Last year, I reported on the cutting-edge composting toilet being installed at the Hollenback Garden on Washington Ave.  Saturday is the inaugural flush!
On Saturday, May 10^th, Hollenback Community Garden in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn will play host to a delegation from the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. Adding to the excitement, the garden will unveil a new composting toilet, adding to the significant “green” activities already underway at the Clinton Hill oasis.
Standing on the sight of the old Hollenback Family Mansion, the Hollenback Community Garden has been a green oasis in the city for more than 25 years. Currently, 40 active garden members work the land, growing vegetables, recycling tons (literally) of community food and garden waste into compost, harvesting rain-water from the rooftop next door, working with P.S.11 students to teach them about growing food, and being an active part of the Clinton Hill and urban gardening communities.

Last year, the garden installed a composting toilet, the first of its kind in a community garden in Brooklyn. Won via eBay auction from the Battery Park Conservancy, it took an almost insurmountable effort by garden volunteers to then get it delivered, installed, and ready to turn the community’s collective poop into brown gold! This year, the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UN CSD) is taking delegates around the state to visit urban gardens, farms, and other green spaces being used to sustain and build local community.

On Saturday, May 10^th, to mark the occasion, and to share our experience as an urban garden with some of our international friends, Hollenback is hosting one part of a larger tour sponsored by WHY (World Hunger Year) for the attendees of the conference held by the UN CSD. 60 international visitors will be touring the garden from 10:30-11:30 a.m. to see our space and talk about our efforts to be not only a good neighbor, but to actively improve the community in which we live.
That same day at 3p.m., we will be hosting the Ceremonial First Flush of the composting toilet followed by a free community barbeque.

Please join us as we mark not only a notable visit from international guests seeking to engage communities in questions of green urbanism, environmental remediation, and ongoing sustainability, but also the equally momentous opening of the first composting toilet in a community garden in Brooklyn.
Contact Mike Dimpfl at 718 288 3509 for more details or with questions.

I’m off to Kentucky for a long weekend. See you on Monday.

(Clinton Ave)

This just in from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden:

I just wanted to give you a heads up that BBG’s annual benefit Plant Sale, the largest in the Northeast (with over 20,000 plants!) opens to the public tomorrow and continues through Thursday morning.  (BBG members have access to the preview sale tonight, from 4:30 to 8.) The Plant Sale takes place on Cherry Esplanade, where right now hundreds of flowering cherry trees are dropping their petals like pink snow to form a breathtaking petal carpet. Considering the multitude and diversity of the colorful plants for sale, the beauty of the setting, the BBG hort experts on hand to answer questions and the little red wagons we provide for shoppers for their “plantsportation,”  the sale is a really dynamic experience all around. If any of your readers are thinking about their backyards or windowsills, there’s no better place to shop for their plants.

They’re also offering a bunch of free classes.  Check out their website for more info!

And speaking of plants, Root Stock & Quade is slated to open today on Myrtle Avenue!

I noticed this occupied storefront on Myrtle between Washington and Hall recently:

I might dismiss a random storefront like this, but there was something about the pile of books in the window that I really liked.

No official signage, but they did have a xerox taped to the door that lists a website.

Looks like they’re offering a plethora of services, including light moving, tile work and painting, in addition to refinishing and custom cabinetry.

After painting my own bedroom recently (and having it take three exhausting days), you can bet I’m giving them a call when my living room needs a fresh coat.

They earn a minus for the fact that their website kept freezing up my computer (and for the bad music).

33woodwork.com

A reader who grew up in the ‘nabe emailed me this rambling and lovely essay about growing up in Clinton Hill: (posted verbatim)
Sure there’s a group of us from those days that wax nostalgia which is so odd, because we still think we’re kind of hip and young. I guess it’s all relative. There are so many stories to tell, I guess I could start at 10 years old and work my way up to when everyone started moving away when I was about 18 ish.

Our playground was initially the Clinton Hill Apartments which many of us lived in. The courtyards (with the Guards booth from outer space being our focal point) some of those guards back then were really quite funny and they would literally chase us through these tunnels beneath the buildings — which to a kid seemed like a coal mine. I n any case, my best friend back then was Arthur Maturo, who’s mother was the producer of the “To Tell the Truth” television show. Her name was Mimi O”Brian and they were the only ones in the Clinton Hill apts that had a maid!

We were really like the kids in Stand By Me….Clinton Hill style. My Aunt Milly was a politician in the area back then too she and her family the Marchiano’s, lived on Adelphi. There were actually a lot of Italians in that neighborhood. While most landed in Bensonhurst, a crew must have got lost and landed in Ft. Green and Clinton Hill. My grandparents were Italian immigrants and lived on Classon Ave. The Pratt students at the time used to use her (my Aunt’s) billboards as art pieces and probably dart boards. I could never get a grip on why that was. I think she may have been pretty tacky and arts students thought she was a joke. (that’s all another story).

My friend Laura Yaccarino whom I still know, would be my oldest friend (were both 50), and grew up on Clinton Avenue between Dekalb and Lafayette in a brownstone. Her father was Joe from Joe’s Place restaurant on Waverly (very hip hangout back then) and her mother Nancy may still live there. Nancy and Joe were like my adopted parents back then. I just loved hanging out with them as they had this kind of gay sensibility. I’m a gay man and back when I was 16 she would always get references I would make to lines in All About Eve or things like that. Their late son John was a good friend as well. They would toss these really fabulous Christmas parties with all these artsy types, and “the kids” were allowed to join the party. The older people there (they were probably only 30ish), seemed really fascinated by our little androgynous group of hippy kids. They would usually gravitate over and ask us strange questions like, I dunno, um “What do you think of the new Mahavishnu Orchestra LP?” (insert blank stare)..

More to come….

I will get to the coven of witches that worked at the Woodward School and the Warlock who sold drugs from the Good Humor Truck in a later email. Then there’s Spike Lee. Who is probably my age now. and The Ft Green Waltons (a family of beautiful blonde men that lived on Cumberland).

I totally planned on going to the Ft. Greene House Tour yesterday.  Really, I did.  But I got bogged down scrambling to finish a final paper for school.  And so the day slipped away.

Did YOU go?  What did you think?  Anyone who’d like to do a guest post and share his/her photos from the tour would be warmly welcomed!  Email me at clintonhillblog-at-gmail-dot-com if interested.

For those of you looking to volunteer in the neighborhood, there’s a brand-new opportunity!  The Friends of Clinton Hill Library are a newly-formed group who hope to make some small improvements at the library (which is on Washington bt Lafayette and Greene), including starting a featured section of local authors, organizing readings, landscaping and maintenance, and organizing after school tutors.

This Sunday, they will be working in conjunction with the Hollenback Community Garden to landscape the front of the library.  They didn’t give me a time, but if interested, stop by with some tools and enthusiasm.

Stay tuned for more info on the group and upcoming meeting information!

(For more info, contact elizabethdreyfuss@yahoo.com )

(Waverly Ave)

Find out why Brooklyn is the bloggiest place in the United States at the Third Annual Brooklyn Blogfest on May 8th at 8 pm at the Brooklyn Lyceum at 227 Fourth Avenue (at President Street) in Park Slope.

“Where better to take the pulse of this rapidly growing community of writers, thinkers and observers than the Brooklyn Blogfest?” wrote Sewell Chan in the New York Times last year.

The blogfest is an event for bloggers, blog readers, those interested in blogging and those passionate about Brooklyn. It brings together citizen journalists, place bloggers, photo bloggers, special interest bloggers, and the creative, quirky, and personal bloggers that make the Brooklyn Blogosphere such a fascinating place to be.

Come hear: Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, Creative Times, Bed-Stuy Blog, Gowanus Lounge, New York Shitty, Flatbush Gardener, and Luna Park Gazette and MORE.
Special features include a video by Blue Barn Pictures, a salute to Brooklyn’s photo bloggers, Top Ten Tips for New Bloggers plus a special message from WNYC radio talk show host Brian Lehrer and promo for Brooklyn Independent Televisions, A Walk Around the Blog.

Learn about blogging; be inspired to blog. Best of all, participate in the annual SHOUT-OUT: A chance to share YOUR blog with the world!
Go to the Blogfest’s blog for more details.

(I am horribly sad to say that I can’t attend this year’s blogade :(  )

From SCH:

Recent conditions have caused Forest City Ratner to put an indefinite hold on the signature buildings (like “Miss Brooklyn” and the “Urban Room”) and the public housing at Atlantic Yards.

People are asking ever more loudly, where are the benefits and why is he knocking down buildings when he is not planning to build for decades?

The Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (of which SCH is a member), Brooklyn Speaks, and Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (of which SCH is a supporter), along with various elected officials are holding a rally to call on Governor Patterson to take a Time Out and put a hold on demolitions, unnecessary changes to infrastructure, huge public subsidies and the displacement of residents and businesses. There has to be a better way!

Join everyone at a Rally next weekend, May 3rd, Pacific Street between Carlton and Vanderbilt at 2 PM.

As you may know, Council members James, Yassky and DeBlasio have written requesting a hold on further public monies being spent and Council member DeBlasio has called for a moratorium on demolitions.

So, whatever you are doing on May 3rd, there’s time to join the Rally. Make this one count. Our neighborhoods need you.