vip in the city

Greenpoint photo shoots

Decisions, decisions. I had to bow out of JL’s belated birthday celebration at Bon Chon – Korean fried chicken: it’s the Next Big Thing! – due to pre-existing plans in Greenpoint the same evening. Not that my presence is actually all that much in demand; July happens to be a popular month for birthdays – second most in fact, just behind August. In any case, I was hoping to cruise by still on the goodwill generated by my birthday gift to JL of some two decades ago: ZZ Top’s Afterburner – on cassette, obvs – during our first summer at CTY (read: geek camp.)

Unbeknownst to me, the Reuters boys had already begun the festivities several hours before my arrival with German chocolate cake. I turned the corner on Manhattan Avenue to discover a couple of serious Żubrówka-fueled photo shoots already in progress.

The boys agreed to take a break at the spin-off location of the much-loved Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, which opened last month on Commercial Street in the space that once housed our favorite Greenpoint Jamaican (then later: not-so-Jamaican) café Bleu Drawes.

Instead, we found two rather forlorn looking girls and a man who I assumed was their father, sitting on the benches outside the shuttered storefront. No ice cream today. The man confided that he’d never actually seen the shop open for business. With no operating phone it’s difficult to confirm, but New York magazine reports that a sidewalk crêpe cart – ooh, crêpes! — is in the works for summer’s end, so we’ll just have to keep coming back to check.

On Franklin, our ears were met with a tinny tune on incessant loop, which could only signify one thing. Not Mister Softee, (R.I.P.) but his fiesty Brooklyn cousin: Kool Man.

This being Brooklyn and not the UK, there would be no 99s for AC. And while the menu was more familiar to me (soft serve cones, Klondike bars, Popsicles, and good ol’ American Bomb Pops), the tune emitted from the brightly logoed truck was not quite that earworm of a jingle that I recalled from all my own childhood summers, but rather “Turkey in the Straw“… with a pounding back beat, which somehow, among the warehouses, felt just right.

Boo.