Get Ready for a Doughnut Orgasm in Your Mouth

Photo via Doughnut Plant's Instagram

On today, National Doughnut Day, it is important that we all reflect on the brave, historic journey depicted in Homer's Odyssey. There's much to be learned from the classic Greek epic, which centers on the patriarch of the Simpson family returning home from Shelbyville after his quest to find the perfect doughnut. The important lesson? Doughnuts are important. People should die for them.

I'm still on a quest for the perfect doughnut myself. After growing up on Dunkin Donuts, when traveling down South one summer in the early 00's, I came across my first glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut & was all "OH...Dunkin Donuts doughnuts are actually kinda lame." Since then, I've been exposed to Tim Horton's. I skipped Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland, OR because fuck that line but I have no doubt that their doughnuts are good. I read so on the internet. Here in Brooklyn, I've never had a bad doughnut from Peter Pan or Dough.

Now word's come out via Twitter that the much-heralded Doughnut Plant, with one location in the LES & one in Chelsea, is coming to Flatbush Ave in October, taking over the former Yummy Taco space & putting them right in the heart of the food boom around Barclays Center. Twenty years after he started baking in a LES tenement basement, owner Mark Isreal is finally crossing the bridge to cash in on those sweet Brooklyn benjamins.

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The Barclays Area is About to Get a Little Sweeter

Photo via Sugar Factory

Back in March of 2010, when construction first began on the Barclays Center, developers swore up & down that once the arena opened up, the local economy was TOTALLY going to boom! Businesses in the surrounding area would be FLOODED with arena-goers. Real estate magnate Michael Pintchik, who owns a number of buildings surrounding Barclays, was going to make bank by bringing new & exciting businesses to his properties. Neighborhood REVITALIZATION!

Flash forward to 2014 and, almost two years after the rusty stadium first opened, it hasn't exactly panned out that way. Sure there's a Shake Shack slated to open up soon in a Pintchik building on Flatbush across from the arena, but Shake Shack does not a neighborhood make. In the last few days though, there've been a few announcements that hint at things picking up in the area.

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The Barclays Center Could Have Killed Us All

Tien Mao via Gothamist

It was only a matter of time.

Forest City Ratner, the same company that promised Brooklyn starchitect Frank Gehry's 9th Wonder of the World and instead plans to give us watered down, prefab modular towers, recently admitted that bolts originally used to keep the Barclays Center from collapsing into Target and Vickie's Secret were the wrong size.

According to the New York Times, halfway through building, the company that created the bolts stopped production because of financial difficulties, and in a rush attempt to complete the arena in time for Jay-Z and the Nets, Forest City Ratner used smaller bolts in the arena's canopy-like entryway to get the job done.

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Here's a video of Jay-Z and Coldplay counting down the new year at the Barclays Center

Did any of you guys check out the show? Did Jay-Z and Coldplay perform a "Yellow/99 Problems" mash-up? Were Beyonce and Gwyneth giddily singing along in the wings like some teenage groupies? 

Damn the Ratner Man, Save the View!

Pic from virtualtourist.com

Do you know that if you look through the arch of Grand Army Plaza from a certain angle just inside of Prospect Park, you can see a perfectly-framed Empire State Building? Cool, right? For those who have never noticed it, you better run out there and take a look while you can, 'cause guess who might be blocking that gorgeous view in the near future? Our BFF responsible for The Barclays Center, FOREST CITY RATNER.

I know that some of us have reconsidered our negative feelings toward The Barclays Center since they brought our borough the Nets and Babs Steisand and the Rolling Stones and whatnot, but the Atlantic Yards project is no where near completion. We have at least a thousand years of their modular glass shithouses to live through, and now one of Ratner's gargantuan towers -- a 219-foot tall residential high-rise on Atlantic Avenue near Sixth Avenue, to be exact -- threatens to block this little-know view of the Empire State building forever.

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