Loretta Gendville didn’t want to become a bag lady.
But a law enacted last year required Gendville, owner of Brooklyn’s Area chain of children’s stores, to put out large containers to collect and recycle plastic bags. So the reluctant bag gatherer recently took a drastic step: she eliminated bags altogether.
What happens to a funeral home when it’s no longer a funeral home?
For Ava Gerber, who recently bought the Robert F. Cranford Funeral Home near Fort Greene Park on DeKalb Avenue, the answer was obvious: turn it into a yoga studio.
Then, bring students to the embalming room and help them meditate on death.
Five dollars a week.
That’s what Fort Greene resident Nia Hoyte pays so that her three-year-old son, Kaiden Neith, can learn to read. These days, although he’s not old enough to understand all of the words, Kaiden’s a bit of a bookworm.
“Every day he comes home he’s like, ‘Mommy, read, read, read,’” Ms. Hoyte said last Tuesday morning after dropping her son off at Duffield Children’s Center on Fleet Place, a 15-minute walk from their apartment. “We read on the bus, we read on the train.”
Duffield, which is run by the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service (BBCS), is a publicly funded day care center serving a number of children from nearby public housing developments and lower income families. Duffield also is one of two centers in Fort Greene that might have to close if a proposal to shutter 15 care centers in gentrifying areas citywide goes through.
To the city, the leases for some of the centers — the list of which also includes Farragut Day Care Center on Gold Street — are draining money from a tight budget. Located in neighborhoods where real estate values are rising, the spaces themselves are no longer affordable.
Fridays are Lady Jasmin’s night at the Starlite Lounge. The resident drag queen at this Crown Heights mainstay performs Jennifer Hudson and old-school R&B songs with gusto — sometimes crying, doing backwards summersaults, and hurling her silver stilettos across the stage.
“You gotta see the show,” the regulars at the self-described “oldest black-owned non-discriminating bar in New York” tell the young hipsters who seem to be venturing through the doors these days.
Since opening in 1959, the Starlite Lounge on Nostrand Avenue and Bergen Street has served as a modest safe space for gay, lesbian, and transgendered people of color and their friends in Central Brooklyn. Older gay and straight neighborhood residents throw birthday parties at the Starlite, and gather at the bar after funerals. More recently arrived condo-dwellers pack the house for Thursday night karaoke.
But a recent change in the building’s ownership may force the Starlite Lounge to end its half-century run.
