Girl bus tour may be coming to Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Bushwick

March 6, 2014 By 2 Comments

girls-bus-tour

This is just what Brooklyn needs! More tourists. Ugh. They should just shuttle them off to Brooklyn Heights:

The circuit would focus on everything from Greenpoint’s coffee outpost Café Grumpy, where Lena Dunham’s character Hannah Horvath once slung lattes, to a Bushwick warehouse where Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) accidentally smokes crack.

But don’t expect a glitzy romp through the West Village to Sex and the City staple Magnolia Bakery, or past the Condé Nast building where Carrie Bradshaw once penned articles for Vogue, on a “Girls” tour — much of the hit show takes place far away from the bright lights of the big city. [Read more...]

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L Train signs at Metropolitan/Lorimer accidentally switched

March 6, 2014 By Comments

l switch

Look closely at the picture above. Notice anything…out of place? That’s the passage leading to the L train in the Metropolitan/Lorimer subway stop in Williamsburg. Most of us don’t need the signs telling us which train goes to Manhattan and which one barrels out into Canarsie.

Some people do need those signs, however, which is why it’s notable that they’re switched in the picture. The left passage actually leads to the Manhattan-bound track, and the right to Brooklyn. Who switched them? Unclear, but it caused some commuter consternation. According to the observant photographer, Astrid Anderson:

I took the train at 830 AM, but I think it was up until the late afternoon. I went to the actual Manhattan side and waited for the train. Everyone was looking extremely confused. When the train came on my side, a bunch of people on the other side started freaking out and tried to run back to the other side.
My friend took another photo around 4 PM & someone had simple stuck a post-it on one sign saying “this is wrong”.

Here’s Astrid’s friend’s photo with the post-it note:

wrong

The signs were fixed as of Tuesday evening.

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Listen to the new Mac DeMarco single: ‘Brother’

March 6, 2014 By Comments

mac-demarco-salad-daysHis new record Salad Days is out, appropriately, on April Fools’ Day. Check out the second single below:

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The Hipster Music Index: someone finally scientifically quantified which bands are hip

March 5, 2014 By 2 Comments

hipster-chart

Someone’s crunched the numbers! Now we know which bands we should be into and which ones are too popular to be hip. Who knew Boards of Canada was for the bros?

So, the first scientific criterion for identifying a hipster band is that Pitchfork likes them. Pitchfork reviewers like a lot of mainstream music, however, so that’s not enough. The second criterion is that not many people should like that band. The music must be obscure so that people can say, “My favorite band is X, you’ve probably never heard of them.”

To measure obscurity, we looked at the number of Facebook likes the Pitchfork review received. All else being equal, we expected a hipster band to get fewer Facebook shares than a non-hipster band with the same score.

For a given Pitchfork Review Score, the trend line uses a linear regression to predict how many Facebook likes you’d expect the album to receive given its critical acclaim.

By our criteria, the further below the line a blue dot is, the more hipster the band. (It’s high quality but obscure.) Dots above the line represent more mainstream (not hipster) bands.

See the full breakdown, band by band, below: [Read more...]

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Bushwick apartments set for development in converted church

March 5, 2014 By Comments
St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church on Jefferson Street (2011). Credit: Heather Hartshorn

St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church on Jefferson Street (2011). Credit: Heather Hartshorn

In more real estate news, Cayuga Capital, the management company of several neighborhood residential buildings, including 44 Berry Street, acquired permits to begin transforming the former St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church into 99 rental apartments and a parking lot. The company purchased the property in 2012, and was originally denied permission to build. The church originally opened in 1892, and was designed by architect Theobald M. Engelhardt.

More from Brownstoner:

New permits have been issued at 626-628 Bushwick Avenue, the former St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church and school, pictured above, to convert the property into 99 rental apartments by developer Cayuga Capital. An Alt-1 permit to convert it to residential apartments was filed in February 2012 and disapproved the following month. There is a partial vacate order in effect on the property.

But a new permit using the address 616 Bushwick Avenue was granted in November. The three-story church will be turned into a four-story one, although the height will remain the same. There will also be horizontal additions, according to the permit.

A one-story scaffold that had covered the front of the buildings for years came down in 2012. In August, a new permit to erect scaffolding was granted, and now netting and pipe scaffolding covers the church all the way to the top of the steeple.

In October, Cayuga put a 90 percent interest stake in seven Bushwick properties on the market for $14,000,000 through MNS to raise funds to complete the Bushwick Avenue conversion, as we reportedat the time. The school and church were designed by architect Theobald M. Engelhardt and completed in 1885 and 1892, respectively. The church space has also been used for parties and a movie set. Click through to the jump to see the church in its scaffolding shroud.

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Big Hug Mugs from ‘True Detective’ going for $100+ on eBay

March 5, 2014 By Comments
Rust Cohle want you to buy a Big Hug Mug.

Rust Cohle wants you to buy a Big Hug Mug.

You’d better act fast if you want your very own Big Hug Mug, as seen in HBO’s True Detective. The troubled yet brilliant detective Rust Cohle uses one as an ashtray whilst throwing back Lone Star tallboys, but feel free to use yours for coffee.

FTD, the flower company that made the mugs, still produces “Big Hug” merchandise, but the particular mug that appears in True Detective was last produced in 1999, according to a spokesperson for FTD. Which means it’s officially “vintage.”

Here’s the eBay link. The average selling price is $50-$80.

[via Eater]

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Is this the ugliest building in Williamsburg?

March 5, 2014 By 1 Comment

201-north-11th-street-rendering

someone actually designed this thing [via]

There’s certainly plenty of competition, but this thing is hideous. As Curbed mentions: “it sort of looks like a Lego tower stacked by a kid who doesn’t care very much.” If you want to check it out, its at 201 North 11th Street, very close to McCarren Park. Construction is well underway: [Read more...]

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Watch: Lykke Li – ‘Love Me Like I’m Not Made Of Stone’

March 5, 2014 By Comments

lykke-li

Her new record I Never Learn is out May 6. Here’s what she says about it:

Every song on the album is a power ballad. Like one of those old radio stations. This is a slow dance; a slow burner.

I wrote ["No Rest for the Wicked"] in Sweden when I was packing up my shit, and I’d just gotten out of a relationship and it was a horrible time. I just had the hurt, shame, sadness, guilt, longing. In the verse, I’m referring to myself pleading guilty but I’m referring to all of us.

Check out the video for the melancholy first single ‘Love Me Like I’m Not Made Of Stone’ below: [Read more...]

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