READY FOR SPRING. Cilla Ehly, PPUABA President, writes about a recent trip to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in the March 2005 newsletter: “My friend John and I visited the Botanical Garden on Saturday. The semi-arid glass house was fragrant with rosemary and a variety of South African cowslips, gladiolas and other flowers. A weeping bottlebrush tree was blooming and a variety of flowering shrubs contributed to the lovely scented air. In the tropical house, papayas, cocoa pods, coffee berries and an amazing sickle plant with purple points up and down its flower… If you can get there this weekend, I think the papayas will be ready for eating.”

Download PPUABA Newsletter here… Highlights:
-New rules about setting out yard tree trimmings
-PPUABA Annual Plant Sale and Block Party: Date and NEW location
-Parent Coop Day Care wants your lightly used children’s books
-ALTERNATE SIDE PARKING RULE SUSPENSIONS
-NEIGHBORHOOD RESOURCES: MaMa Duke (owner: P Diddy’s mother?!), Fermented Grapes, One Race, more…
-Newsletter Editor Needed!

Susan checks in with a report: “Walked past the old Peralta Supermarket on Carlton and St. Mark’s place and saw it full of renovators. The Work Permit says it’s getting a kitchen update to the existing store.”

Any ideas? Also, check out this engaging “he said, he said” article about the demise of this neighborhood bodega. According to the article, Peralta’s landlord, which “failed to renew” the shop’s $1,173-per-month lease, bought the brownstone for $20,000 in 1968 and sold it last August for $1.2 million.

UPDATE: Laura B. reports that there’s a thread about this today on Chowhound’s Outer Boroughs Message Board. The food will be “American,” according to a guy with a French accent, and will involve “lots of wine”…

Untitled. Unknown (2005), Vanderbilt Ave., Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, New York, USA; Mixed Media (concrete, wood, spraypaint, Sharpie, tinsel, various household furnishings)

UPDATE: In case you were wondering who draws all those little guys everywhere … ideashak has id’d the spraypaint artist as SOLER.

If you’ve had trouble contacting DH in the past few days, have trouble no more.

[image: wallpaper.net.au]