I am pleased to announce that BK Southie, the website that I’ve published for over two years to cover news and events from around southern Brooklyn, is being renamed and relaunched as Bay Ridge Odyssey. This ends the “soft” re-launch phase of the site that began in November when its six-month hiatus came to an end. The Odyssey will have the same mission of bringing you news, events, and photos relevant to the community, and do so specifically for Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights.
A small part of the reason for the name change, as I’ve said previously, was that including the word “Southie” in a Brooklyn-focused website fell out of favor with me quite some time ago (to the point that I played off the New York-Boston rivalry in the week leading up to the Super Bowl and promised to change the name if the Giants won). I don’t know how everyone else felt about it – through the grapevine, I’ve heard some nice things said about it and heard some not-so-nice things – but just speaking for myself, I’ve had a hard time calling it by it’s right and proper name for a while now.
A much bigger reason is the site’s change of focus from southern Brooklyn as a whole to specifically Bay Ridge. The name BK Southie, once you could get past the whole Boston thing, was much better suited to its old focus. After the hiatus was over, I’ve written mostly about Bay Ridge. And if books are getting judged by their covers, BK Southie just wasn’t going to work anymore. I settled on the name Bay Ridge Odyssey a few months ago – at the end of the hiatus – I just wasn’t certain of the right time to make the switch.
2001 Odyssey, of course, was the name of a local disco club made famous across the United States by the John Travolta movie Saturday Night Fever. So, definitely a lot more Brooklyn now than that Boston name. Odyssey also has a much more personal meaning to me as a writer. It pays homage to a children’s science and space exploration magazine that served as my inspiration to publish – at the age of 10 – a monthly “newspaper” using an MS-DOS word processor and a dot-matrix printer. My first blog, perhaps?
Of course, the name Odyssey has been in vogue for a very long time, initially finding favor with a Greek poet who shares a name with a popular, yellow cartoon character. Maybe.
I’m fairly happy with what BK Southie has done to date, and I am very optimistic about the future with Bay Ridge Odyssey.