Armed with cameras, envelopes and postage, cops from Brooklyn’s 76th precinct are launching a new initiative called “Spot It To Secure It.” Starting next week, officers will patrol areas of Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, and Cobble Hill searching for valuables left visibly unattended in parked cars, snap a photo and send you a letter about it.

The point? If cops can see that iPad mini on your front seat, so can a passing thief.

Basically, little brother is going to tell on you.

Last year, 541 unattended property thefts took place in Carroll Gardens, according to the Daily News. That's up from 510 in 2011.

“The whole idea is to prevent the crime from happening in the first place,” said Captain Jeffrey Schiff at the 76th Precinct Community Council Meeting last night.

Either that, or the cops were itching to practice their Instagramming skills.

Anyways, car photography isn't all the 76th precinct is doing to prevent larceny. Officers will also be toting their cameras as they search for unattended homes with lowered fire escapes, and open windows or unbarred windows.

“To zoom in on grand larcenies, the precinct will deploy a team made up of community affairs cops in blue jackets, as well as a uniformed anti-crime officer and cops on the conditions unit,” reported the New York Post. “They will visit apartment buildings and brownstones, and check the vestibules for broken, open, or unlocked doors.”

“I think it’s innovative and exciting,” said district manager of Community Board Six, Craig Hammerman, to The Observer.

There we have it. The NYPD's own minority report.

Rising waters in Red Hook. (Kathleenhoran, yfrog)

As Hurricane Sandy pummeled the city on Monday, the storm waters surged through the streets of Red Hook, flooding basements, cars and Red Hook Community Farm's field of late-fall salad greens, arugula and cabbage.

"The farm was under two and a half feet of water. It's total crop loss," said executive director Ian Marvy, who lives nearby in Red Hook, where he stayed as the hurricane struck.

The plants, even those that survived the flooding, cannot be sold or donated because of the water pollution. Mr. Marvy said that the farm had been having an amazing growing season and that the fields were about half full with fall crops.

The farm also lost two beehives, which had been tied down in anticipation of high winds but could not be saved from the flooding, as well as tents and quite possibly a good deal of equipment. Mr. Marvy said that he expected the damage would exceed $30,000 or $40,000, although fortunately the farm has crop and flood insurance.

"We're going to be composting it all," he told The Observer with a rueful laugh. Which was fortunate, as the farm's large composting operation was also knocked apart by the flooding, with waters washing the mounds away and eroding the dirt covering the old cement field that the farm is built on. Pallets and other equipment were dislodged and scattered.

"Crop loss has been happening to farmers for centuries," said Mr. Marvy. "But we've had four dramatic weather events in the last few years [a hailstorm, the tornadoes and two hurricanes]." He admitted, however, that he'd never expected a sea surge to wash away his farm.

"It's new to these parts of the city, and the extent of this storm was phenomenal," he said. "It's hard to imagine a storm surge before you see one, and the speed of it was really surprising."

kvelsey@observer.com

Jumpin' off? (Property Shark)

Could it get any more Brooklyn than Red Hook? From On the Waterfront to that new Spike Lee movie you haven't seen, the neighborhood is just off the grid enough to keep nostalgic hipsters feeling like they live in some far away place that is anything but Manhattanized (never mind the IKEA and high-end restaurant scene). But just as the Barclays Center has transformed the nexus of Park Slope and Fort Greene (for the worse, at least in certain [fresh] eyes), might a new Nets training facility do the same to Red Hook?

According to Crain's, the Nets toured a site owned by Red Hook megadeveloper Joe Sitt.

Despite its ballyhooed move to Brooklyn, where its first regular-season game will be played Nov. 1, the team will continue to practice at the Nets Center in East Rutherford, N.J., during the upcoming season.

The search for a Brooklyn location has been going on for over a year now. Last year, the Nets weighed three sites in Brooklyn, according to another real estate source. But team officials decided not to pursue those opportunities because a number of key players reside in New Jersey and wanted to practice closer to home, the source said. The Nets also have a lease on the facility in East Rutherford that runs through June 2015.

You know, it does look kind of romantic. (loudpop, flickr)

While its unforgiving Sultan mattresses do not stir wild desire in most people, apparently Brooklyn teenagers find the metal chaise lounges outside Ikea to be an ideal setting for sexual encounters, DNAinfo reports.

Hey, they're probably more comfortable than those dreadful particle board beds the store sells!

"There are lights that are purple and blue and change color. It's beautiful, like a wedding thing," 16-year-old Monica told DNAinfo.

Other teens also voiced their approval of the site, away from the prying eyes of parents, the inconveniences of a shared bedroom and other common impediments to sexual freedom.

"Kids got nowhere else to go," said 21-year-old Jonathan Morris.

But some community members are less than enthusiastic about the Ikea park's new purpose, particularly the used condoms, or  "squishy balloons" as one disgusted mom who enjoys frequenting the park with her kids calls them. "It's condom central. The lawn chairs are a bordello," the woman told DNAinfo.

A number of community advocates and health professionals also say that they're worried about Ikea sex and the sexual health of the teens enjoying it. But hey! People are only aware of the illicit activity because the teens are leaving the detritus of their safe sex all over the place.

Ikea built the park as a kind of good-neighbor gesture for the community. Little did they know how much it would be appreciated. The store, which has pledged to increase nighttime sweeps of the area after being informed of the activity, is apparently less than thrilled to learn how exactly the community has put the space to use, but at least it  disproves once and for all the claims of anti-corporate crusaders who have said that “Ikea in Brooklyn is nothing but a post-apocalyptic, post-consumerist ghost town.”

kvelsey@observer.com

Better act fast: brownstones in Brooklyn are being snatched up like hot cakes.

Christabel Gough, the secretary for the Society for the Architecture of the City and a resident of the Greenwich Village Historic District, has a simple, to the point message for New Yorkers: Beware. Manhattanization, she warns, is growing, encroaching on historical neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. It is the real estate equivalent of kudzu and Brooklyn, Ms. Gough says, is the next victim. Yet unlike it’s leafy cousin, Manhattanization cannot be eradicated with sheep.

But first, a word on Manhattanization, as explained by Ms. Gough in her keynote speech, “Can Cobble Hill Avoid Manhattanization” at the Cobble Hill Association General Meeting on May 29th, and helpfully reprinted at Brownstoner.

“How do you Manhattanize an old town house? First, you pay a seven or eight figure price to buy it. Then you destroy it—except, of course, for the street front, if it is in an historic district. You gut it. Your toss any Federal or Greek Revival woodwork into the convenient garbage scow outside the front door. You cut in new windows. You tear out the lower back wall. You change the floor levels. You remove some floors altogether to create double height rooms. That, your architect triumphantly explains, reduces your Floor Area Ratio! You expand the back with a rear yard addition; you expand the top with a rooftop addition; you expand underneath with new underground levels, which may include a swimming pool, a dog-grooming-room and other such essentials. If the swimming pool is of Olympic dimensions, you may ask to excavate the entire rear yard as well, turning the existing garden into a roof terrace. Your landscape architect and his arborist will testify that this will have no impact on the neighbors, because the roof of an Olympic-style swimming pool can be incredibly verdant and beautiful, when planted with trees with shallow root systems, such as crab apples! Or bamboo, perhaps. And your engineer will explain that of course there is no danger; excavation will be painstakingly monitored and the shoring will be state of the art!”

Ms. Gough is not the only Manhattanite concerned about this growing penchant for historical facelifts. “Many buyers re-entering the real estate market after years on the sidelines are discovering what they’re after in brownstone Brooklyn,” The New York Times’ Marc Santora recently wrote. The article, entitled “Brooklyn’s Gold Rush,” lists Brooklyn’s Fort Greene, Park Slope, Boerum Hill, and Red Hook as the most endangered neighborhoods. 

“Brownstones signify stability,” Jill Seligson Braver, an associate broker at Brown Harris Stevens, told the Times. “Putting roots down in a neighborhood for the long haul.”

But they also signify space.

“The current frenzy in the brownstone market is more a reflection of the continuing demand for large spaces,” Mr. Santora writes, and developers are increasingly snatching up two- and three-family homes and converting them into larger single-family residences.

As a result, the median sales prices of Brooklyn homes, once a much-welcome alternative to their pricier counterparts across the East River, have increased considerably. In Park Slope, median sales prices have jumped from $1.2 million to $1.45 million in the last year (a roughly 20 percent increase); in Boerum Hill, they’re up from $1.1 million to $1.7 million (a 60 percent increase); and in Red Hook, from $475,000 to $825,000 (a 73 percent increase).

Not since On the Waterfront has Red Hook been so popular.

jschiewe@observer.com

The beginning of the end?

There is something about big box stores that brings out irrational hatred. Especially in Brooklyn.

Now that plans for a 52,000-square foot Whole Foods store are hurtling toward groundbreaking, Brooklynites have been forced to confront their fears that without dogged opposition, the borough might come to resemble the kind of suburban hellhole found in the southern or central U.S. Or the Upper West Side, even.

Fortunately, a few brave filmmakers have tapped into their creative sides and explored these issues, posting the results, both the very, very sincere and the satiric, on YouTube.

For some, the Whole Foods debacle has dredged up memories of when Ikea came to Red Hook and ruined everything. In "Ikea: Four Years Post Controversy," by theresident, we get a bleak view of empty parking lots and Ikea's sad, state-of-the-art waterfront park.

The only thing Ikea was right about was that there would be no traffic problems, because no one shops there! So claims the video. (The 572 iIea items currently being sold on Brooklyn Craigslist would seem to suggest otherwise.)

Either Ikea shoppers are the most furtive people in the world, evading the camera and hiding their flatpacks and bright blue bags, or the filmmaker should look into setting up location shots for horror movies.

"Ikea in Brooklyn is nothing but a post-apocalyptic, post-consumerist ghost town," she concludes, over a soundtrack that one commentator on Browstoner, where the video was posted earlier, called "somewhere between 'don't go in the basement!' camp and scanning post-apocolyptic rubble/oil-covered ducks."

With a videos like these, Brooklynites are naturally wary about Whole Foods plunking down next to the pristine Gowanus Canal. Well, a few Brooklynites, at least.

But why wallow in the past, when you can fear the future? Also posted on Brownstoner, A reason.tv reporter dug up two local activists mounting their best campaign against the health food superstore. While one talked mostly about the historic landmark concrete building that will be dwarfed by the superstore, the other, unfortunately, spoke about the Superfund site's natural beauty, with "delicious apple trees and a delicious red apples."

(The project does have a healthy cadre of opponents, like the Gowanus Institute.)

Most people, though, or at least those milling outside the Park Slope Food Co-op, seemed not to care about Whole Foods coming. Or maybe they were just relieved not to be the center of controversy anymore?

kvelsey@observer.com

Renovating architects left the front of the house unchanged to blend in with the block, according to Brownstoner. (http://www.brownstoner.com/blog/2011/10/the-insider-radical-reno-in-red-hook/)

Lucky editor Brandon Holley has a personal essay in Glamour magazine this month, describing a home invasion she experienced last March. An open window on the ground floor of her Brooklyn house was broken into in the middle of the night by a man who stood over the bed where she, her husband, and her two-year-old son slept, demanded their money and threatened to kill them.

The scene is chillingly rendered, but it's almost more interesting to hear the former Jane editor describe the hazards of gentrification. It's rare that an article about Ms. Holley fails to mention that she lives in Red Hook; the remote industrial neighborhood serves as shorthand for her many cool aspects (opened Max Fish, worked for Sassy, married a musician). After Jane folded, Ms. Holley ran Yahoo! women's site Shine from her home, sometimes in her pajamas.

New York visited the wood-frame house built in 1899 for a 2007 article on the de-gentrification of the neighborhood, when she was hosting a fundraiser for the Red Hook Initiative, the poverty-fighting nonprofit at which she volunteers (and to which she donated the writer's fee for the Glamour piece).

Adam Sternbergh wrote:

Holley’s house, which she bought with her husband in late 2004, then gut-renovated for a year, sits on a typical Red Hook block, by which I mean a dark, unremarkable stretch of three-story, vinyl-sided rowhouses along a cracked and wobbly street. When I first arrived, I have to admit I thought I’d written down the wrong address. But walking through her open door, I entered a totally different world: an artfully reimagined loftlike space with a sunken central room, concrete floors, and a large manicured backyard. Inside, the assembled guests enjoyed a "Taste of Red Hook," displayed on long tables with white tablecloths: gumbo from the Good Fork, sweets from Baked, and greasy, delicious huaraches from one of the vendors who work weekends at the Red Hook ball fields.

Five years later, Ms. Holley is back to getting dressed up and taking a car to 4 Times Square every day, but according to the essay, she's still something of an outsider in a neighborhood stalled in transition.

She wrote:

“You don’t fit in here,” Jerry, my busybody neighbor, had told me a few months before. He had been raised in rough-and-tumble Red Hook, Brooklyn, where I’ve lived for the past seven years. Perched happily on my stoop on my quiet block, I just smiled—I was used to his diatribes about yuppies. Our neighborhood has undergone a wave of gentrification, and I’m definitely a part of that. I shop at the little boutiques. I go to the new restaurants. I wear heels to work.

“You aren’t careful!” Jerry continued. “You don’t lock your door, you leave your windows open—you can’t do that around here!” As usual, I argued with him. Even though I grew up on a small farm in Great Falls, Virginia, I’m street-smart, I told him. I’ve never been the victim of a crime.

But I’m also not delusional. Red Hook can be a tough place. Back in the eighties, a cover story in Life magazine proclaimed it the “crack capital of America.” It’s home to the Red Hook Houses, New York City’s second-biggest housing project, and you commonly hear about gangs and crime there. So as much as I liked to spar with Jerry, his criticism unnerved me. Part of me had refused to let go of the easy way of life I grew up with. Until that morning in March.

On the waterfront... someday.

The sun had not quite broken over the rowhouses and warehouses of Greenpoint Monday morning when The Observer arrived at the new concrete pier jutting out into the East River at India Street. The dock seemed barely finished, its concrete planks not entirely even, the sides of the structure lined with chain-link fencing. Whole sections were torn up and surrounded with orange construction netting.

When the ferry pulled up, ghost decals clinging to the foredeck, the passengers filed on, handing over their $4 tickets, joining the nearly 3,000 New Yorkers who have ridden the ferry each weekday since its launch in mid-June, according to the city—more than double the number officials had expected.

After ordering our locally brewed fair-trade coffee and a pain au chocolat, we turned to see a gay couple smiling across a starboard table, sharing a quiche, a floating picnic. On the port side was a pretty biracial pair staring out the window at Long Island City, its gleaming towers pulling into view. The woman held a breastfeeding baby on her lap.

The subway this was not.

But neither was it entirely new. The Bloomberg administration—and to a lesser degree its predecessors and the civic groups that surrounded them—has been dreaming about transforming the East River into the city’s new axis. It took nearly a decade of experimentation and failure, but the river is about to be flooded with people. The ferries (after two tries finally a success) are only the first sign.

Just two years ago the master plans, brand new parks, renderings and rezonings that made this stretch a seething hot bed of development and gentrification were declared dead, another casualty of an overheated real estate market that had thrust the nation into recession. But something unusual happened. Even as the unemployment rate rose, so too did the rents throughout western Brooklyn. Instead of shuttering, an almost endless stream of precious boîtes and boutiques opened on the vinyl-siding-lined streets. What the bourgeois soothsayers at New York magazine dubbed “The Billyburg Bust,” complete with operatic comparisons to Miami, never materialized. Not a few bankers and movie stars—Ed Westwick among them—moved in. So what if the critics are right, and there is a little too much South Florida glass for all the soot still in the air? This is Brooklyn circa 2012.

Packed ferries, along with subways, bike lanes and flea markets, are but only the latest sign that the Brooklyn waterfront has prospered, rather than withered during the downturn.

Developers are hard at work on nearly a dozen megaprojects, many of them all but forgotten about in the past three years. A number of firms expect to break ground sometime in 2012, as they told The Observer, and while such ambitions remain lofty, given the near impossibility to raise construction financing at this time, the strength of Brooklyn real estate market has developers scrambling to get on the waterfront.

Tour the developments bursting from the Brooklyn waterfront >>

“The ferry is really the litmus test,” Jed Walentas, the second-generation Dumbo developer, said. “If you have just one good thing on the water, a ferry makes absolutely no sense. There’s nowhere to go. But when you get enough things happening in different parts of the city on the water, all of a sudden, ferries make a ton of sense.”

None of these undertakings are as ambitious as Park Tower Group’s redevelopment of the Greenpoint Lumber Exchange. Park Tower put stock in the area long before many of its competitors, taking a stake in the defunct lumber yard in the northern-most reaches of Brooklyn, where Newtown Creek empties its Superfunded waters into the East River. With 4,000 units planned, in some 10 towers along 20 waterfront acres, Park Tower’s project is larger even than the controversial Atlantic Yards project. Despite its size, a good many community members welcome the development.

“Until stuff gets built in Greenpoint, we don’t get any waterfront access,” said Ward Dennis, co-chair of Neighbors Allied for Good Growth. “I guess some people would gladly trade that for a less crowded neighborhood, but the thing is, the rezoning is done, the land is going sit largely fallow and underused, or overused and productive, with at least some benefits to the community at large.”

Park Tower earned much of its good will by helping to shape the rezoning that made over Williamsburg and Greenpoint during the past decade. Dreamed up in 2003, a year after Park Tower took its stake in the borough (previously, it had developed and later sold off marquee office towers in midtown), the rezoning passed in 2005. Due to the expense of building on the waterfront, even during the boom, only four towers got off the ground, two by McMansion builders Toll Brothers at Northside Piers, two by Douglaston Development at the neighboring Edge.

Both projects foundered, coming online after Lehman collapsed, despite being in the beating heart of Brooklyn gentrification, North Sixth Street. (Ever been to the Thai restaurant Sea on a Friday night?) Even facing its challenges, the Edge became the best-selling building in the city this past year, moving 260 units. Douglaston has since taken over phase three of Northside Piers and is planning to build the first 40-story tower of the rezoning (at least a dozen are possible), which will house 500 luxury rentals.

“I’ve always been a big believer in Williamsburg because Williamsburg created itself,” Douglaston chairman Jeff Levine said. “Unlike some of the other areas that were built up through subsidies or rezonings first, Williamsburg was somewhere that built itself up, and then the city came in later and improved it.”

Park Tower, which has been quietly preparing its project while the gold rush was on, is making the same calculation. “The project has been there a long time, but now the market is finally there for us,” a person involved with the project told The Observer. “The only difference is we’re not looking at condos anymore.” If last decade’s boom was defined by the condo taking hold in New York, this decade, at least in the outer boroughs, will be defined by a rental resurgence. The banks are mostly to thank for this trend. The condos that remain are hard to purchase due to a lack of mortgage financing, which means greater risk, which means lenders are less likely to give money to condo projects. Meanwhile, vacancy rates hover around 1 percent across the city, even lower in the coves of Brooklyn’s gold coast.

Inside Park Tower Group's mammoth Greenpoint project >>

Not all projects have faired quite so well, however. Besides Park Tower’s Greenpoint colossus, the biggest development in the works on the waterfront, and the most contentious by far, is the conversion of the Domino Sugar refinery.

Its developer, CPC Resources, is said to be in financial trouble, according to a number of sources, and some of the city’s top developers have looked at the site beside the Williamsburg Bridge. So far none of those deals have worked out, but project manager Susan Pollock said the developer is about to reach a deal with a partner to revive the project. “It was always our understanding we would bring someone in with the experience to build tall towers,” she said. Rose Plaza, located on the south side of the bridge, is similarly on hold, as are a handful of developments in southern Greenpoint.

What unifies many of the projects making less progress are those that were not part of the city’s rezoning or that have tried to go above and beyond it, incurring extra costs and commitments—like Domino, like Rose Plaza. The India Street pier is part of one such project, a development proposed by Jonathan Bernstein that is trying to turn the surrounding streets into parkland, adding a public amenity but also many thousands of square feet to the project, as well as adding a recreational pier on Java Street that would further bulk up his project. Many in the community are against the streets-into-parks plan and even object to the second pier—while it improves waterfront access, it also gives Mr. Bernstein more air rights. “It’s the same thing we’re seeing down at Occupy Wall Street,” local City Councilman Steve Levin said. “Is this a public benefit, or it a private benefit?”

Yet it is the piers and the parks that have also paved the way for these projects. “Once the infrastructure is in, the sky’s the limit,” said Andrew Genn, senior vice president for maritime at the city’s Economic Development Corporation. Toll and Dougalston and neighboring rental 184 Kent have all finished their waterfront esplanades, which connect to East River State Park, creating a reasonable riverside park, a hint of the 14-mile emerald necklace that could someday stretch from the tip of Greenpoint all the way to the Verrazano in Sunset Park. Meanwhile, at the asphalt lot that someday will be the Edge’s 40-story tower, Brownstoner’s Jonathan Butler has set up a branch of Brooklyn Flea and the Smorgasburg, which draw some 15,000 BroBos to the waterfront every weekend in the summer.

And it is not all housing and hip hangouts, either. Mr. Genn argues that the working waterfront is more vibrant than it has been in decades. The Navy Yard is near capacity and Carnegie Mellon has proposed building its branch of the vaunted new tech campus there. New cargo operations have taken hold in Red Hook, not to mention big box stores and ocean liners—Port Authority executive director Chris Ward said it should all be redeveloped as housing someday, but then only to facilitate a stronger connection to Governors Island. The city has signed half-a-dozen new leases and partnerships at Sunset Park in the past year and also launched a sustainability plan for the massive industrial hub. “Brooklyn had been written off as a place to do maritime commerce, and now it’s back,” Mr. Genn said.

Much of this development has been during the downturn, with developers chastened and the city looking to expand its economy beyond Wall Street. If developers are already venturing in again, in a shaky economy, when things are back in full swing, the waves could kick back up.

And there are those developments causing waves already. Last week, the city received bids for the first development site at Brooklyn Bridge Park. “There is very little right about this because it takes away from the parkland,” Councilman Levin said. But the park needs the funds from a new apartment building and hotel to finance its maintenance, and even enliven the open space, its planners argue.

To make the project as palatable as possible, the city has encouraged a level of design rarely seen—or required—in Brooklyn. Among the firms submitting bids are many of the waterfront’s best builders: Mr. Walentas’s Two Trees, Toll Brothers, Dermot, Extell and Hamlin, all of which have hired some of the city’s top architects.

“We put forth a really strong statement on quality design,” Brooklyn Bridge Park president Regina Myer said during a tour of Pier 1 and the adjacent site last week. “We have put so much into the park, we do not want anything that detracts from it. This is the gateway to Brooklyn, a panorama seen all over the world. Whatever we build here has to be special.”

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Long necks. (Barry Yanowitz)

Two weeks ago, Port Authority boss Chris Ward declared that one of the biggest projects the city could undertake would be the redevelopment of Red Hook. Not only would it vitalize another corner of the Brooklyn waterfront, but it would also become a critical connection to burgeoning development on Governors Island.

At the time, this sounded like pontification—Mr. Ward fought to keep the container terminal active at his previous job running American Stevedoring—but now it is looking more like prognostication.

Last week, it was revealed that the Port Authority had quietly cancelled its lease with American Stevedoring, which has led a handful of outlets to speculate that Red Hook’s redevelopment is in the near future. According to a highly placed source at the Port Authority, though, it will be at least a decade before the port ships out for good and the BroBos can move in.

The Red Hook Star Revue first got wind of the American Stevedoring buyout, revealing that the company had refused to pay rent on the piers even after it had won a contentious agreement to continue to manage them in 2008. The Post then reported that Pheonix Beverage was taking over the container terminal, and because it only had a year-lease, it was simply a placeholder.

“Phoenix is a holding pattern until the city and the Port Authority reignite the intensive development unveiled in 2003,” said a source familiar with the buy-out deal. At that time, the city proposed a visitor-friendlier waterfront and angled to wrest control of the piers from ASI.

But The Observer has learned that the one-year lease is merely a holdover until the Port and Phoenix can work out a longer 10-year deal. The hope is this will give it enough volume to move its operations elsewhere, likely to Sunset Park—the sort of move Mr. Ward advocated. "There is no abrupt getting rid of containers in the near term," our source said. "The idea is Phoenix will build up its business, grow its market share, and when it is ready to move, it will move."

Lovely Red Hook. (Bing Maps)

Phoenix executives could not be reached for comment.

The Post argued that Phoenix had no experience running a port, but the Port official told The Observer it is actually a far better deal for the city than American Stevedoring because it will ferry goods back and forth from New Jersey, whereas the former operator often returned with its hulls empty. As a result, American Stevedoring received millions of dollars in subsidies to remain viable, whereas Phoenix is getting none.

Phoenix has in fact been at the terminal for almost two years now, a move that has angered neighbors who feel its beer trucks cause excessive congestion on the streets. Whether its expansion will improve or worsen matters is not clear, but The Observer did learn one fun fact: alcohol is the fourth biggest commodity to move through the region's ports—which is what makes Phoenix such an attractive operator for the container port. As it was explained to us, Heineken is the Walmart of beers and Phoenix controls Heineken, so the scalability and success of its operations is seen as highly likely.

As for what comes after Phoenix’s eventual departure, there are no concrete plans in the works at either the city or the Port, though there is interest in keeping at least part of the space for active, working waterfront uses. "It's not going to flip back to the Dan Doctoroff days of a glitzy Sydney waterfront," the Port official said.

That does not mean redevelopment will not continue of its own accord elsewhere in Red Hook. The waterfront has already begun making its transformation, with Fairway, IKEA and maybe a huge new mall colonizing some of the old piers. Adding to that, Brownstoner hears a huge warehouse may be headed for a rental conversion. It turns out 160 Imlay Street is across the road from the container terminal, so its nascent conversion only underscores the uncomfortable, should-to-shoulder transition within the neighborhood.

Even if Sam Sifton has moved, rumors of Red Hook's demise are greatly exaggerated.

Correction: A previous version of this article mistated the location of 160 Imlay Street. It is not next door to Fairway. The Observer regrets the error. We have been to Red Hook and love it there. Great book shelves...

Also, Mr. Sifton has informed The Observer that he has moved, but not "moved out." He still proudly calls Red Hook home.

Let's dig another tunnel!

With at least a few people clamoring for a Chris Ward mayoralty, the Port Authority executive director visited the Time Warner Center today and talked about something besides the World Trade Center--not only the focus of much of his work the past three years, but also his public speaking.

Instead, he proffered an ambitious, even absurd, proposal for the Brooklyn waterfront and Governor’s Island. The former he likened to Vietnam: “nobody ever seems to retreat with a clear victory,” he said during an address at Municipal Art Society's Summit for New York City. Of the latter, he said “it is the last open question, in terms of land-use, in the city.”

To fix one, you must fix both, he suggested. In the bombastic style reminiscent of his infamous LaGuardia remarks, Mr. Ward called for the elimination of the Red Hook container terminal. "Red Hook is in the wrong location is Governors Island is to succeed," he said.

Both could become a new cafe-hub, instead of a containerized one, another piece of BroBo-dom. (It is something the mayor has spoken longingly over before, referring to Red Hook on occasion as the new East Village.) It is an unusual proposition, considering Mr. Ward used to run American Stevedoring, which operates the Red Hook port. Perhaps it is his familiarity with the area that allows Mr. Ward to make such a radical, anti-industrial call.

Well, anti-industrial in a sense, because he thinks that the shipping capacity, though it will never be "the huge, supertanker shipping," could move to Sunset Park, where it is insulated by Industry City. There it can hook-up with the project of every politician's dream of the past century, a trans-harbor freight rail tunnel—ironically the very thing the combined Port Authority of New and New Jersey was founded to create yet never did.

"People think the Port loves trucks, because it brings us revenue," Mr. Ward said. "Believe me, we have enough revenue, and the non-stop delivery trucks are killing our city."

"We must get beyond out nostalgia for the Brooklyn waterfront for the future of this city," Mr. Ward said. He calls for a more permeable waterfront, one of transportation and recreation. "Climate change is real, and it changing the way we live."

It was no stump speech, but the audience sure loved it.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC