The Neighborhood Power Rankings: Summer 2012
No. 1 Greenpoint
[+2]
Residents have begun to plan how to spend $19.5 million they received from Exxon Mobil for the millions of gallons of oil it spilled underneath the neighborhood over the course of a century.
No. 2 Gowanus
[+2]
The city’s first shuffleboard club plans to open 32,000 square-feet of indoor and outdoor courts, and call itself The Royal Palms. Seriously.
No. 3 Ditmas Park/Flatbush
[+2]
The 1930s art-deco Sears Roebuck tower on Beverley Road and Flatbush Avenue got one step closer—and is now super-close—to achieving landmark status.
No. 4 Fort Greene/Clinton Hill
[-2]
The owner of the unique Broken Angel home/art project on Downing Street, featured in Dave Chapelle’s Block Party, got caught up in a lawsuit that ended in foreclosure.
No. 5 South Brooklyn (“BoCoCa”)
[+2]
Boerum Hiller Tracy K. Smith won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Life on Mars. Woot.
No. 6 Williamsburg
[-5]
The building housing both Millennium Health and the Bagel Store, on Bedford at N. 3rd, was sold to an investor who hopes to combine the spaces to attract a large chain.
No. 7 Red Hook
[-1]
The neighborhood’s famous food vendors worry new park regulations will mean far fewer adult soccer games, whose players account for half their business. Stupid youth leagues.
No. 8 DUMBO
[ – ]
Native daughter Anne Hathaway, who was preschooled at Brooklyn Heights’s Montessori School before her family relocated to New Jersey, moved into the Clocktower building.
No. 9 Park Slope
[+1]
A new Obama biography, excerpted in Vanity Fair, revealed details about his time in Brooklyn in the 80s—he lived in a brownstone on 2nd Street, and jogged in Prospect Park!
No. 10 Crown Heights
[+1]
Brownstoner’s founder is developing 155,000 square-feet to attract businesses shut out of DUMBO, with a new food- and beer-garden from Brookyln Flea (where do we sign up?).
No. 11 Brooklyn Heights
[-2]
Truman Capote’s old digs on Willow Street were sold to a game developer for $12.5 million, setting a record for home-sale prices in Brooklyn (Other Voices, Other Joysticks?).
No. 12 Bushwick
[+1]
Occupy Bushwick marched unpermitted up Flushing Avenue on May Day past cheering storeowners, honking trucks and many thumbs up.
No. 13 Prospect Lefferts Gardens
[+2]
A new outdoor market, called the Arts and Culture Fest, features crafts sellers on Saturdays outside the Parkside Avenue subway station. Food vendors to come.
No. 14 Sunset Park
[+4]
A 10,000 square-foot hydroponic greenhouse will be built atop an old warehouse, growing enough produce annually to feed 5,000 Brooklynites.
No. 15 Bed-Stuy
[-3]
An on-duty Secret Service agent ran over and killed a local 47-year-old woman on Atlantic Avenue, at Ralph Avenue.
No. 16 Downtown
[-2]
NYU announced plans to open a Center for Urban Science and Progress, as early as 2013, in the old MTA headquarters on Jay Street.
No. 17 Prospect Heights
[+2]
The Bronx Zoo closed its 111-year-old Monkey House; some of the monkeys were taken in by the Prospect Park Zoo.
No. 18 Coney Island
[+2]
The city will raze the decaying footbridge from the Q and F to the beach at W. 8th Street after this summer, replacing the eyesore with an expensive plaza two blocks west.
No. 19 Windsor Terrace/Kensington
[-3]
A local post office told residents to pick up their missed packages at the nearby branch on McDonald Avenue in “Frooklny, NY,” a Seussian alternate-Brooklyn.
No. 20 Bay Ridge
[-3]
Oxygen’s Jersey Shore-ripoff Brooklyn 11223, about Gravesend girls acting trashy in Bay Ridge, trades on tired stereotypes about women and Italian-Americans.