If you've tried to walk or drive on the west side of the canal this week, you already know. Half the neighborhood is torn up for underground utility work, and getting anywhere on foot has become a minor negotiation with orange cones and steel plates. And the noise! We're told it will end soon. We're choosing to believe it. On to this week’s issue.

Now Open / Coming Soon — a new coffee shop lands in South Slope, a Court Street game shop turns into a wine bar, and our Curated Pick is a Smith Street kitchen we've been quietly obsessed with for years

The Big Story — what's actually being built behind the fence at Nevins and Butler, and the preservation fight it took to get there

Things to Do — a lizard hosting therapy, Dominican Night at the Bandshell, and the last weekend to catch The Ark at Powerhouse Arts

The Local — a pink marble table crossed the Atlantic decades before the shop it sits in even existed

Development Watch — what's replacing the old Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, plus a fresh permit on 4th Avenue

Quick Hits — fall class registration opens at Powerhouse Arts

A New Coffee Shop Lands in South Slope
East Light Coffee
161 12th Street
Now Open
Independent and small, East Light pours Café Integral beans and stocks pastries from Balthazar.

Court Street's D&D Shop Is Now a Cafe and Wine Bar
Light Switch
333 Court Street
Now Open
Henry Cummings and Mark Thomas took over the old Brooklyn Strategist space, the one every elementary schooler in Carroll Gardens knew as the Dungeons and Dragons store, and turned it into something for their parents. Mornings run on Abbotsford Coffee and mille-feuille, lunch is baguette sandwiches, and by night the espresso machine gives way to a wine list. Part of the staff comes through Emma's Torch, the nonprofit that trains immigrants and asylum seekers for careers in hospitality.

Thirteen Years In, Smith Street's Greek Kitchen Still Delivers
Avlee Greek Kitchen
349 Smith Street
Owner Andrew Poulos makes his own 3am runs to the fish market and grows some of the herbs himself, and it shows. We keep coming back for the saganaki, pan-fried and served hot in its own cast-iron pan, and the keftedakia, small and dense and gone in two bites. The gyro is shaved thin off the spit, not pre-formed, and the fried pita that comes with the spreads disappears faster than anyone plans for. Family-run since 2013, and it still feels like it.

For four years now, a large area bounded by Butler, Degraw, Nevins, and the canal has sat behind construction fencing, and most of the neighborhood has no idea what's happening inside it. Here's the short version: it's an 8-million-gallon underground tank, built because the Gowanus Canal's Superfund designation requires the city to prevent sewage from overflowing into the water whenever it rains hard.

Getting here wasn't simple. In 2018, City Council voted 49-1 to authorize the city to seize the site by eminent domain, including 234 Butler Street, a 1913 Beaux-Arts pumping station that had housed Salvatore Tagliavia's sanitation repair business for 45 years. Preservationists pushed to landmark the building. The Landmarks Preservation Commission said no, citing too many alterations over the decades. EPA brokered a compromise instead: tear the building down, but save its pediment, its plaque, its carved stone scrollwork, and rebuild them into the new facility's street wall.

Construction has moved fast since. The underground perimeter wall finished in 2024. Excavation encountered old manufactured-gas-plant contamination that triggered resident odor complaints, so the city accelerated the timeline and finished digging six months ahead of schedule in March 2025. Crews are now pouring the concrete base.

When it's done, the tank will be capped by a Selldorf Architects-designed headhouse with a red terracotta louvered facade, and a 1.6-acre public park on top, genuinely rare open space for this stretch of the neighborhood. Full completion is projected for 2029, with the park following in 2030. We'll check back in as the concrete work becomes visible.

Honey Works It Out at Union Hall
702 Union Street
Saturday, August 29 · 7pm
Jack Bensinger and Grace Johnson test new material on you before anyone, themselves included, has decided if it's funny yet. Union Hall calls it a workshop. You're the control group.

Therapy Gecko: A One Lizard Show Special Taping at Bell House
149 7th Street
Saturday, August 29 · 7pm and 9:30pm
An advice show hosted by a puppet gecko gets recorded live, twice, in case the first round of human problems wasn't enough. He's a better listener than most people you know.

Dominican Night at the Bandshell, presented by BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn
Lena Horne Bandshell, Prospect Park
Saturday, August 29 · free
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso hosts an evening of Dominican music and culture, no ticket required, which is more than most borough presidents manage to give you on a Saturday.

Last Weekend for The Ark at Powerhouse Arts
322 3rd Avenue
Through Sunday, August 30
Ninety animal sculptures by artists including Kiki Smith and Maurizio Cattelan close out their run in the Grand Hall this weekend. After Sunday, the elephant goes back to whoever loans out elephants.

NYC Crowdwork New Material at Union Hall
702 Union Street
Sunday, August 30 · 7:30pm and 8:30pm
Holmes, Tara Raani, Gauri B, and Lakshmi Kopparam workshop new sets across two back-to-back shows, which means twice the chances something lands and twice the chances for you to be roasted.

The Nursery: Leon Vynehall All Day Long at Public Records
233 Butler Street
Sunday, August 30 · 3pm
A full afternoon set from the UK producer in Public Records' open-air plant nursery turned dance floor. Starting at 3pm means you can call it a day event and still not go home until dark.

Peyton Dix: Hot & Bothered at Union Hall
702 Union Street
Monday, August 31 · $15
Comedy, fanfic, and what the flyer bills, unpromptedly, as crushes on the host herself. At least she's honest about her own agenda.

George Civeris: Brand New Stuff! at Union Hall
702 Union Street
Thursday, September 3
New material from George Civeris, presumably brand new, presumably still under warranty.

100% Eat Live at Bell House
149 7th Street
Thursday, September 3 · 7:30pm, 21+
The hosts of the food review podcast argue about fast food in front of a live audience for the first time, which means the chicken sandwich discourse now has stakes.

Kumbia Net: Turbo Sonidero, Space Primo at Public Records
233 Butler Street
Thursday, September 3 · 10:30pm
MC MexTape hosts a night of cumbia and sonidero on the club side of the building. A 10:30 start on a Thursday might be ambitious.

Noah Show: Live! at Littlefield
635 Sackett Street
Thursday, September 3 · 8pm, doors at 7pm · $14.86–$18.71, 21+
Two teams of comedians compete for a prize that, per the venue's own description, comes out to twenty dollars split between them. The dignity is not included in the ticket price.

Body Count, hosted by Tessa Belle and Jo Sunday, at Union Hall
702 Union Street
Friday, September 4 · doors 9:30pm, show 10pm
A comedy and variety show built around, in the hosts' own words, sex and murder, lovers and enemies, broken hearts and broken bones. Whether you kiss them or kill them afterward is, they insist, entirely your call.

Booker Stardrum & Evan Shornstein, Alfredo Colón Trio at Public Records
233 Butler Street
Friday, September 4 · 7pm
A live bill in the Sound Room, which remains the one room in the neighborhood built specifically so you can hear everything.

Court Pastry Shop
298 Court Street
Daily, 8:30am–8pm

Salvatore Zerilli's story starts before the bakery does. Born in Brooklyn in 1917, he lost both parents to the flu pandemic that same generation was still reeling from, and was sent back to Marsala, Sicily, to be raised by relatives. He came back to New York at fifteen, and an uncle named Carmelo, who ran a pastry shop on Columbia Street, taught him the trade. In 1948, the year his son Gasper was born, Salvatore bought the shop that's now Court Pastry.

The pink marble table in the back of the kitchen made the same crossing decades earlier, shipped over from Italy sometime in the 1890s. It's still there. Still used. A stretch of countertop that predates the shop it sits in by half a century.

Gasper and his brother Vincent run the place now, and the holidays are the real test: seven days a week, frying rice balls, pulling sfogliatelle from the oven, keeping up with a line that gets serious the closer it gets to Christmas. The sfogliatelle is the thing people plan trips around, orange-scented ricotta packed into pastry shells that shatter the second you bite in. In summer, the Italian ices pull their own crowd down the block.

About twenty years ago, Court Pastry started making sugar-free cookies, a small accommodation for diabetic customers in a shop that's otherwise not in the business of modernizing. Gasper's philosophy on the matter, more or less: everything in moderation, and what's the point of living a long time if you can't eat butter?

Seventy-eight years in, the shop hasn't needed a rebrand, a renovation, or a reason. The marble table is still there. So is the family. If you've walked past this stretch of Court Street a hundred times and never gone in, this is the week to fix that.

The Whole Block Around the Old Dinosaur Bar-B-Que Is Being Redeveloped
604 Union Street
A nine-story, 85-unit building is headed for 604 Union Street, the spot Dinosaur Bar-B-Que left when it closed in April. It's set to include ground-floor retail, a rooftop rec space, and a cellar-level yoga room. Developer Blue Sky Builders has not announced a construction timeline.

A 14-Story Building Is Planned for 292 4th Avenue
292 4th Avenue
A 14-story, 99-unit building is coming to 292 4th Avenue, designed by architect Fariba Makooi of Bayside Engineering. The lot currently holds a one-story commercial building from 1931. No construction timeline has been announced.

Powerhouse Arts opens fall class registration September 1. Ceramics, printmaking, and more, running October through November, with tiered pricing based on ability to pay. Don’t sleep on this.

Watch your step out there. Half the sidewalks have been torn up.

If something's happening out there, we want to know about it. Email, photo, neighborhood gossip — we'll take it.
[email protected].

Exploring Gowanus · Every Saturday