Last Weekend for the Red Hook Vendors

Sunday is the last day for the beloved vendors at the Red Hook Ball Fields to serve up food this season. If you've never been or if you want another fix, today and tomorrow are it. The future of the enterprise is up in the air. The vendors have been under siege all year. First, from the Parks Department, which has threatened their very existence with a permitting process that has yet to play out, and then, from the Health Department, which has demanded some expensive upgrades. We love the vendors. We have stated our position many times and our feeling that the city should do backflips to keep this vital cultural institution in place rather than taking steps to wipe them out. When the season rolls around next year, however, Red Hook will be a very, very, very different place. The Ikea will be open, attracting up to 50,000 cars to the neighborhood every week and the parks where the vendors work will be in the middle of thousands of cars going to and from Ikea every weekend. If you haven't been, go today or tomorrow. Even if the vendors are there next year--and we will be outraged if they are not--it will be a very, very different scene. That part of Red Hook won't so much be a community as a place that people from all over the city drive through to get Ikea furniture.