Hebert. She organized a meeting for all the occupants to decide whether they wanted to pursue protections under the loft law. Most of her neighbors showed up, and they took a vote. It was unanimous in favor of applying.

Hebert serves as chief of staff for Brooklyn Assemblyman Vito Lopez, a longtime affordable housing advocate and the sponsor of the 2010 loft law. She says her knowledge of that law—acquired by working for Lopez—has allowed her to advise her landlord on the legalization process and soothe his concerns.

“He was very hesitant at first,” she said. “It took a lot of mediation.”

Other landlords aren’t so willing to join hands with their tenants. “Sometimes landlords will look at [the loft law] as something impeding their ability to get the biggest financial return on their investment,” Hebert said. “They will try and claim incompatible use, they will try and claim all kinds of things.”

In response to the reported bullying of tenants by landlords, which occurred in the wake of the loft law, Lopez sponsored another bill, this one guaranteeing loft-dwellers basic services such as heat and water while they await the result of their Loft Board application. It also grants them the ability to plead their case in housing court if their landlord is abusive. The bill went into effect in April 2011. However, Rich Mazur, executive director of North Brooklyn Development Corporation, suspects the harassment has not stopped since then but has simply become less overt.

“I’d say the percentage of abusers is about the same,” he guessed. “Economics dictate [that they not] lose sight of their ultimate goal.”

For now, Hebert says, the relationship with her landlord is good but precarious. Tenants who have not individually applied for legal residency status are still technically illegal occupants unless and until the owner registers his building with the Loft Board. Hebert’s landlord says he’s going to register the building, but hasn’t done it yet.

Mitchell understands the desire to protect what’s yours, but feels bad about forcing his landlord to spend money to make the building legally habitable. These costs, however, are passed on to the tenants over time.

What’s worse, legalization “changes the whole feel of the neighborhood,” Mitchell said. By his own admission, he performs “glorified manual labor” building window displays for fashion houses like Louis Vuitton, and currently splits a $2,000-a-month rent on a five-bedroom loft with six others. By contrast, he says, new residents are “creatives and people that are making a lot of money.”

Lacy Davis typifies the new breed of loft-dweller. Recently arrived from Oklahoma, Davis, 28, a girlish blonde with an open face, is subletting from a man who moved out because his dog died and he could no longer bear to live in the unit they had shared. He left behind an extensive book collection, including works by Michael Chabon and the Marquis de Sade. He also left a mess.

“The place was filthy,” Davis said, and she and her roommate promptly set about cleaning it up.

Despite her willingness to tackle dirt and grime, it’s hard to imagine her making a home here during the days when, Mitchell says, “squatter laws” prevailed and a Russian gambling establishment operated out of the building. The police eventually shut down the illegal gambling operation but they left the tenants alone.

“People were evicted, and still living in their apartments. It was wild, man. Now it’s pretty much just like a normal apartment building,” Mitchell said.

Davis is paying less than $1,000 a month for her share of the loft, and is happy with that. “I think he’s still making money off me,” she said of her landlord.

Without air conditioning or central heat, living in a loft can still be “gnarly at times,” Mitchell said, but his building is no longer the Wild West frontier town it once was. He seems more than a little nostalgic for the bad old days. “It used to be a lot more, like, you could do whatever you want,” he said.

Asked why she moved in four years ago, before protections for loft occupants were in place, Hebert is unequivocal. “They’re beautiful spaces,” she said. “Tall ceilings, huge windows and we are walking distance from the Bedford stop. Who wouldn’t want to live here?”

The number of people seeking assistance from Greenpoint Reformed Church have risen every year since 2007. Yet invoices show that TEFAP supplies have dropped off precipitously. (Photo: Brian Eha, The Brooklyn Ink)

Eric Hargraves can’t get enough to eat.

Hargraves, who lives in Greenpoint, came to New York from Lincoln, Nebraska, where he was working as a home health aide and part-time mechanic. During that time, he struggled with an addiction to heroin. Finally, 18 months ago, he and his family made the decision for him to come to New York for treatment so that he could return home a changed man.

His wife is supporting herself and their children back home, but there isn’t much left over for Hargraves himself. He lives in a halfway house and depends on food assistance.

Despite the hardship, he plans to stay in New York as a patient of King’s County Hospital until the beginning of next year—long enough to be sure he won’t backslide. “If I’m no good to myself, I’m no good to anyone else,” he said.

Hargraves is one of dozens of hungry residents of Greenpoint, Brooklyn who depend on the food pantry and soup kitchen run by Greenpoint Reformed Church at 136 Milton Street. In 2010, more than $200,000 worth of food and other necessities were distributed by the church.

That assistance is now in danger. Most of its food funding has traditionally come from The Emergency Food Assistance Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but in recent months TEFAP supplies have dried up, forcing Ann Kansfield, the pastor who runs the outreach, to turn people away or send them home with very little food.

What’s happening here is happening all over the country, as the number of impoverished Americans climbs and federal budgets are stretched to the breaking point.

A square-jawed woman with short, spiked hair and a no-nonsense attitude, Kansfield seems well-suited to tackle the social problems of a neighborhood that, although in the early stages of gentrification, still has plenty of industrial grit. Homelessness is an enduring issue, and the poverty rate in Greenpoint is well above the Brooklyn average.

Until recently, the numbers at both the Wednesday night dinner and the Thursday food giveaway had doubled every year since the pantry and soup kitchen opened in fall 2007, Kansfield said. Yet her invoices show that TEFAP supplies have dropped off precipitously since June.

In her hot, airless office above the church’s kitchen, Kansfield laid out folders containing careful records for the past three years. She is clearly worked up, indignation masking frustration at her inability to resolve a crisis whose root cause lies far beyond her corner of New York.

Throughout the first half of 2011, TEFAP deliveries to Greenpoint Reformed Church routinely totaled $1,000 to $2,000 each and contained a healthy variety of food. The delivery on June 15, by contrast, was less than $500 of mostly canned goods.

In July and August, the quantity and variety of food continued to decline. Even so, the delivery on September 1 was startling—eight cases of tomato juice totaling $91. That was all.

“I wanted to cry I was so angry,” Kansfield said.

Kansfield is struggling to make up the deficit with other sources of funding, including the Emergency Food Assistance Program, run by the New York City Human Resources Administration, and New York State’s Hunger Prevention Nutrition Assistance Program. But these are minor compared to what TEFAP had provided.

Kansfield, who holds a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, says with some dark humor that keeping the food pantry and soup kitchen open takes every bit of her Ivy League education.

In September, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the percentage of Americans living below the federal poverty line rose to 15.1 percent in 2010, from 14.3 percent in 2009, and that more people are now impoverished than at any time in the nation’s history. New York fares even worse: 16 percent of New Yorkers are below the poverty line, defined as a yearly income of $22,350 for a family of four. Food assistance programs such as Greenpoint Reformed’s are becoming ever more necessary.

Though TEFAP is a federal program funded by Congressional appropriations, its funds are managed and distributed on a state and local level. Each state administers TEFAP for the USDA through regional food banks. According to Heather Groll, the public information officer at the New York State Office of General Services, there are eight such food banks in New York. Of those eight, the Food Bank for New York City receives the lion’s share—approximately 62 percent of all USDA food and administrative funds allocated to the state. Funding and food entitlement, she says, is pegged to the food stamp participation in the counties the food banks serve.

In 2009, New York State received about $45 million in TEFAP funds. In 2010, the state received a little more than $39 million. In 2011, funds were down to about $28 million.

Hans Billger, a public affairs official at the Food and Nutrition Service, the agency within the USDA that manages TEFAP, says a funding shortfall is affecting not only New York but the entire country. The TEFAP budget has been slashed even as the American poverty rate has continued to climb.

On a Monday in late September, Hargraves stood in the gathering dusk outside the house he shares with several other men on Clay Street near Manhattan Avenue. His large frame was wrapped in a spongy orange coat. He and his housemates “pretty much counted on” the church for sustenance, he said. Formerly, the men—seven to 10 in all—would gather as a group and walk the ten blocks to the church every Wednesday and Thursday. The groceries they received would last them for days. Now many of them skip it because it isn’t worth the walk.

It’s hard to survive on nothing but a few canned goods, he said, “especially when you’re used to getting bread and milk and meat, you know, things that you can cook—make a meal out of. It’s not like that anymore.”

Patrons prepare to enter the Polish and Slavic Center in Greenpoint. (Photo: Brian Eha / The Brooklyn Ink)

Ana Dricdzic doesn’t want her neighborhood to change. The owner of Staropolski Meat Market & Deli, located on Manhattan Avenue — Greenpoint’s main commercial strip — Dricdzic holds forth on the ethnic character of her neighborhood in between phone calls in Polish and warm transactions with customers.

Her small shop is stocked with Polish breads, teas and candies. In a glass display case are heaped links of kielbasa and other meats as well as platters of potato pancakes and cheese blintzes.

“This [is a] Polish area,” she said. And she wants it to stay that way. “American a little bit, Spanish a little bit is okay,” Dricdzic said, referring to the predominantly white twenty- and thirty-somethings who have moved into the neighborhood in recent years, and to the now-sizable Latino population in north Greenpoint, but she doesn’t cater to those demographics.

Dricdzic is a holdout in what was once called Little Poland. Not many years ago, residents say, anyone on the street in Greenpoint was assumed to speak Polish. But now, though many parts of the neighborhood still feel Polish, many of the markers of Polish culture — bakeries, meat markets and restaurants — are gradually disappearing.

The real estate market is seeing a similar demographic shift. Victor Wolski, a broker at Greenpoint Properties Inc., said few people buying homes in the neighborhood today are Polish. The new residents are of various ethnic backgrounds and nationalities and rents are going up because of the influx of what he describes as young urban professionals and creative types.

And the neighborhood has gotten more expensive. Wolski estimates that rents have increased 50 percent in some cases over the last five years. Although this is a boon for some Polish landlords — especially on trendy Franklin Street and the Lorimer Street corridor — other residents feel they are being priced out of the neighborhood. Some retirement-age Poles are selling their Greenpoint homes for a profit and moving on.

According to Wolski and other residents, many Poles have moved away in the last five years — and the exodus seems to be accelerating. Some former Greenpointers have formed new Polish enclaves in cheaper neighborhoods such as Ridgewood and Maspeth in Queens. Others have returned to Poland.

The eclectic tastes of their replacements, many of them young people, are evident in the new boutiques and bars that have sprung up. Among these is Kill Devil Hill, a modern take on the concept of a general store. Opened in 2008, it sells vintage workwear and specialty grooming products as well as 10-cent candy.

In 2008, Justyna Goworowska, a graduate student in geography at the University of Oregon, presented a master’s thesis detailing the “eradication of [Greenpoint’s] distinctive cultural landscape.” Her findings indicated that Poles are being displaced “through expensive housing units, disappearing manufacturing jobs [and] the changing commercial landscape.”

After Poland’s 2004 entrance into the European Union, she wrote, “migrating to the United States for economic reasons ceased to make sense.” With long-time Polish residents leaving for cheaper neighborhoods and few recent immigrants to replace them, Goworowska concluded that “Greenpoint is rapidly transitioning from a Polish ethnic enclave into a hip urban American neighborhood.”

Martin Cyran is well placed to observe the transition. He emigrated with his mother from Poland 10 years ago and works with her at the family restaurant, Happy End Polish Cuisine at 924 Manhattan Ave.

He and his mother lived in Greenpoint for the first five years, then Cyran bought a house in Maspeth, one of the Queens neighborhoods to which former Greenpointers are flocking. His mother stayed behind in Greenpoint. In the years since moving, Cyran says he has seen business at Happy End steadily decline. Their regulars are leaving and the new residents aren’t interested in Polish cuisine.

He regrets that there’s little future for the homemade Polish food he’s proud of, but is resigned to the change. “That’s the rules: if you cannot belong inside, then you got to move out.”

The changes in Greenpoint have been bad for his restaurant, but good for his lifestyle. At 30, Cyran says he spends a lot of time partying in nearby Williamsburg.

“If I had enough money,” he said, “I would buy [a] condo over here.” He dreams of opening a coffee shop with broad appeal when Happy End closes down.

The local restaurant landscape has already reacted to new palates. Across the street from Happy End is the popular Thai Café. A neighborhood institution for the last 15 years, it has since been joined on Manhattan Avenue by three other Thai restaurants, a number that would have been unthinkable five years ago. La Taverna — a nearby Italian restaurant operated by a Hungarian — used to be a Polish bookstore.

One of the three remaining Polish bookstores in Greenpoint is located at 161 Java Street, near the Polish & Slavic Center. On a Monday afternoon it was empty and quiet. Books by Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, were prominently displayed.

Owner Andrzej Szymanik, once a member of the anti-communist resistance in his homeland, emigrated to the United States in 1981, shortly before martial law was enacted in Poland. A brusque man with short gray hair, he says the Polish flight from Greenpoint is “across the board.” People of all ages are leaving.

In addition to the young workers leaving for Europe in search of better pay and benefits, many political refugees of Szymanik’s generation have chosen to return to the homeland they once fled. Little by little, the culture they brought to Brooklyn is leaving with them.

“They moved back because of the political changes,” Szymanik said, referring to the overthrow of Communism in Poland, “and because also they were involved in [the] opposition, and right now they have a lot of friends who are in government. So they have all those connections because those people who were in [the] opposition movement went to power.”

Szymanik, like Cyran, accepts the changing demographics as inevitable even as he pursues new strategies to stay in business. Because his bookstore is suffering, he now operates a Polish food business, buying from a local wholesaler and shipping all over the country.

“Without the food business, probably I would have to close the bookstore already,” he said. His next project is a gallery and online store of Polish contemporary art attached to the bookstore’s website.

Asked why he doesn’t return to Poland himself, Szymanik said he has put down roots in New York.

“I have family here,” he said. “I have four kids and a house. Everybody’s here. My sister also is here.”

When he visits the old country it is to see his mother, who still lives there.

“I know Poland well enough, so I don’t need to go back.”

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Darrell Issa (R-CA) current ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is taking over the chairmanship from Edolphus Towns (D - NY) as part of the new Republican congressional leadership. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

By Miranda Neubauer

Brooklyn’s clout in the new U.S. Congress will be greatly diminished come January. Despite easy victories in November, the borough’s three most powerful congressional representatives will be removed from leadership posts in three House committees when the new Republican majority is sworn in.

Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D), who represents Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick and Sunset Park, among other areas, will lose her chairmanship of the House Committee on Small Business that she has held since 2007.

One organization that is set to receive $750,000 in federal funding this year through Congresswoman Velazquez’s position is the Brooklyn Kings County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. The money will fund a not-for-profit business incubator program.

The loss of her position on the committee “will be a detriment to the aspiring entrepreneurs and to the small business community in general, ” said its President Rick Miranda.

The organization, which has existed since 2005, also offers loans through the Small Business Administration, helps minority owned businesses obtain certification to do work for the city and hosts educational and networking forums.

“Someone like Congresswoman Velazquez, who came from a pretty poor background herself, … she realizes that the middle-class citizens that contemplate and dream about opening up a business can never take the plunge because they never have the money or the savvy or the education,” said Miranda. Miranda also pointed out that the group’s business incubator could sponsor six businesses per quarter, amounting to 24 a year. “A huge mouthful in this economy.”

Without Velazquez, said Miranda, he fears such funding for small business might dry up. The new Republican majority “should take a real hard look at what is available and continue to assist those programs that are doing well and not just say we need to cut our spending on these programs.” The new majority should not “choke us in our ability to execute services to the small business community.”

The weakening of the power of other Brooklyn congressmen will have more national effect.

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D), who represents Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York, among other areas, will lose his position as chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee—a position he has held since 2009.

The change in chairmanship of the committee has a national impact, Julian Phillips, Towns’ spokesperson said. “The congressman was such a strong ally for the president … now that he will more than likely be taking a lesser role, obviously the kind of power and influence he was able to wield as chairman will no longer be the case.” Over the summer, Towns held a hearing in Brooklyn to examine a case of fraud at a Brooklyn census office, after two managers were fired for fraudulently filling out census forms.

As chairman of an investigative committee with subpoena power, Towns has also investigated the BP oil spill and the Toyota recall, among other major issues. “The new chairman may have a different agenda,” Phillips said. While Towns will be able to serve the community as Congressman and as ranking minority member, “his powers will be less than what they were.”

In fall 2009, Director of the National Urban League Marc Morial testified at an Oversight Committee hearing about the impact of the economic crisis on minority communities. With the change in leadership, Morial said, “you’re not going to have as much of an examination of policies and solutions [related to] the disparities of the recession and the disparities of the subprime crisis.”  Foreclosure rates have been highest in areas with high minority populations, such as Bushwick.

Jerrold Nadler (D), representing Coney Island, Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, will go from high ranking to minority status in the Judiciary and Transportation and Infrastructure committees.

Nadler’s spokesman Ilan Kayatsky also said it is too early to tell how the new majority will play out. “We will still be fighting for the same transportation reforms, such as seeking more funding for mass transit and high speed rail.”

Kayatsky added that “more debates and disagreement on how much and where and why” would be expected with Republicans in the majority. Democrats, he said, will no longer be “driving the house agenda” as negotiations get underway. With a new six year transportation up for reauthorization, Kayatsky said that for Nadler, “it’s really about funding mass transit as much as possible.” The congressman’s priority, he went on to say, was increasing sustainable transportation options and expanding rail freight with “less focus on cars and roads.”

Last July, Nadler helped to secure $ 450,000 for a Brooklyn Waterfront Transportation Study, which will explore the transportation improvements necessary to develop a container port at South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park. According to the congressman’s summer press release, “the development of deep water port facilities in New York Harbor will create tens of thousands of jobs in New York City and the region, and will protect New York’s position as the East Coast’s major gateway to global trade.”