The night for mischievous tricks may have passed, but a horde of Halloween costumes will be on parade to treat visitors to Brooklyn this weekend – from beautiful ballerinas to “notorious” gangster rappers and every Cinderella in between.
All you’ll have to do is look down at your feet to see them.
Like any three-year-old, Jayla Taylor has a fondness for candy. But an evening trip to fulfill her craving at a Brooklyn candy store a week ago nearly ended her life.
On radiant, sunlit afternoons, Wilma Atwell – or “Bee,” as she’s known in her neighborhood – likes to go out in front of her colonial-style house and water her garden.
“It’s so nice here,” she said. “I’ve been living here 21, 22 years. I love it.”
Eleven blocks west and 14 blocks north of Atwell’s “farm house,” as she likes to call it, a man dressed head-to-toe in black rifles through a plastic trash bag, four feet long and stuffed with the castoffs of the college students that live in an adjacent building.
New York City police officer Ruslan Matdiip couldn’t remember much of anything about what he did on Nov. 28, 2005.
On that day – the same day that fellow officer Dillon Stewart was gunned down on the job for making a routine stop in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn -- Matdiip knew he had looked for evidence at the scene of the crime. He was sure that he followed department procedure, and he knew that eventually, a spent Luger nine-millimeter shell casing was found at the scene, three short blocks away from Prospect Park.
Kate Cranston and Emily Post would be pleased.
A centuries-old culture is returning to Brooklyn, and it's bringing its pinky finger with it.
When a prisoner is released on parole, he could use a little more than a rumpled suit, a couple of bucks and a hardened pack of chewing gum.
Like an apartment. Or a college degree. Or a job.
Or somebody to help him figure out how to get them.
It’s a hot summer’s day, and Francine Dixon is sitting outside her Brooklyn café watching customers enter. Among the passersby, a middle-aged woman wearing a plastic hairnet and smeared magenta lipstick walks across Malcolm X Boulevard toward the entrance.
“You see that one right there?” Dixon says, motioning toward the woman. “I’ll bet you a quarter she’s gonna go in and ask for food.”
Two weeks after the coalition death toll in Iraq passed 4,000, and a month after one of the youngest casualties of the Iraq war – an 18-year-old Queens resident -- was buried, residents of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn seem to agree that the U.S. has overstayed its welcome in the Middle East.
In Bed-Stuy, West Indians redefine Brooklyn’s black mecca
If you happen to receive an invitation to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday in Bedford-Stuyvesant with Catherine Lewis – better known as “Miss Catie” by the neighborhood – by all means, take it. Her animated personality and jovial laugh will keep you slapping your knee well into the night. But when you finally sit down at Miss Catie’s table for the evening’s meal, try not to appear alarmed when your eyes survey the table and can’t locate the candied yams, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie that make up the usual trimmings of the most traditional of American meals.