Sean Jacobs of the Africa is a Country blogs talks to Tsidi Matale aka DJ Stone about music and what it means to be an African living in Brooklyn.

Claude Scales of the Brooklyn Heights blog interviews fellow blogger and lawyer T.K. Small about the proposed closures at Long Island College Hospital.

Even after closing three patient services that lose money, beleaguered Long Island College Hospital could still end up shutting down, a top official said.

At a packed community meeting, the president of the hospital’s corporate parent, Continuum Health Partners, could not guarantee the fate of the downtown hospital.

“Everybody should be anxious about this. This is not a guarantee,” said Continuum president Stanley Brezenoff after presenting a plan to close LICH’s pediatrics and dentistry departments. In July, hospital officials announced plans to close LICH’s maternity unit.

The hospital also closed its well-regarded Rape Crisis Center in June.

Read the full article here.

Justin Palmer of the Little Rus blog, takes us on a tour of all things Russian in Brighton Beach.

Ned Berke of Sheephead Bites talks to Captain Sapanara about the challenges facing the recreational fishing industry in Sheepshead Bay.

Adrian Kinloch of Brit in Brooklyn and Tracy Collins of Not Another F*cking Blog share their thoughts on photoblogging and talk about the Web Cam that is documenting the demolition at the Atlantic Yards site.

Keith Wagstaff of Williamsburg is Dead talks to artist William Powhida and Don Carroll of Jack the Pelican Presents about the state of the art scene in Williamsburg today.

Williamsburg has long ago hit the “tipping point.” If and when the Broadway musical based on the ‘Burg comes out, rather than a dramatic ending, in tragedy and death, like Rent, the ‘Burg will, more likely, fade and crumble without a whimper, burdened under its own ennui and the pressures of the real estate boom.

To read the full article in the Brooklyn Rail go here.

Brenda Becker of Prospect: A Year in the Park and Charles Star of Hawthorne Street, debate the pros and cons of a new 20-story building slated to be built on Lincoln Road, adjacent to Prospect Park.

What disturbed me about the nascent debate over this flagship of skyscrapery in PLG was the opinion expressed by some that Brooklyn would have “arrived” once Prospect Park was virtually ringed with towers, in the manner of (its vastly inferior rough draft) Central Park. The vision of Vaux and Olmsted was explicitly that harried urbanites could refresh their souls in a place from which the city was mysteriously cloaked and hidden.

Read the full article here.

Ben Nadler of Kinetic Carnival talks to some of the folks at Surfside Gardens in Coney Island about the future of their community garden as development plans threaten to convert their beautiful garden to low-cost housing.

During Rudy Giuliani’s mayoralty in the 1990s, garden closures were at their highest rates, culminating in 1998 when the Giuliani administration tried to auction off all of the community gardens on city-owned property.

But a judge stopped Giuliani’s plan from moving forward. In 2002, a compromise was reached between the attorney general’s office and the city that handed jurisdiction over many gardens to the parks department, protecting them from development. Many others have been bought by private organizations like the Trust for Public Land, but a few dozen or so remain under the control of HPD.

Read the full article here.

Find the surfside garden on Google Maps

Louise Crawford of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn interviews Joe Holtz from the Park Slope Food Coop about their upcoming vote regarding the selling of bottled water.

The problem is this: 30 million or so bottles end up in landfills every day, environmental experts say. The vast majority of the bottles are made from petroleum — roughly 1.5 million barrels of oil a year, enough to fuel 100,000 cars, according to the Earth Policy Institute.

Read the whole article here:
Find the Park Slope Food Coop on Google Maps.

Anne Pope shows us around the sustainable side of Flatbush. Her tour in includes a stop at a meeting of the Sustainable Flatbush gardening committee, hosted by Flatbush Gardener, Chris Kreussling.

The Gardening Committee has already begun planning for a whole weekend of activities on Arbor Day Weekend (April 25-27); yes, it’s about trees, but trees and neighborhood “greening” are also Livable Streets issues, they affect energy use, are proven to be good for business, and are healthy for children and other living things.