brooklyn

• Greetings from Brooklyn... fuggedaboudit!- This blog is about the challenges of renovating an old Brooklyn, New York row house.
  
  My last renovation project, begun in September of 2006, was the master bedroom, most of which is about finish carpentry. You can follow the progress here.
  
  You'll find other completed home improvement projects in the photo diary menu to the left.
  
  
• A Tree Blows Down in Brooklyn- About 5:30am this morning I was suddenly awake. I'm not sure if it was the threatening thunder approaching from the northwest or my shivering, hundred-pound Newfoundland desperately trying to crawl under the covers with me.
  
  Outside, it was like War of the Worlds... real Wrath of God stuff. Lightning was flashing like a paparazzi frenzy and the thunder was getting progressively angrier. I heard the rain starting. Within minutes it was coming down in buckets. Seriously, that's what it sounded like: someone dropping buckets on my roof.
  
• My Old House- In January 1999, I said goodbye to my downtown loft and moved into an old row house. While I got it at a terrific price, it took almost a year to close the deal. Sellers were dying, powers of attorney were dying, people were falling off roofs and my mortgage commitment was days away from expiring. It was a fitting prologue to the story.
  
  I liked the style of the house but the initial attraction was the attached garage for my bikes. Almost every house on the street, except this one, was well cared for. The neighborhood was quiet and there was a pretty park at the end of the block, not that I would have time to actually visit it over the next few years.
  
• Bay Ridge Hum- Out-worlders would probably expect Brooklyn to sound like inner-city traffic, police sirens and "Yo! Vinnie! T'row me down some money fa a' egg cream!" Actually, it's pretty quiet down here by the harbor, except for the low-flying NYPD helicopters.
  
  Nevertheless, I have two "bizarre noise" stories. I'll talk about the most public one first and, if I can keep it short, I'll tell the other one.
  
  In late 2005, I was at the dog run when an obviously exhausted woman told me that she was kept awake all night by a loud hum outside. She lives only three blocks from me so she asked if I'd heard it too. I told her I was sorry but I hadn't heard a thing. She bore on, telling me that it sounded like a low engine rumble, almost like a fog horn, except it was non-stop. I thought there might be a simple explanation: she was nuts.
  
• The Flamingo Kid Rides Again- This weekend I was invited again to my neighbor's annual court party at her cabana at the Breezy Point Surf Club in the Rockaways.
  
  Breezy, a/k/a the Irish Riviera, is as definitively "boro" as it gets and as timelessly shabby as a summer camp. Anyone who's seen Garry Marshall's 1984 movie, "The Flamingo Kid", with Matt Dillon might be able to imagine the place. In fact, that movie was filmed on location only a mile down the beach from Breezy at a similar, although higher-end, beach club.
  
  My buy-in for the annual invite is my sangria, which I immodestly admit has few peers. It's loaded with good wine, brandy, Triple Sec, at least six fresh fruits and a few secret ingredients. (I'll cop to one of them: cinnamon sticks). I come laden with six gallons of the stuff, both red and white.
  
  It's too easy to take cheap shots at Breezy. After passing through the gates, it looks less like a beach club than a refugee camp with tiny, cluttered wooden cabanas abutting the parking lot. The second thing you notice is what's not there: ocean. The Surf Club is a good quarter-mile+ hike from the surf, separated by a federal sea bird sanctuary. Nobody really cares though because the action is on the cabana courts.
  
• Brooklyn wildlife- No, I'm not talking about the street scene around here. I mean actual wildlife living in the shadow of downtown Manhattan. Rural folks are surprised to hear that we have something other than rats and pigeons here. But itsa fack, Jack.
  
  In fact, I was walking Jack (and Auggie) last night around 1am when Auggie spotted something in my neighbor's garden and charged. I heard a hiss and caught a flash of white fur as it flew up a large bush. A cat? Then I saw the skinny tail and the lethal-looking teeth. It was a possum.
  
  I wasn't that surprised because I know that they exist here. Karen rescued one on Christmas Eve of '04. We took it to the Christmas party with us that night because there was an emergency vet specializing in wildlife rescues on the way out to her sister's place on Long Island. Karen adopted it, gave it a name (Lorilei) and took it for walks with her dogs.
  
  There's a whole colony of possums living on the Dyker Heights golf course about a mile from here.
  
  What else do we have here? Raccoons! Big suckers too. Shortly after moving here I was cutting my back lawn when I stepped in a pile of poop that was too large for a cat. The fence pretty much ruled out a dog. And it was horrible smelling, worse than a dog's, leastwise a healthy one.
  
• I actually do have house stuff to blog about- After all, it's been almost two weeks since my last blog post. However, I like to accompany my renovation articles with photos and the bedroom is currently an eyesore while I reorganize closets and get rid of clothes I've had since my disco show band days. No way am I posting photos of it now.
• T'weaks- Wow. I was surprised at 8:45am this morning when a big Con Ed truck pulled up just as I was walking out the door with the pooches. If you read my last post, I lost one leg of power to my house yesterday. The extorti...er, electrician I summoned pronounced one of the feed cables from the street DOA and called Con Ed to report it. He left me with a number to call if I didn't hear from Con Ed soon, which he translated to mean "in the next two or three weeks". In other words, it's the classic unit of flexible time I call t'weaks. Yes, I know it sounds like "two weeks" but make no mistake -- that will only lead to false expectations. It's really more of a Klingon word. T'weaks lives in a different temporal reality from that of terrestrial time. Let's use it in a sentence. "When will that part arrive?" "T'weaks." "When can your guys get started?" "T'weaks." See how easy it is to say?
• Bummer- I was checking my email today when my computers and monitor suddenly shut down. The music went quiet in the living room downstairs as well. But I could hear the radio playing in the shop downstairs. It took me five seconds to figure out what happened. People a block away probably heard me yell, "NOOOOoooo!!" This has happened to other houses on the block. The underground feeder cables into these houses are old. Add a bunch of melting snow and road salt like we've had the past couple of weeks, throw in some leaky manhole covers and these cables can fry. A typical home has two legs of power coming into the breaker box, 180 degrees out of phase. If you lose one of them you typically lose power to half the breakers.
• What's Bay Ridge?- BrooklynRowHouse is located in south Brooklyn, or Brooklyn South for the locals, in an area called Bay Ridge.
  
  For Google Maps fans, here we are. We sit on lower NY harbor on the narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, connected by the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which was the world's longest suspension span bridge for about five minutes when it opened in 1964. One of the coolest things about this neighborhood are the big ships and the lonely foghorns at night which are obliterated only by low-flying helicopters from NYPD's heliport three blocks away.
  
• All politics is local- Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, a longtime Speaker of the House in the U.S. Congress, coined this phrase and it couldn't apply better than to my own neighborhood here in Bay Ridge.
  
  This morning's mail brought some very good news for the neighborhood. First a little background.
  
  Bay Ridge is a largely conservative Republican bubble surrounded by probably the largest liberal stronghold in the United States. While I'm a progressive political agnostic myself, the local Republicans have taken the former Democratic Speaker's words to heart. They know that throwing a bone to the electorate is worth a hundred airhead "I'm a Decider" slogans.