Links

Brooklyn Billboard Warns of the Apocalypse: 17 Days to Go! (Gothamist)
Luc Sante & 'Degentrifying' Park Slope (Park Slope Patch)
The new home of Gowanus Nursery (Lost City)

Mike Tyson on Pigeons (City Room)

There's a nice link in the comments to the flickr page of Chris Arnade - Pigeon Keepers of Bushwick.   When I come home from work, along Eastern Parkway, through Brownsville, there's often a flock taking flight, around 4:00 p.m., & it's a beautiful sight to see the birds swooping & circling up into the air.  Alfred Kazin, in A Walker in the City, describes a similar scene in the Brownsville of the 1920's:

On the roof just across the street, the older boys now home from work would spring their pigeons from the traps.  You could see the feathers glistening faintly in the last light, beating thinly against their sides ... Then, widening and widening their flight each time they came over our roof again, they went round a sycamore and the spire of the church without stopping.

Now the light begins to die.  Twilight is also the mind's grazing time.  Twilight is the bottom of that arc down which we are fallen the whole long day, but where I now sit at our cousin's window in some strange silence of attention, watching the pigeons go round and round to the leafy smell of soupgreens from the stove.  In the cool of that first evening hour, as I sit at the table waiting for supper and my father and the New York World, everything is so rich to overflowing, I hardly know where to begin.