A bit belated, but here’s another piece of community news that came my way. Sunset Park Community Supported Agriculture is now accepting new members. Below find a little info on what a CSA is, and how exactly you might go about joining the neighborhood group if this strikes your fancy. I know several people in the neighborhood have, including Sunset Parkour. From the press release:

CSA’s have been popping up in neighborhoods around the city recently and Sunset Park is no exception.  Last year a handful of neighborhood residents got together and worked with Just Food to establish a CSA right here in Sunset Park.  After a great first year with MimoMex farms the Sunset Park CSA is ready for their second year and is now selling shares for the 2010 season.

The Sunset Park CSA runs for 22 weeks from mid-June through early November.  Members can choose either a Weekly or an Every-Other-Week vegetable share.  Members pick up their shares on Wednesday’s from 5 to 7:30 at St. Michael’s Church on 4^th Avenue between 42^nd and 43^rd Streets.  The Sunset Park CSA is a volunteer organization and the members also set up and break down the distribution site each week.

Here are the share prices for the 2010 season.  Note that there are two different pricing options based on household income – Plan A and Plan B – for the vegetable share.

More questions? You can shoot an email to SunsetParkCSA@yahoo.com.

This landed in my inbox this week, and I thought, especially in these strapped times, it worth passing along. Most of the jobs are for the “enumerator” position, I’ve been told, which pays $18.75 an hour and offers flexible scheduling, including nights and weekends. The local district also covers Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights, Ft Greene, Boerum Hill, Borough Park, and Park Slope. Job applicants take a basic 28-question multiple choice test with basic math, map reading, and literacy skills. No computer skills needed, and there are local testing sites right in the neighborhood. Brokelyn’s checked it out.

From the people who walk the streets to the sidewalks themselves, Sunset Park has serious texture. Out shooting the other day, I couldn’t help but notice the odd and fascinating variety of doors–oddly high from the ground, camouflaged in walls of color, and a bright spot in a field of gray. So here are a couple of shots with a common theme: unusual apertures.

Have any good “wallscapes” from Sunset Park? Send them along to sunsetparkchron@gmail.com with a note saying when you found it, where and the name you want to use as credit. I’ll put together a sideshow of some of the best looking shots.

Cyclist making his way through west Brooklyn via Sunset Park's busy Third Avenue.

I’ll be covering the tonight’s forum on the new Brooklyn Greenway planned to run from Greenpoint to Sunset Park. It takes place at UPROSE tonight, Wednesday, March 31 at 6:30pm at 166A 22nd Street in Brooklyn. Come out to participate in the forum, or tweet a question with the hashtag #spgreenway and I’ll try to pass it along.

digenger captures another side of parking...

Here are some of the goings-on with the Sunset Park politicos…

City Politics:

Councilwoman Sara Gonzalez has been elected Brooklyn’s budget negotiator for the third year in a row. Budgetary gloom and doom abounds at the state or city levels this year, and Gonzalez recognized the climate in a statement she released, saying, ““I will continue to seek innovative ways to ensure my constituents, as well as all New Yorkers, feel as little negative impact as possible as we navigate through the twists and turns of these troubled times.”  Affordable housing, jobs, and education topped her list of priorities.

Gonzalez last week introduced a bill to limit alternate side of the street parking days in many residential districts to two days per week. The community board has been vying for this for a while, feeling it an onus on local residents to have the rules in effect four days each week. In fact, I heard a resident griping about just that as she walked out of the subway last week. The limit has already been implemented in Park Slope, Fort Greene and other neighborhoods northward.

Lastly, Gonzalez was one of several members to float another idea–making March 31 a national holiday honoring union-organizer and farm worker César Chávez.

In Albany:

Assemblyman Félix Ortiz is back the news, this time stumping for legistlation to requires skiers to don helmets when they before hitting the slopes, the New York Times reported. Though no salt ban, this too might face some opposition. The legislation, originally introduced in 1998 after the deaths of Sonny Bono and Michael Kennedy, would penalize slope operators for bareheaded patrons.

Representative Nydia M. Velázquez made the news this week in a NY Times article on the March for America immigration rally in Washington. She’s not the only one from Sunset Park speaking up on the issue–La Union and it’s youth arm Y-ACT also made the trip south for the march.

Police have opened a homicide investigation in the death of a man found with his throat slashed at the scene of a fire on 56th Street last Tuesday, according to Jesus Pintos, deputy inspector of the 72nd precinct. It looks, sadly, like Sunset Park is following a recent uptick in murders throughout the city.

Burglaries in the 72nd Precinct are up 120 percent from this time last year, due in large part to a recent spate in Sunset Park. Shoddy locks and improper safety measures have a lot to do with it, Inspector Pintos said. Police recommend taking basic precautions–make sure doors are shut properly when you leave the house, and replace old or flimsy locks and bolts.

Two men in their early 20s were badly stabbed near Greenwood Cemetery on March 16, the Inspector said. Carlos Perez and Fernando Simon were walking along on 26th Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues when they were confronted by one or two men. Perez and Simon were rushed to Lutheran hospital where last week they remained in critical condition. Police said the investigation is ongoing.

Things do look a bit grim, but here is some perspective: while crime may be up 12.32 percent this year in the 72nd precinct, it is down 21.92 percent from this time in 2008.

Here is the information for the upcoming youth committee meeting for Community Board 7, which was rescheduled after a cancellation last week. The committee will create a mission for the year. Do you have ideas or concerns about youth in Sunset Park? Show up and put in your 2 cents:

Community Board 7’s Youth Committee

Tuesday, April 13 at 6:30 p.m.

Community Board Office, enter on 43rd Street at Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park in the old court building.

(7:07 p.m.) A 35-year-old home health care worker in Brooklyn was arrested on Thursday on charges she fatally beat with her fists or an object the 67-year-old woman she was supposed to be caring for, a law enforcement official told the New York Times.

Read more below…

(3:25pm) A home home health aide has been charged with the murder of the 67-year-old Sunset Park woman in her care.

Aide Yamilette Hidalgo had on ongoing dispute with patient Maria Torres, neighbors told WABC.

Hidalgo, 33, called police at about 11am on March 24 to report she had found her patient dead on the bathroom floor in Torres’ apartment at 558 50th St. Hidalgo told officers a man had burst through the door and knocked her unconscious. Hidalgo said she found Torres after coming to. But police charged Hidalgo with the murder after investigation “revealed that Mrs. Hidalgo’s story was…fabricated,” Deputy Inspector Jesus Raul Pintos wrote in an email.

Police told WABC the frail Torres fell in the course of the dispute Wednesday morning and subsequently died.

Hidalgo confessed yesterday evening, according to police.

Police are investigating the death of a 67-year-old woman found dead in her house on 50th Street in Sunset Park on Wednesday morning, the Daily News reported. The home health care aide who called to report the death said a man burst in that morning, knocking her unconscious. When she awoke, she discovered her charge nude on the bathroom floor. Police are investigating the grisly story, and have not yet ruled the death a homicide.

The body of a man was found in the backyard of a burning row house on 56th Street in Sunset Park early Tuesday morning.

The body of a man in his 30s was found with his throat slashed in the backyard of a house ablaze on 56th Street in Sunset Park, the Daily News reported.

The fire at 322 56th Street, set the street alight at 1:22am Tuesday morning. More than 100 firefighters spent 90 minutes extinguishing the blaze, according to the Daily News. Eight sustained minor injuries.

The man found sprawled in the back yard was bleeding from a laceration at the neck, and was declared dead at the scene, said Jesus Raul Pintos, deputy inspector of the 72^nd Precinct. Police are investigating the death, but have not declared it a homicide.

“His body was found in the behind the building,” said Melissa Velez, whose aunt and grandparents live in the house next door. “We heard someone threw the body out the window.”

Velez’s aunt Janet Morales lives with her parents in the house, and awoke early Tuesday morning to find the house next door burning. She rushed her two sons and her parents onto the street, and fire crews soon arrived.

The family was safe, but their house was not, said Morales, 40. Firefighters used her front room to help put out the blaze, leaving water damage that has seeped from Morales’ apartment on the third floor down to the foundation.

“It was a terrible experience,” she said.

Morales’ family and neighbors have complained to police and buildings inspectors about people passing in and out of the vacant building next door for years, Morales said. Police too have tried to do something about the structure, but have had little success contacting the bank that now owns the house, Pintos said.

Neighbors across the street said they often saw people lingering outside the house. One man in his twenties made it a regular post, they said, and often stumbled around as if drunk. They didn’t believe anyone lived in the building, but people regularly seemed  to come up from Third Avenue and walk in and out. The door, to anyone willing to walk up and test it, was open.

“We tried to call the bank too after someone tried to rob my grandfather’s house,” said Melissa Velez. “And then this.”

At about 5pm, Velez stood with an umbrella and a baby carriage, watching an emergency team clean out the contents of her aunt and grandparents’ house. Detectives with notepads passed up and down the block, asking neighbors what they had seen. But the investigation was not the first thing on Velez’s mind. Her aunt and grandparents must vacate the row house where they have lived for decades.

Janet Morales came down the stairs, surrounded by family. They had been in the house, looking at the damage, and what they might salvage.

“I lost everything,” Morales said.

They were heading to Fifth Avenue to buy some clothes. Morales looked at her violet fingernails, “Maybe I’ll get my nails done,” she said. “They got all messed up.”

Morales laughed, the ring a little hollow. “I’m trying to make the best of it,” she said.