Top 5 Stories on Brownstoner This Week: Celebs in Boerum Hill and a Grocery Showdown

Williamsburg Affordable Units Now Open for Applications
Applications have opened for 19 subsidized rental apartments at a new affordable housing development in Williamsburg, at 223 N. 8th Street. The mixed-rate building will include such amenities as a credit-card-operated laundry, gym and rooftop garden.

Six Brooklyn Destination Grocery Stores: Which Has the Best Prices?
With recent news of Gristedes overhauling its stores and a new Trader Joe’s coming to City Point — plus the previously announced openings of Williamsburg outposts of both Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods — we thought it’d be an opportune time to look at some of Brooklyn’s biggest and best-known supermarkets.

Actors Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale Pay $2.15 Million for Boerum Hill Townhouse
More celebrities are migrating to Brooklyn from Manhattan. Actors Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale, who had been living in the East Village, paid $2,150,000 earlier this month for a two-family, three-bedroom townhouse at 453 Warren Street in Boerum Hill. The couple starred together in the 2014 remake of Annie.

Walkabout: The Summer of 1915 — Edward Reiss and the “Negro Invasion” of Park Slope
Edward Reiss was a larger-than-life Brooklyn character in the early 20th century who often took matters into his own hands when a situation wasn’t to his liking. Our story today concerns his use of a racist power play to get his way in a feud with a developer.

Ultra-Orthodox vs. Animal Rights Activists: Should Chicken-Killing Ritual Continue?
Animals rights activists have cried fowl at kapparot (also called kaporos), a 2,000-year-old Orthodox Jewish tradition involving ritual chicken slaughter. In preparation for Yom Kippur, practitioners — including thousands of members of Brooklyn’s Orthodox community — hold a chicken by its wings and swing it over their head three times while praying. Then the chicken is killed with a knife.