(Photo from Grubstreet)

(Photo from Gothamist)

Shake Shack, the popular burger stand that opened in 2004 in Madison Square Park in NYC by Danny Meyer opened its first Brooklyn location in December 2011 and its seventh in NYC. But there’s a little bit of Brooklyn in every location. CounterEvolution, the Dumbo Broolyn based growing business uses reclaimed wood to create one-of-a-kind handmade tables and seating for Shake Shack. CounterEvolution owner Jim Malone created the tables and one wall at the Brooklyn Shake Shack using reclaimed wood from bowling lanes.

According to the CounterEvolution website, CounterEvolution began in 2007 when Jim, a life-long musician and songwriter who was at the time producing cartoons for children’s television, needed to make a change. (He was also the original director of the English-language version of Pokemon.). We’ve admired his tables since we saw them at the first Brooklyn Flea and at BKLYN Designs. CounterEvolution has been at 10 Jay Street in Dumbo for three years, but is moving near the Navy Yards in Brooklyn later next month. We caught up with Jim.

Q: Can you give us a short description of counterevolution’s philosophy?

A: We strive to elevate the artistic possibilities of reclaimed wood and other materials through unique designs and quality craftsmanship.

Q: How did it get started and how long have you been in Dumbo?

A: We started with a few postings on Craigslist then began showing at the Brooklyn Flea just as they were getting started. We had a lot of support from design blogs early on and that really helped get the word out. We’ve had a showroom in Dumbo for 3 years.

Q: How did your partnership with Shake Shack start?

A: They found us through our work at Starbucks and Sweetgreen. Our first location was Miami Beach and we’ve been fortunate to partner with them through their expansion. Our most recent Shake Shack was downtown Brooklyn where we did the tables and a large wall installation.

Q: What were some challenges you faced early on? Current challenges?

A: We started just as the banks stopped lending in late 2007. So, financing was an early obstacle and remains a challenge as we seek to expand our retail sales in a slow economic climate.

(Photo of Jim Malone. Photo credit: Sandra Kress)

Thanks Jim and looking forward to seeing your beautiful pieces in upcoming locations soon.

CounterEvolution (counterev.com)

From time to time we get complaints about Dumbo in our inbox. And by time to time, we mean daily. Some are valid, while others are misdirected anger. Some complaints have been consistent over time (7+ years) and some are new. We normally don’t like to dwell on negatives, but maybe something good can come from listing these. Here are a few choice quotes (emailed to us or as a comment on this website) grouped by topic and frequency in the past month or so.

1. Building alarms: “Any idea what’s going on with the middle of the night alarms being set off? Saw a light flashing at 2:45am in front of Foragers. This has been going on every night for weeks.” (email)
2. Filming in Dumbo: “There should be a balance here that simply does not exist. We are not just a back lot for film crews to use for free- we are a living, breathing, neighborhood that do not need these shoots invading our space.” (source)
3. Lunch/Dining options: “Please Please bring us some more decent food options. Landlords, let the food and beverage establishments come in, they will only make your properties more valuable and your tenants happier!” (source)
4. Gentrification: “I applied for an apartment at 25 Washington Street for middle income earners, but was sold out. How can one get an apartment in Dumbo that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg?” and “Why are rentals in DUMBO so damn expensive? I can’t find anything under $3000. HELP!” (emails) [Ed: Median price for rentals in Dumbo are nearly $4,300, according to Streeteasy]
5. Parking: “Parking in Dumbo used to be easy, but with construction and yuppies moving in, good luck finding a spot.” (reference) [Ed: This complaint has been consistent over time regardless of construction.]
6. Residential building management: [Ed: All of these are complaints about building management. Rather than naming names, contact your building manager.]
7. Dogs and Kids: “The number of dogs and kids in Dumbo are past the annoying stage. What’s the best building without dogs or kids?” (email) [Ed: Umm, none?]

We also get complaints about this website – “why don’t you feature us? Where’s the article about xyz? Your posts are biased.” As mentioned in the about page, this site is run by one person (not affiliated with real estate, the Dumbo BID or art galleries). “We” can’t do it without the tips and emails from you, but sometimes I cannot answer all emails. Thank you. Also the ads are served on the site to support the community. Ad revenue is recycled back into Dumbo non-profits and organizations. Guest posters are welcome!

We used to get a lot of complaints about the street construction, but once Washington Street and Water Street were completed, the complaints stopped. There are others, but if you have a constructive one that we can bring to attention to local officials, neighborhood groups, or businesses, please comment below.

Are you tired of lugging your laundry to the cleaners, especially during the cold and wet winters and muggy summers? This was the thought that SpotlessCity co-founder Sonny Bajwa had before thinking that there must be an easier way to take care of his laundry errands. So he created SpotlessCity.

SpotlessCity lets people find every dry cleaner and laundromat in their area, and schedule pickups & deliveries from the cleaner of their choice directly through the site. The pickups and deliveries are absolutely free, so customers always pay the same exact amount that they would if they dropped their clothes off at the store themselves. It’s sort of a GrubHub.com or SeamlessWeb.com for your laundry and dry cleaning.

They launched the site a few weeks ago in Dumbo, Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn and planning to expand to more neighborhoods throughout NYC soon. We caught up with Sonny recently:

Q: Why did you decide to start in Dumbo/BK Heights?

A: Our company is based in Downtown Brooklyn and our entire team lives in Brooklyn, so we always knew we wanted to launch the service here first. When it came to choosing neighborhoods to start in, Dumbo and Brooklyn Heights were natural choices. Even aside from being the two residential neighborhoods closest to our office, which made them convenient, a number of reasons make them a great launching pad for SpotlessCity.

Dumbo is a very entrepreneurial neighborhood that is full of professionals, which means that there are many residents who need their dry cleaning and laundry done and who are willing to try out new services online. In fact, it’s not only the residents who are entrepreneurial; we found one of our first partner dry cleaners in Dumbo — a very savvy and forward looking cleaner that was excited about being part of something new.

Brooklyn Heights is another great neighborhood with a large number of professionals, but none of the people living in those beautiful brownstones and townhouses have doormen, so they could definitely use our service.

We’re planning to expand further in these neighborhoods and then throughout NYC.

Q: How did SpotlessCity begin?

A: I came up with the idea for SpotlessCity late last year after my wife and I divided up our errands and I got stuck with taking care of the dry cleaning. I noticed pretty quickly that while I was out lugging laundry down the street in the snow, she was able to handle all of her errands — like getting the groceries and ordering dinner — by curling up with her laptop and placing orders online. Naturally, I tried to trade chores, but when she wouldn’t let me, I just kept thinking, “why can’t I do this errand online too?”

I ran the idea by some friends, started doing research and talking to dry cleaners. Pretty soon, we got a team together and raised some seed money. Now we’re proud to welcome everyone to SpotlessCity!

Q: What are the challenges you are or will face in growing SpotlessCity?

A: When trying to launch a lean startup, every day brings new challenges that we have to figure out how to tackle! I’ll share a couple –

First: getting our message across to customers effectively. Explaining our concept has been a little trickier than we thought, perhaps because it’s new. Some people confuse us with “Internet dry cleaners” — companies that have swapped a brick-and-mortar storefront for a website. They’re essentially dry cleaners on the Internet competing with local dry cleaners.

We don’t compete with local dry cleaners, we partner with them. In fact, we don’t actually do any dry cleaning or laundry. We’re more of a SeamlessWeb of dry cleaning and laundry. Our mission is to help local dry cleaners connect with their customers online, and let people choose a dry cleaner and schedule their pickup and delivery online.

Second: communicating with some dry cleaners. Earlier this year, we hit the streets and started talking to dry cleaners to get feedback on our idea and whether it was something they’d be interested in signing up for. We learned pretty quickly that a huge number of New York dry cleaners are originally from Korea and weren’t interested in talking to what they perceived to be door-to-door salesmen (I guess that’s what we looked like!).

After getting the cold shoulder a few times, we stopped and recruited a Korean-American friend to come out with us on our research trip. Before we knew it, he was chatting it up with the dry cleaners in Korean, shaking hands with them, and we got all the feedback we wanted.

Congrats to Sonny and SpotlessCity on their launch. If you want to try out their service, you can get 10% off their dry cleaning and laundry with this code: DumboNYCReaders (valid until 1/31/2012 + pickups & deliveries are ALWAYS free). Also see BrooklynHeightsBlog’s article about them.

Episode 9: Sarah Walko (www.sarahwalko.com and triangleworkshop.org)
Directed by David Castillo
Produced by Blue Barn Pictures, Inc. for DumboNYC on vimeo

In this episode of Crossing Dumbo, Blue Barn Pictures interviews Dumbo based artist Sarah Walko, artist and Executive Director of Triangle Arts Association. She was awarded a scholarship during graduate school, and as part of it, she took an internship at Triagle. “The focus of Triangle is about process and experimentation over product. The emphasis is not on what is the actual thing that comes out of that but it’s about the entire journey. All of that together under one umbrella is art.” Isn’t the journey what life is about?

Crossing Dumbo, a web series of video portraits of artists, entrepreneurs and residents in Dumbo Brooklyn. This is a collaboration between DumboNYC and our talented friends over at Blue Barn Pictures. Different directors from Blue Barn Pictures, a creative content agency, bring their own approach to each interview to create a distinct profile of the person being interviewed and place them within the Dumbo community. Blue Barn Pictures truly love what they do and support the community in a positive way, and for that we’re grateful to have them be a part of Dumbo.

{DumboNYC.com/category/crossing-dumbo/}

(Photo: Emily Berl for The New York Times)

Two Trees Management principal Jed Walentas was featured in The New York Times Sunday Real Estate. At 37, he looks “more Silicon Valley entrepreneur than big-city real estate tycoon”, but runs the real estate management firm his father built by buying two million square feet of former factory and warehouse space between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges in 1981 (for $12 million) and creating the most expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn. Mr. Walentas tells the NYTimes that he wants “to find ways to better connect Downtown Brooklyn with the thriving neighborhoods that ring it. With so many college-age students attending classes — but often not living — in that section of Brooklyn, he said it mystified him that more hadn’t been done to keep them there.”

He not only has influence on Dumbo, but neighborhoods stretching from the West Side of Manhattan to Fort Greene, Brooklyn. He also supports entrepreneurs and the tech community, when he helped present the Dumbo incubator last summer. He also contributed a piece on Brooklyn Eagle on how AT&T, an international corporate entity is supporting the local community.

Bruce Ratner, the president of the Forest City Ratner Companies, which is developing the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn said

“Battery Park City is a great place, but it does not have the same sense of character as Dumbo. Rockefeller Center, on the other hand, has a definitive sense of character, because “the Rockefellers had some idea of what they wanted that place to be.”

In Dumbo, he said, the guiding vision was to retain the area’s industrial flavor (without the industry), while providing a street-level experience both diverse and interesting — even if it means subsidizing rents for small-business owners and declining the high rents offered by big-box stores, or selling off properties and cashing out.

“Jed holds firm to the vision,” Mr. Ratner said. “And that is not a minor comment.”

High praise from one of the more well known develpers. However, Judy Stanton, the executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association has been a critic has battled with both David and Jed Walentas over numerous projects, including the controversial Dock Street project.

Read the article to find out why attracting diversity is important for NYC, why real estate prices are so high, and how he and Donald Trump differ in their styles.

Episode 8: Stefan Killen (stefankillendesign.com and pinholeny.com)
Directed by David Castillo
Produced by Blue Barn Pictures, Inc. for DumboNYC on vimeo

In this episode of Crossing Dumbo, Blue Barn Pictures interviews Dumbo based artist Stefan Killen, a graphic designer and pinhole photographer. Pinhole photography involves a handmade pinhole camera, a small cardboard box wrapped in black plastic and electrical tape without a lens. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. The smaller the hole, the sharper the image, but the dimmer the projected image. Mr. Killen says, “There’s a quality of chaos and messiness in pinhole photography that I really like.” Growing up in Zurich Switzerland, Mr. Killen says, “the Swiss half of me is a graphic designer, and has to have everything to the pixel. The other half of me is American, artistically inclined, and loves pinhole photography for the messiness in it.“

Crossing Dumbo, a web series of video portraits of artists, entrepreneurs and residents in Dumbo Brooklyn. This is a collaboration between DumboNYC and our talented friends over at Blue Barn Pictures. Different directors from Blue Barn Pictures, a creative content agency, bring their own approach to each interview to create a distinct profile of the person being interviewed and place them within the Dumbo community. Blue Barn Pictures truly love what they do and support the community in a positive way, and for that we’re grateful to have them be a part of Dumbo.

{DumboNYC.com/category/crossing-dumbo/}

After Brooklyn Eagle Claw Kung Fu left the neighborhood, there lacked a martial arts school in Dumbo. Last week, Josh Paul opened Aikido of South Brooklyn (AOSB) at 68 Jay Street #509. Aikido is a traditional Japanese martial art of self-defense. Aikido translates as “the way of harmonizing with energy.” It relies on principles of balance, timing, and spacing, rather than size, strength, and might, and is accessible to people of all ages, shapes, and sizes. The goal of aikido’s techniques and philosophy is to control aggression without inflicting injury. It is a system of self-defense and a path to develop positive character. Training at Aikido of South Brooklyn focuses on the technical, martial and artistic aspects of aikido, as well as its potential for individual growth and development.

Classes are available for children ages 6-13 and adults.

“We are very excited to have this opportunity to share our art with the DUMBO community,” said Josh Paul, AOSB’s head instructor. “Aikido is safe, practical, and affordable for people of all ages. It is about self-defense and self-improvement. It is not about fighting and competition. We look forward to expanding our already large youth program and growing adult practice here in Dumbo.”

For more information about Paul sensei and Aikido of South Brooklyn, check out their website. Welcome to Dumbo, Aikido of South Brooklyn!

Aikido of South Brooklyn (www.aikidoofsouthbrooklyn.com)
68 Jay St, #509 Brooklyn, NY 11201
718-612-6334
josh@mindbodyartsinc.com
www.facebook.com/aikidoofsouthbrooklyn

Reader “epc” posted a great recap of yesterday’s Transportation Town Hall meeting worth reposting here. For those who attended, please add any other comments. It would be interesting to see how State Senator Daniel Squadron, Assembly Member Joan Millman and Council Member Steve Levin work with the MTA and DOT on the issues that were raised by residents:

Interesting meeting. Honestly impressed to see Millman and Squadron show up in person for this as well as the staff from MTA and DOT. Not so impressed that no one appeared from our local council member’s office.

Maybe 50-60 people (about 30 seated, plus a lot standing across the back and side).

Biggest issue was the routing of the B25 down Main Street, both in terms of number of speakers as well as time spent discussing the issue.

The B25 also figured in discussion about where to layover the buses (on Fulton or in a new space on Front (I’m guessing under the Bridge but this wasn’t clear to me).

The parking fiasco on York at Front also figured prominently.

Some issues raised by residents from Vinegar Hill about additional bus capacity towards Bridge/Gold streets.

Other issues: two-way Furman means lack of legal drop-off/pickup space for 8 Fulton. Lack of enforcement of no-parking/no-standing on Main Street and around Fulton Landing. Accessibility of buses, train stations. Some sort of connecting tunnel between the York Street station and High Street stations.

Someone asked about the BQE rehab and the DOT rep responded that they were awaiting a response from the NYS DOT on the issue. I know from the meeting I attended in the spring and ensuing reports I’ve read that there simply is no funding at all at the state or federal level to rehab the cantilever (my understanding is that the recently finished rehab was paid for out of the Clinton era(!) highway funding bill). Unless the state can assess a toll on the BQE, which it is currently prohibited from doing (I guess Federal law), the funding is a major stumbling block for anything other than a nice paint job.

I’m sure I’ve left out other issues people raised, feel free to add them. I wanted to ask about adding stop signs and lowering the speed limit on Water Street. Perversely now that Water Street is even, traffic flies down it from Main to Fulton (perhaps with a cursory nod to the stop sign at the bend by River Cafe).

Thanks Ed for the recap!

B25 Bus (Photo by Jane Kratochvil)

State Senator Daniel Squadron, Assembly Member Joan Millman and Council Member Steve Levin invite you to a Transportation Town Hall for DUMBO, Fulton Ferry Landing and Downtown Brooklyn. Join in for a discussion about ongoing transportation issues in our neighborhood, featuring representatives from the MTA, the NYC Dept. of Transportation, and NYPD’s 84th Precinct.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 7:30pm – 8:30pm
55 Washington Street, Room 216 Brooklyn, NY
RSVP to belinda@danielsquadron.org

Dumbo has been talking about yesterday’s discussion of new parking signs, and the B25 Bus Route on Main Street. If you have opinions on the tour buses on Old Fulton Street, York/Front Street redesign, lack of parking, enforcement (or lack thereof)?

Have your opinions heard!

 [+]

[ED: Parking in Dumbo has been a sore subject for Dumbo (as are in many neighborhoods in NYC that lack enough spaces for visitors, residents, and workers. Parking used to be easy to find in 2005 when the area did not have as many residents and businesses. As residents and businesses moved into the area and infrastructure/construction increased, parking has been a challenge for those who drive to Dumbo. But there's hope (aside from indoor/outdoor pay lots). Below are the techniques, as written by Danii Oliver, who commutes to Dumbo every day by car. Please note that parking regulations and signs may change without notice. Observe signs to confirm you are parked in a valid space.]

Sorry Dumbo, for the delay on last week’s secret revelation. I was delayed driving around looking for parking and was waiting in my car for alternate side parking to end. Now that its over let me share my secrets to finding parking in Dumbo with you!

Over the past 6 months I have been driving to work here in Dumbo. At first I had trouble finding parking which made getting to work on time very difficult. However, with time I learned the area and began to formulate a system.

This is a 6 day a week parking schedule that reduces driving around time and can get you in the office by 10:05 AM. Since I am revealing my secret it is imperative that you do two things 1.) Don’t take my spot LOL! and 2.) Be on time for parking not just work. You should plan to arrive in Dumbo around 9 AM to get a space.

Post written by Danii Oliver, Interactive designer and developer. CDO of DAMN Digital Studio, an Interactive Agency. *Please note parking signs may change without notice.*

Related:
{DOT Reverses Story on No Parking Sign, 02Sep2006}
{New Street Parking Spots in Dumbo, 24Aug2007}
{Front Street Parking Regulations Update, 06Nov2007}
{Watch for Updated Parking Regulations in Dumbo, 04Apr2008}
{New Parking Regulations On Front Street, 24Nov2008}
{Outdoor Parking on Old Fulton to Close, 22Apr2009}
{Outdoor Parking in Dumbo, 29Jun2009}
{Parking in Front of 70 Front St, 29Jun2009}

{Past Parking articles on DumboNYC}