Day: July 25, 2025

THE NUBIAN CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC in Bedford-Stuyvesant is celebrating student Ricky Brackett’s opera performance

The post Brooklyn school celebrates student’s international opera success appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.

DEVELOPER WITKOFF and Apollo Global Management have completed The Brook, a 52-story apartment tower at the intersection of Fulton street

The post The Brook, 52-story rental, completed in Downtown Brooklyn appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.

THE U.S. EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ANNOUNCED THAT IT IS RELEASING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN GRANTS TO SCHOOLS for adult literacy

The post U.S. Education Dept. releases funding for schools and special programs appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.

The vote on a sweeping proposal to redevelop 122 acres of Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront has been postponed for the fifth time.

The Brooklyn Marine Terminal (BMT) plan, originally scheduled for a vote on the afternoon of July 24, was delayed after several members of the 28-member BMT Task Force raised concerns. Task force leadership — U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman, state Sen. Andrew Gounardes and City Council Member Alexa Avilés — along with the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), pushed back the vote on the $3.5 billion project, which would have required a two-thirds majority.

Despite the postponement — a new date has not yet been announced — community members rallied outside 100 Columbia St. alongside Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-Manhattan), Assembly Member Marcela Mitaynes (D-Brooklyn) and Council Member Avilés, voicing opposition to the NYCEDC-led plan in its current form.

In addition to modernizing the long-neglected container port and connecting it to a Blue Highways freight system, the redevelopment plan includes 6,000 new housing units — 40% of which would be permanently affordable — along with commercial space, public green areas, resiliency upgrades and transportation improvements.

Critics say the plan is being rushed and that community input has been ignored. They argue it presents serious infrastructure challenges, would disrupt local businesses, displace residents, and worsen pollution and traffic. Many also called for the city to focus more on preserving the existing working waterfront.

Nadler, whose former congressional district included parts of the Brooklyn waterfront before the 2022 redistricting, acknowledged the urgency of the city’s housing crisis. Still, he raised concerns about how thousands of new housing units would affect the community and its infrastructure.

He proposed preserving the Red Hook port without reducing its footprint and urged the city to invest in port infrastructure, similar to investments in ferry service, roads and bridges. He also recommended that the housing portion of the BMT project go through the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), which requires public review and community input.

“The future of Red Hook deserves careful deliberation, not rushed issues,” Nadler said. “We can protect our working waterfront while addressing housing needs through proper planning and community engagement.”

John Leyva, founder of the Columbia Street Waterfront, acknowledged the city’s “affordable housing crisis” but said modernizing Brooklyn’s last working waterfront should take priority.

“Luxury housing is not going to help, and it’s actually going to make it worse,” Leyva said. “The maritime industry doesn’t have the lobbyists [real estate] developers have. But there’s a maritime crisis in this city. We keep taking away all the waterfronts. This is the last working waterfront of its kind here in Brooklyn. So we gotta preserve it — there’s good jobs there.”

Maritime advocate Phaedra Thomas, former executive director of the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation, said developers have had their sights on the southern Brooklyn waterfront for decades. She recalled the EDC’s 2005 “Pier 7 through 12” study as an early sign.

“It was a foregone conclusion that they wanted housing there then, and it was a foregone conclusion that they wanted housing here now,” Thomas said. “It is a farce to say that they need housing development in order to subsidize a port development.”

In a statement, NYCEDC spokesperson Jeff Holmes said the agency remains committed to the plan and that the delay would provide time for additional community engagement with task force members and the public.

“The Vision Plan for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal is a generational opportunity to replace decades of disinvestment with a brighter, more abundant future for Brooklyn and New York City,” Holmes said.

Gounardes, in a statement, said the delay would help address concerns and work toward a more widely supported proposal.

“It has always been our goal to achieve broad consensus on a BMT redevelopment plan,” Gounardes said. “After extensive discussions with members of the Task Force who remain opposed to the current plan, they have indicated that further refinement and community engagement could achieve that broader consensus.”

Ten members of the BMT Task Force — including Assembly Members Mitaynes and Jo Anne Simon, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, Council Members Avilés and Shahana Hanif, and several environmental and community leaders — released a joint statement expressing frustration over the NYCEDC’s approach.

They said the current plan fails to offer meaningful solutions to key concerns, including transportation impacts, water and sewer capacity, displacement of businesses, and flood zone risks. They also cited a lack of data to support the project’s feasibility and said many of their concerns had gone unaddressed.

“We have participated in the BMT Task Force in good faith, hoping that our engagement would shape a forward-thinking and equitable vision for our waterfront,” the statement read. “Our goal from the beginning has been to get to a ‘yes,’ and we remain committed to that outcome. The proposal does not fulfill the salient goal of transforming the BMT into ‘a harbor of the future’ with manufacturing jobs and robust maritime opportunities. We believe in a future of a working waterfront that centers people, sustainability and justice.”

In a separate statement, Reynoso thanked task force leaders and the EDC for allowing more time to explore ways to revitalize the BMT through “careful thought and consideration,” with a goal of crafting a “truly port-first plan that centers people, sustainability and justice.”

“Our goal from the beginning has been to get to a ‘yes’ on the BMT vision plan,” Reynoso said. “Task Force leadership’s decision to delay the vote today is the best course of action to enable Task Force members and the community to build a shared vision that maximizes the economic potential for Brooklyn’s last working waterfront.”

On the phone recently after a grueling day of rehearsal, composer and indie rocker Ellis Ludwig-Leone had a bit of trouble coming up with a succinct summary for his latest work. 

“Let’s wait on that,” he said with a laugh. “I’m still working that out.”

It’s hard to encapsulate Ludwig-Leone’s career in a tight description, too — he’s the founder and bandleader of San Fermin, an acclaimed Brooklyn-based group that has melded indie rock with orchestral elements for over a decade. But he has also had a parallel career over the past 15 years as a composer, writing and arranging pieces for orchestras, chamber groups, dance groups and more.

At the end of this month, Ludwig-Leone will unveil his most genre-bending project yet: The Woods, an “immersive concert experience” that will take over the main floor of Red Hook’s Pioneer Works arts space for three nights only. Tickets quickly sold out for July 31 and Aug. 1, but on Tuesday, Pioneer Works announced a third show on Aug. 2.

The Woods will feature San Fermin songs from throughout their catalogue, some original arrangements and several stages throughout the large room that will host both a scattering of musicians and professional dancers and singers.

The show resists a straightforward narrative, too (Ludwig-Leone isn’t a fan of “jukebox musicals,” or shows that create plot out of a body of songs). San Fermin members Allen Tate and Claire Wellin play two characters who enter a “witchy kind of bacchanalia,” Ludwig-Leone said, that takes place in a secluded woodsy area, where everyday people can come together to release their worries or loneliness in a group dance ritual.

“The first thought that we had was to prioritize the audience experience. So we were like, ‘Okay, how do we create a world that the audience can enter?’” Ludwig-Leone told Brooklyn Paper. “Allen and Claire as singers are kind of proxies for the audience entering this world.”

Ludwig-Leone produced the show in tandem with longtime creative partner Troy Schumacher, a member of the New York City Ballet and the founder of the BalletCollective nonprofit. But don’t call The Woods a ballet — it’s part contemporary dance, part rock show, part immersive theater. 

Tate, a co-songwriter in San Fermin, also pitched in during the writing process, and Jason Ardizzone-West — who has worked on tour looks for the likes of The Weeknd, Dua Lipa and Lady Gaga — designed the set.

“I think we’re trying to do something that I haven’t seen really done,” Ludwig-Leone said.

Since 2013, San Fermin has released five albums, including 2015’s “Jackrabbit,” which begins with a track called “The Woods.” One verse of the song reads: “Your eyes were lovely, dark, and dense/Pulling legs off salamanders/A little creature you once spun/The skin and bones, and brains and blood/While witches, they surrounded us.”

On “The Cormorant,” the first track on the 2019 album “The Cormorant I,” the lyrics include: 

“Waking from a dream in which/Sleeping you are visited/By a great black cormorant/His wings are vast and open wide/Razor beak and diamond eyes/The bird begins to speak/In a voice both harsh and deep/Rising from an ancient sea… ‘On this morning you will die.’”

While many of the band’s songs also focus on universal themes like love, loneliness and longing, there is a distinct magical feeling to some San Fermin albums, punctuated by theatrical — and sometimes eerie — horn and string sounds.

Ludwig-Leone, 35, grew up near wetlands in western Massachusetts and has always had a fascination with the woods. He liked catching frogs and snakes and reading “Grimms’ Fairy Tales.”

“[In those stories] wonder could turn to terror so quickly. And, you know, I think that the goal with this show is to acknowledge both sides of that,” he said. “That’s what living in our society feels like. It’s such a strange mixture of beautiful, wonderful things and deeply terrifying stuff.”

He’s also a big fan of “The Odyssey” (as in the original, by Homer). In 2023, Ludwig-Leone and Schumacher teamed up to create a dance and music show for prominent novelist Karen Russell’s “The Night Falls” — about a “beautiful grotto turned into a roadside attraction where three sisters sing in kitschy bird outfits,” the New York Times wrote. Think the Sirens from “The Odyssey,” in modern-day Florida.

Ludwig-Leone enjoyed the long rehearsals before that show, because they brought the cast and musicians closer together — and he enjoyed fusing the two strands of his musical life into one production. He wants to tour The Woods across the country and eventually sees it being set up in a residency somewhere in New York.

“It just felt very clarifying to me, that that was the kind of scale that I wanted to write music at,” he said. “Hopefully it’ll be the start of a new fun chapter for the band.”

By the end of our conversation, Ludwig-Leone wasn’t too much closer in figuring out how to describe The Woods.

“It’s sort of like [the horror film] ‘Midsommar,’ without any of the murders,” he quipped.

At schools across the country, academics have raised alarm about growing efforts to define antisemitism on President Donald Trump’s terms.

The post A Columbia genocide scholar says she may leave over university’s new definition of antisemitism appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.

Virginia Brooks Manbeck, eclectic world traveler and librarian extraordinaire, passed away July 19 at the age of 84 while reading a book by Amor Towles.

The post The amazing flying librarian, 84, lived in Heights for 25 years appeared first on Brooklyn Eagle.