Cacao Prieto may be Red Hook’s sweetest secret. The chocolate factory has been quietly making bonbons for private parties and for the public, via a pop-up shop in DUMBO. While pop-up shop closed at the end of the spring, the Red Hook factory is poised to soon open its doors to the public.

The chocolate-making process starts with organic beans picked from proprietor Daniel Preston’s family-owned plantation in the Dominican Republic. The beans undergo a unique fermentation process after being harvested. Once in New York, the beans get shelled and winnowed down to a nib, before fats and sugars are added.

Damien Badalementi, Cacao Prieto’s head confectioner, says the painstaking process makes for quality chocolate. Badalementi clearly enjoys his work – but don’t mistake him for an Oompa-Loompa. Unlike Roald Dahl’s legendary chocolate factory workers, Badalementi believes chocolate making is serious business.

Mayor Bloomberg’s budget calls for raising parking rates 25 cents an hours in Manhattan north of 86th Street and throughout the other boroughs. But small business owners and their advocates contend the increase will drive some shoppers to parking-friendly suburban malls, cutting down on sales – and sales tax revenue.

A tradition that started in the Bronx’s deadliest days, when homicide was an everyday occurrence, still marks the borough’s streets. As blood fell on the pavement, paint rose on the walls.

Beginning in the early 1990s, memorial murals began to appear in Mott Haven and other South Bronx neighborhoods as vibrant reminders of those lost in the community and to honor the lives of neighbors who died.

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The Centers for Disease and Control touts fluoridation of tap water as  “one of the ten great public health achievements of the 20th Century.” But the last year has brought a wave of 21st Century opposition from some lawmakers and activists who cite new claims that the practice, intended to promote tooth health, is actually dangerous.

City Councilman Peter Vallone, Jr. (D-Queens) recently introduced legislation to ban fluoride in the city’s tap water. Dr. Gilbert Ross of the American Council on Science and Health and others experts say there is no danger – and argue that the claims are reminiscent of fluoride opponents of the 1960s who called putting the chemical in drinking water a communist plot.