Brooklyn Week in Review: The Brutal Weirdness of Empty Prosperity

Call this the week that insult was compounded by outrage, amplified by the whacka-whacka-whacka of construction equipment and wrapped in the deadly silence of written orders and summonses. To use the crude vernacular: Shit. Shit. And more shit.

How else can you characterize a week in which our two favorite phrases were "brutally weird" and the non-Brooklyn utterance of "empty prosperity" by Patti Smith to describe the demise of CBGB's and the continued spread of Affluent Theme Park New York? (We think "empty prosperity" could be the Brooklyn Phrase of the 2000s.) A week in which we learned that bedbugs will be "the pest of the 21st Century" and that they love Brooklyn?

And that, relatively speaking, was the stuff that went down easy.

There is so much to sort through that it's hard to decide which story made the blood boil more vigorously. Of course, the dagger through the heart was the city giving the boot to the boat--the Empty Vessel Project was finally banished by city bureaucrats from its mooring on First Street. Its future is now in doubt.

Running a close second, however, was the "Clinton Hill Waco," from which we concluded that if you attract attention by almost setting the Watts Tower-like structure you're building in Brooklyn on fire, the city will dispatch the troops to get you. On the other hand, if you are developer ruining people's quality of life and practically causing the collapse of a building adjacent to your construction site, well, no problema. Bang the hell away.

If only the government was as concerned about the (likely) Oil Spill-related cancer cluster in Greenpoint, despite the press conference on the banks of Newtown Creek calling for expedited action by the EPA. (Action by the EPA. Now, there's something to set the mind at ease.) Good thing the plume is unlikely to spread as far as the mouth of the Creek, where a huge affordable housing development is going to be rising on the Queens side and offering excellent Greenpoint views.

Moving back to non-toxic things, the jellyfish design proposal for the Coney Island Aquarium--our least favorite--came out on top in an unscientific Brooklyn Papers poll. (We voted for the whale design.) Too bad Frank Gehry isn't offering a design like the one he came up with for the Louis Vuitton art museum in Paris.

We could go on and on, but we'll wrap with Atlantic Yards and the Empire State Development Corporation's release of an economic impact statement that said nothing about the cost of mega-project and with Eliot Spitzer's unsettling embrace of the "eight percent reduction" as an "appropriate compromise," which only goes to show that come November, the more things change, the more they will likely stay the same.

Just so you don't conclude we're total Big Bummer Party Poopers, we are cheered to note that a floating pool is going to dock at Pier Two and will by NYC's floating swimming pool next summer.

Also, we really, really dug Jane's Carousel in Dumbo. Turn, baby, turn.