It happens every year: by the end of your Thanksgiving meal, you swear you’ll never eat again. By Friday afternoon, a little something to cleanse the system will be tempting. You can absolve your repentant self at Urban Spring, a juice bar and sandwich shop at 185 DeKalb Ave. in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn, just east of Ft. Greene Park. Call 718.237.0797 for hours.
Urban Spring is built around the belief that eating is a political act. This stance puts any restaurant in good company in Ft. Greene. Anna Lappe and Bryant Terry’s book, Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, debuted at Smooch, an organic coffee and vegan snack shop around the corner from Urban Spring, a few blocks east the restaurant Ici offers organic food and wine, and the solar-powered Café Habana Outpost is a but a few blocks south. Before establishing themselves in Brooklyn, Urban Spring’s owners Gordon Kindlon and Consuelo Casarotto were political activists in many other contexts. The pair, who are now married, met in Afghanistan when Kindlon was a logistics officer for the UN during the elections there, having just left Amara, in southern Iraq, where he worked with Mercy Corps.
Kindlon and Casarotto take a holistic approach to their business that includes a thoroughly green shop design in addition to the healthful food and accoutrements like biodegradable utensils that you’d hope for in a simple gourmet-to-go eatery focused on locally grown and organic produce.
From the outset, the owners had an ambitious eco-design agenda for the store. In addition to hundreds of hours of hard work and dedication to the owners' vision for sustainable design, there were some uncanny breaks that made the peaceful and lovely space successful from an environmental point of view. Like the food, most of the ornate interior comes from local sources. The intricate medallion in the center of the sweeping counter looks like a Victorian detail from one of the brownstones in the neighborhood, as does the gothic pattern on the sliced up doors that are used as shelving. In fact, they’re from the old Romanesque revival “Peace Church� on Washington Square Park.
Acting on a tip from a friend at the green living directory Vivavi, Kindlon went by the church as it was being demolished (yes, condos strike again), and came away with truckloads of gorgeous woodwork. With help from Associated Fabrication in Williamsburg and a floor plan by architect Peter Lynch, Kindlon cleverly assembled the church pieces into almost everything the store needed. Using a lamination method that recalls material pioneered by Brooklyn’s own Scrapile, the church’s old floorboards became countertops and seating.
The rigorously green building project also has a countertop from Icestone, a recycled glass product made a mile away in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and a kitchen backsplash made from a crazed tile that was given to Urban Spring by a local architect when a client decided not to use it. The color? Green, of course.
