Check out this piece I wrote for nbcnewyork.com.

Check out my latest story on the Brooklyn blogging community published in the New York Daily News.

A world seethes beneath New York where love-seeking straphangers interact with stolen glances between jostling bodies.

Those who enter that world at the L train’s Bedford Avenue stop in Brooklyn take to the Internet more often than riders on any other line to turn furtive eye contact into trysts.

In romance fever’s high-season — the two weeks before and after Valentine’s Day — 421 men and women posted to the “missed connections” thread on craigslist.org hoping to connect with a stranger they chatted with or made eye contact with underground.

Read the rest of my story, also published by chicagotribune.com here.

You can also check out the missed connections mapped out by gender here.

Two of my classmates, Eliot Caroom and Lakshmi Gandhi, produced a multimedia package for Newsweek on the Quaker vote in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can find the video and story here.

or other ways to avoid Times Square.

By Erin O’Neill

Buried beneath our streets and seas lie the fiber optic cables that allow entire continents of people to communicate and trade in the economic phenomenon known as globalization. That same spidery web of cable connecting people in different countries has also spawned a new trend taking place in the cafes and bars of south Brooklyn.

At noon on a Thursday a health care consultant, graphic designer, architect and accountant sit in a French bistro on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens talking about the Spitzer scandal and things to do in Brooklyn – and not one of them took the day off. It is the office break room evolved – fitted for the needs of the growing population of Brooklynites that work from home.

“When you’re home all day it’s nice to find people to meet up for lunch,” said Ginger Smith Carls, a healthcare consultant who works from her home in Park Slope.

Technology has laid the foundation for this whole new breed of American workers – people who work from home and commute online. An estimated 45 million Americans telecommuted in 2006 – up from 4 million in 2003 – according to the International Labour Organization’s World of Work. They come largely from the professional class – investment bankers, fashion designers, account managers – and make up a growing number of employees who spend their working hours behind brownstone walls.

But this new mode of working has one problem – many employees fear a lack of personal contact that cannot be satisfied while dressed in sweatpants working on your laptop from home. In Brooklyn, this growing group of telecommuters have found ways to replace water cooler banter by spending their lunch hour with other telecommuters at local restaurants in the area, instead of at their kitchen table – alone.

Allison Make, an account manager for a Boston-based pharmaceutical company, started telecommuting from her Kensington apartment a year and a half ago when she decided she wanted to move from Boston to New York without leaving her job behind. But she worried that she would miss the human interaction.

“I’m very social,” said Make. “I do talk to people throughout the day on conference calls and email, but it’s when I have down time that I can go a little crazy.”

So Make joined the Park Slope Lunch Meetup Group – a social network formed online that meets for lunch every two weeks in a different restaurant in Park Slope and adjoining neighborhoods. “It gets me out of the house,” said Make.

Jeffrey Drexler, a 57-year-old architect who works from home at Park Slope, worked in office buildings as an architect from 1978 to June of 2007. When Drexler started spending his days behind his desk at home and not at the office he realized he missed the personal contact and group lunches that are the staples of an office environment. “I miss meeting up for after work drinks,” said Drexler. To assuage this growing loneliness Drexler joined the Park Slope Lunch Meetup Group nine months ago to meet new people and expose himself to new opportunities.

Peter Karp, a software developer from Park Slope, started the meetup group over a year ago to fulfill what he saw as a growing need in his neighborhood. “There is a sacrifice of socialization when you are working at home, and this was one place where people could come out and have that social interaction,” said Karp, who has telecommuted in some form or another for the past 20 years. The group currently has 83 members – a typical lunch caters from five to ten of those members. “People come for a break,” said Smith Carls, who now organizes the lunches. “The people that end up staying really enjoy meeting new people.”

Those same people – people who work from home – produce more, have better morale and less stress, according to a 2006 study by the Telework Coalition, a non-profit organization that advocates working from home.

This increase in productivity stems from decreased distractions in a work at home environment, according to Chuck Wilsker, President and CEO of the Telework Coalition. “People look at work as a social opportunity,” he said. “At home you have fewer distractions and people put in more hours.”
The only downside to the telecommute is occasional feelings of isolation, said Wilsker.

“There are so many good reasons to do it [telecommute] that I don’t know why people don’t do it more” said Wilsker, who has worked from home for the last six years.

The lack of time hanging around water coolers chatting about the latest sports scores or presidential candidate gaffe does not phase Peter Karp’s regard for the telecommute. “A lot of people ask me if working from home is distracting,” said Karp. “I find it less distracting than working in a office, where a lot of time is spent standing around the coffee pot.”

email me.

As rents rose along Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue, the faces of storefronts changed, and in the past five years a new breed of stores have moved in and planted the seeds for future growth and stability by organizing a business improvement district, which taxes participating businesses and then uses that money for overall improvements for the avenue.

“It is a totally new kind of shop coming into Fifth Avenue,” said Carl Hum, president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.

This newest wave of gentrification in the south Brooklyn neighborhood, an idea Sharon Zukin, author of The Culture of Cities, says people refer to as super-gentrification, refers to the rich replacing the slightly less rich, which is a stark contrast to the normal perception of gentrification – the displacement of the poor by the wealthy.

Park Slope looks a lot different than it did in the 1980s, when Gentrification 1.0 hit. During that time drug dealers found new corners from which to peddle and the last embers of trash can fires burnt as abandoned storefronts filled and buildings rose in vacant lots. After 9/11, during Gentrification 2.0, wealthy, young Manhattanites fled to Brooklyn, buying up the neighborhood’s brownstones, people some Brooklynites jokingly dubbed “trustafarians,” in reference to the disposable income that came with them. Their presence in the neighborhood courted upscale restaurants and bars. Today, in Gentrification 3.0, a range of savvy business people opening upscale boutiques and salons have set up shop in the area—and they’re banning together to mitigate any risk of being the next business pushed out in Gentrification 4.0.

“These are smart business people moving in that know how to adapt to the market,” said Hum. “Take a look at Park Slope fifteen years ago, it is a very, very, very different neighborhood.”

It was a neighborhood where the stores along the avenue not boarded up were being converted into apartments, according to Tony Giordano, a Brooklyn resident that put together the business improvement district for Fifth Avenue. “This place was hell,” said Wilfredo Garrastegui, the owner of Mega Glass and Slashes on Fifth Avenue between Bergen Street and St. Marks Place for 35 years. “Everybody had gates. Business owners had guns. You wouldn’t want to be here by yourself in the store. The neighborhood has changed so much.”

Garrastegui remembers buying homemade cuchi fritos, fried Spanish specialities, from the bodega on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Bergen Street for less than $4. A natural food store now stands at the location that sells organic soap products and boxed tofu-vegetable lasagna.

Garrastegui dines elsewhere for lunch now. “You can’t go in there and buy normal stuff,” he said.

After the late 1980s, when the neighborhood, along with the rest of the city, became safer, the gears of Gentrification 2.0 began to grind and rents went up. Nail salons became organic food stores. Bodegas became sushi restaurants. The corner barbershop became a pub. The rents went up again. Five years ago the average price for a business building along Fifth Avenue cost $900,000, and today that price has more than doubled, according to Ken Freeman, a broker for Massey Knakal Real Estate in Brooklyn.

Patrons of the upscale restaurants along Fifth Avenue dine on everything from butter roasted Atlantic Hake to pappardelle with ragú of wild boar. And the pubs pour pints from every corner of the globe, Presidente to Pilsner Urquell. But the neighborhood now offers up more than exotic food specialties. Niche shops, selling everything from lace camisoles for the modern mistress to Ultrasuede pillows with graffiti needlepoint, grace nearly every block.

These recent retail additions to Fifth Avenue in Park Slope highlight to whom that market caters. Billie Currem, the manager of the Park Slope branch of Flight 001, a retail store specializing in travel luggage and accessories, on Fifth Avenue said the company moves into up and coming neighborhoods where the demographic is primarily young people in their 20s and 30s. Park Slope matches that description with nearly half the population designating themselves between the ages of 25 and 44 on the 2000 census.

The combination of high-end stores serving young residents with money to spend makes Park Slope a neighborhood where super-gentrification looms on the horizon – poised to evolve the Brooklyn neighborhood into the next SoHo or Upper West Side. The business improvement district, adopted by the City Planning Commission on Jan. 9, hopes to maintain the attractiveness of the avenue, as well as the current businesses that line it, in the future.

“Does Park Slope become like a SoHo? That’s very tough to predict, but I think Fifth Avenue will definitely change,” said Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce President Carl Hum. “I’m not going to say it’s going to be unaffordable, but I will say like any other neighborhood in New York – you are going to see change.”

Most business owners see this inevitable change courting higher rents and even higher end stores. Businessman Garrastegui succinctly puts it, “Why get $500 when you can get $5,000?”