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Brooklyn Today April 9: Anti-Gentrification Groups Rebuke the Brooklyn Museum

April 9, 2018 Brooklyn Daily Eagle
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THE LEDE: Happy Monday, Brooklyn! Anti-gentrification groups criticize the Brooklyn Museum, NYCHA’s roofs get fixed, and we tour Williamsburg’sDomino Park. Plus, Mayor de Blasio considers punishing landlords for vacancies, we share the scariest mascots from March Madness, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg expects to find more cases of data grabbing. Finally, Cuba prepares for a non-Castro leader, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has some sharp words for President Trump, and a woman finds a lizard inside her bag of Trader Joe’s kale. Have a great week.              
 
IMPRINT: Parkland’s Emma Gonzalez and other young activists grace thecover of Teen Vogue.

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The Rundown
 

~DOMINO PARK WILL OPEN IN JUNE ON WILLIAMSBURG WATERFRONT: Come walk for the first time through Domino Park. There are 80-foot-tall cranes and 36-foot-high syrup tanks, a waterfront esplanade — and playground equipment that looks like a miniature sugar refinery. Two Trees Management is thisclose to completing the privately funded construction of the six-acre shoreline recreation area at its Domino Sugar Refinery mega-development in Williamsburg. The park will open to the public in June. By then, lawns will be planted. Bocce courts, a sand volleyball court and a dog run will be built. The developer spent tens of millions of dollars to construct the nearly finished park, Two Trees Management’s David Lombino said during a press tour on Thursday. And the developer will hire and pay a staff to maintain the park, he said. There’s a dearth of open space in Brooklyn Community District 1, Lombino said. The area includes Williamsburg and Greenpoint. The other tour leader was Lisa Switkin, a senior principal of James Corner Field Operations, which designed Domino Park. This landscape architecture firm was the lead designer of the High Line in the Meatpacking District and Chelsea.(via Brooklyn Eagle)
 
~65 NYCHA ROOFS REPLACED ON TIME & UNDER BUDGET, BUT HOUSING REPAIRS PIT NYC MAYOR VS. GOV.: On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that leaky roofs have been fully replaced at 65 NYCHA buildings on time and under budget. He also used the occasion to snipe at Gov.Andrew Cuomo’s sudden interest in NYCHA housing projects, just in time for the gubernatorial primaries in September. In Brooklyn, repairs have been completed at the Albany 1 & 2 and Sheepshead Bay projects. The next phase will replace 78 roofs, including Brooklyn’s Tilden, Cypress Hills and Breukelen projects. The repairs should go a long way towards dealing with the mold problems that have developed since Superstorm Sandy. The mayor did not mask his feelings toward Cuomo’s emergency order turning control of the state’s portion of NYCHA repair funding —$550 million — over to an independent monitor. “I don’t think the executive order was what we needed,” de Blasio said. “What we needed was design-build authority for all of NYCHA, and what we needed was the $250 million that the state had authorized in the 2015 and the 2017 budgets to actually get to NYCHA — neither of those things had ever happened.” (via Brooklyn Eagle)
 
~ANTI-GENTRIFICATION GROUPS REBUKE THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM:The Brooklyn Museum is under heat for hiring Kirsten Windmuller-Luna, a white woman, to be the curator of its African art collection. Twelve anti-gentrification advocacy groups called on the museum to create a “Decolonization Commission” to address the issue. Lead organizer with Equality for Flatbush Imani Henry got involved partly because he remembers a time when the museum catered more to the working-class and is now concerned that it’s becoming tone deaf to the community. But a professor of African and African-American art history thinks the controversy is based in misconception. “The outrage around Brooklyn revolves around public misconceptions … that African art scholars and curators are largely people of color,” Steven Nelson said. “Yet the field of African art history in the U.S. is largely white and female.” (via Hyperallergic)
 
~MAYOR FLOATS IDEA OF PUNISHING LANDLORDS WITH VACANCIES:With both Brooklyn and the city as a whole facing waves of retail vacancies, Mayor Bill de Blasio is floating the idea of punishing landlords who own vacant space. “I am very interested in fighting for a vacancy fee or a vacancy tax that would penalize landlords who leave their storefronts vacant for long periods of time in neighborhoods because they are looking for some top-dollar rent, but they blight neighborhoods by doing it,” de Blasio said. The mayor explained that any initiatives are only in the planning phase right now. The city doesn’t keep track of all retail vacancies, but the City Council is considering requiring owners with vacant space to register in an official database. (via Curbed New York)

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Staff Picks:   
 

LONG READ: “The Isis Files“: The New York Times scavenged thousands of documents and discovered how the Islamic State stayed in power for such a long time. (via NYT)
 
ANOTHER LONG READ: The media covered the Pulse nightclub mass shooting wrong. Here’s what they should have reported. (via Huffington Post)
 
SPORTS: For those missing March Madness, here are the scariest mascotsfrom last month’s tournament. (via USA Today)
 
EAT: Here are the 19 best pizza places in America, including Bushwick’sown Roberta’s. (via Men’s Journal)  

 
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NATIONAL BULLETIN: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg expects to findmore cases of data grabbing…Martin Luther King Jr.’s death led to gun control…And a woman in Washington, D.C., finds a lizard inside her bag of Trader Joe’s kale. (via Politico, NYT and People)                 
 
FOREIGN FLASH: Ex-South Korean President Park Geun-hye is sentenced to24 years in prison…Cuba prepares for a non-Castro leader…And Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has some sharp words for President Trump.(via The Guardian, USA Today and WaPo)                                  
 
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 ROYAL WATCH: Here’s what Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’swedding cake will be like. (via Time)

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BROOKLYN TONIGHT   
 

6:30PM — Screening and Panel Discussion: King in the Wilderness at NYU Skirball Center. Details.
 
6:30PM — Collecting the Past: Pierpont Morgan and Ancient Mesopotamia at Morgan Library & Museum. Details.
 
6:30PM — The Psychology of Relationships: How ‘Seinfeld’ Can Teach Us About Love at Prospect Heights Brainery. Details.
 
6:30PM – 8:30PM — Long Distance Caregiving Workshop at Park Slope Center for Successful Aging. Details.
 
6:30PM – 10:00PM — Jane Austen’s Persuasion at 200 at Players Club.Details.
 
7:00PM — Conversation & Book Signing William Middleton at French Institute Alliance Française. Details.  
 
7:00PM — Sung Hwan Kim: Love Before Bond at The Cooper Union. Details.
 
7:00PM — Let My People Know at Bay Ridge Jewish Center. Details.
 
7:30PM — Fact or Fiction? Amadeus and the Portrayal of an Artist with F. Murray Abraham at David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center. Details.
 
9:00PM – 11:00PM — Madame Morbid Presents: Death Becomes Her at Caveat. Details.  
 
 
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EAGLE SPORTS: “As Islanders Season Ends, John Tavares Ponders aTough Call” (via NYT)

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MILESTONES
 
Happy birthday to Doug Ducey, Marc Jacobs, Taylor Kitsch, Paul Krassner,Michael Learned, Tom Lehrer, Leighton Meester, Cynthia Nixon, Keshia Knight Pulliam, Dennis Quaid, Kristen Stewart and Jacques Villeneuve!
 
Brooklyn Today’s editor is Scott Enman. Contact him at[email protected]. 


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