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New York Times
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
I've Dreamed of This Salad for Over a Decade. Now, It's Yours.
Roman's opened in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 2009, a little over a year into my daughter's life. I was still just emerging from the fevered seclusion of early motherhood, and when I stepped outside, the world seemed unnaturally bright. I was hungry all the time. Recipe: Melon Salad With Nectarines, Tomatoes and Basil My husband and I would walk the four blocks from our apartment to the restaurant. We'd arrive at 5 p.m., right when it opened, with our daughter in my arms, feeling like fugitives, ready to eat and run before the proper customers showed up. Often we were the first through the door. We always had the same table, the last four-top across from the marble bar, angled against the wall like a diamond. A server would slip a shim of cardboard under an unsteady leg so it wouldn't rock. The menu was printed on graph paper and changed daily — completely, with almost no repeats. What you loved, you loved once and might never see again. (Pete Wells, then The Times's restaurant critic, wrote that raving about such dishes 'borders on sadism.') Sometimes I had no idea how to order; but whatever came turned out to be exactly what I wanted. Over time, patterns emerged. Suddenly fennel was a significant part of my diet. Likewise cardoons, an obstinate vegetable — technically, a thistle — I had never heard of. The writer Scarlett Lindeman, who was a cook there, told me they required up to six blanchings to be coaxed into tenderness. 'Those bitter puny vegetables,' she recalls now, adding: 'Best kitchen I ever worked in.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
16-07-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Condo Conversion in Former Brooklyn Church Offers ‘Piece of History'
A former church in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, has had its pews turned into staircases and bell tower to a kitchen, undergoing a refresh into luxury condos. Now known as the Abbey, the building, at 232 Adelphi Street, started sales this week for 12 condos, ranging from studios to three-bedrooms. Sales are being handled by the Jessica Peters Team at Douglas Elliman, with studios starting at $1.195 million and three-bedrooms starting at $3.85 million. 'You're buying art,' said Ms. Peters, who also oversaw the renovation's interior design with Rita van Straten. 'You're buying a piece of history that was updated.' Completed in 1888 in the gothic revival style, the church, which is in a designated historic district by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, was formerly known as St. Mark's Protestant Episcopal. The building was converted to rentals in 2016 after having fallen into disrepair. Adapting a church 'is always a negotiation of trying to preserve all the things that are extraordinary about it, but then finding a way to utilize this residential use,' said Brian Ripel, a principal with Combined Architecture and Interiors, the firm that oversaw the building's initial conversion. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
08-07-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Lorna Simpson's Brooklyn Art Studio Is On the Market
When Lorna Simpson couldn't find the right spot for her Brooklyn art studio, she did what many artists in New York City often can only dream of doing: She had one built from the ground up. Ms. Simpson, renowned for her photographs and multimedia work, and her then-husband, the artist James Casebere, commissioned the British architect David Adjaye to design a building at 208 Vanderbilt Avenue in the Fort Greene neighborhood where a one-story garage previously stood. (It was one of Mr. Adjaye's first projects in the United States.) 'I could not find something that I liked that felt spacious and that did not feel like a tight traditional townhouse domestic space with limited free-wall space,' Ms. Simpson said in an email. The four-story, 22-foot-wide structure, which Mr. Adjaye called 'Pitch Black,' is clad in polypropylene panels on the front and side facades, while the back portion is mostly glass. Ms. Simpson created many of her works there, but today the building, which was completed in 2006, is mainly used for archiving and storage, as well as entertaining and hosting guests. Several years ago, Ms. Simpson moved her primary studio to a larger, leased commercial space nearby. Now she's putting the Vanderbilt Avenue building on the market with an asking price of $6.5 million, according to the broker, Leslie Marshall of the Corcoran Group, who is listing it with her colleague Nick Hovsepian. Annual property taxes are $12,161. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
