Brooklyn Views

January 3, 2014

Polar Bear Club takes annual icy plunge at Coney Island

The swim serves as a frigid way to ring in the new year.

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Polar Bear Club takes annual icy plunge at Coney Island - NY Daily News

Around 2,500 intrepid swimmers took a dip in the 41-degree ocean at Coney Island Wednesday as part of the annual Polar Bear Club dip

Polar Bear Club takes annual icy plunge at Coney Island

Brownstone and North Brooklyn Home Prices Shoot Up, Report Shows

Home prices in Brownstone Brooklyn and North Brooklyn rose 13 percent over 2013, a report shows.

Brownstone and North Brooklyn Home Prices Shoot Up, Report Shows - Boerum Hill - DNAinfo.com New York

(Excerpt)
"The ever-shrinking pool of Brooklyn listings pushed prices up more than 13 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013 from the year before, according to a report from Ideal Properties released Friday.
From Park Slope and Prospect Heights to Greenpoint and Williamsburg, bidding wars were pervasive, with nearly 62 percent of homes selling at or above asking prices"

Banning horse-drawn carriages an early focus for New York's new mayor

Banning horse-drawn carriages an early focus for New York's new mayor - CBS News (Click for video)

For generations of tourists, and even some residents, taking a ride on a horse-drawn carriage through Central Park has been a key part of their New York City experience, along with watching a Broadway show and ice skating in Rockefeller Center.

Those days -- as far as the carriage ride goes -- may soon be coming to an end.

New York's new Mayor Bill de Blasio says he will make good on a campaign promise to shutter what he considers to be a cruel industry, a view backed by animal rights groups. The drivers of the 200 or so carriages that have meandered around the country's first landscaped public park are crying foul and one prominent horse veterinarian has said he found the horses to be well treated.

How de Blasio, who was inaugurated as New York City's 109th mayor earlier this week, handles this issue may offer some hints on how he handles economic issues. Tourism is big business for the city, which attracted more than 52 million visitors who spent about $37 billion in 2012, the latest year where data is available, according to the city.

Related story: NYC at war over Mayor De Blasio's ban on horse-drawn carriages

Some observers question his prioritization of the horse carriage issues. "De Blasio is starting his term as dictator by dictating," writes Judson Phillips in the conservative Washington Times. "He is dictating a group of people out of their jobs. These are the iconic horse drawn carriages in New York."

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Lakeside, a New Skating Rink in Prospect Park

Lakeside, a New Skating Rink in Prospect Park : The New Yorker

JANUARY 2, 2014
A SKATING RINK GROWS IN BROOKLYN
POSTED BY ALEXANDRA LANGE

The last few weeks of Michael Bloomberg’s third term were a marathon of ribbon cuttings, as the Mayor opened pedestrian plazas, recycling facilities, and future tech campuses right up until December 23rd. The most seasonal event was the opening of Lakeside, a seventy-five-thousand-square-foot ice-skating facility in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, just in time for Christmas. Lakeside, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and officially known as the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak Center at Lakeside, replaces the late, unlamented Wollman Rink, and is the first major building added to the park since the end of the nineteenth century. That long pause proves to have been a smart one: the emphasis of twenty-first-century architecture on sustainability and materials dovetails nicely with Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s artful, artificially-constructed park landscape. Lakeside, a significant work of plain, bold contemporary design, makes perfect sense in Prospect Park by combining that old sensibility with new bluntness. The curves of its two rinks echo the park’s swoops and lawns, while its rectangular roof stands out like a billboard.

The architects chose a parking lot installed during the twentieth century as their site, taking out a minimum number of trees and restoring naturalistic planning that had been overrun by asphalt. Wollman Rink sat over part of the park’s original lake and absorbed the romantically named Music Island, a hillock surrounded by water from which bands once played. Christian Zimmerman, Prospect Park’s lead landscape architect for twenty-three years, coördinated with the architects and engineered the restoration of the lake, where the island is an island again.

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