Brooklyn

The Big Takeover

June 29, 2007 – 8:30 am

On the Map Dept: I live on Eldert Street, a 6 block long stretch on the south side of the Shwick (let's get all the kids to start calling it that!). My end of the block is residential, rowhouses and an elevated train. Children run around the block and participate in activities that can only be described as "wholesome." They roller skate (with or without those shoes with the wheels in the back), jump rope, bike, play basketball, pick broomsticks out of the trash and hit each other with them. It's been pretty startling to see kids act like this, I thought kids just sat in front of the TV all day, absorbing Fritos and Hawaiian Punch while watching reality TV shows about people starving themselves. What I wanna know is, how do these nice little kids transform into the surly teenagers who hang out further down the block?

Anyway, that's life on my end of Eldert Street. On the other end there is an old knitting factory building that's been converted to loft apartments. The industrial side of Bushwick somehow made it this far south, seemingly only along the L train. The building at 345 Eldert is full of artists, and apparently a group of them are trying to get financial backers so they can buy their building from its management company. If successful, they will have a huge space in which the artists call the shots. Nice idea, I guess, but are they serious? The article in the Brooklyn Paper isn't clear how much of a joke this is, but the accompanying photo doesn't lend a whole lot of credibility to their crusade. They need some kind of venture capitalist to provide the dough to buy the place, who's gonna do that? This sounds like the 21st century version of the "Let's put on a show!!" type stuff from the 70's and 80's. I hope they pull it off, though I'm pretty sure this isn't the first time anybody thought of this ("Hey, we all live here, we're all into the same stuff, let's buy the building!"), but I dunno if anybody ever actually went through with it. Aren't there any wealthy, eccentric philanthropists anymore?

Still, the notion of a gaggle of artists trying to run their own building … shades of Lord of the Flies? Speaking of which, are you aware there's gonna be a reality TV show in which a group of children live in the wild without adult supervision? See what the kids on my street are missing out on?

[Photo: Sarah Kramer / Brooklyn Paper]

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Bushwick, Gentrification, Neighbors, Real Estate, The City | Comments Off

Now it can be told

June 6, 2007 – 9:09 am

Ugh, the last few days have been miserable, and not just because of the rain. Sometime on Friday night, Decatur slipped out an open front window. We didn't realize it until the next afternoon. We started searching around the area, trying to apply some form of feline logic to the situation. It seemed to me she would have dashed across the street into the vacant lot/parking lot as it is easy to get into and hide. But the more we looked around, the more we realized how many places there are for a small animal to hide. Not the least of these is the church yard behind our house.

At this point we didn't know what window she went through, so we looked out in the back as well. The church has been out of commission for years and the lot (which contains both church, rectory house and driveway) is totally grown over and full of trash. So it's basically a stray cat's amusement park. I searched through it several times, rousting many other cats, but not the one I was looking for.

The circumstances surrounding Decatur's disappearance may shed some light on all this: see, on Friday night we let some cats into the house. One was that Russian Blue cat I spoke of earlier, the other was the Kool-Aid Kitten, who has an even better 'in' to our home: she's pregnant.

Last time Decatur was around a cat with kittens, she bolted and I didn't see much of her for over a month. I didn't know if this was the same situation or if she was really lost; she had never been out front before, and this weekend had been fraught with stuff to scare both cats and humans. Friday night there was some huge to-do down at the far end of the block; we heard what may have been shotgun blasts and soon the street was full of people, cops, ambulance, fire trucks. Not sure what the story was there but it was a bit unsettling. Saturday night as we were entertaining friends with discussions of how Bushwick is really much nicer than its reputation suggests, some dipshit started shooting a gun right outside our house. I'm still not sure what that one was about, I checked outside afterwards but saw no one in evidence, shooter or shootee (the next day the cops came and placed tiny orange cones next to each bullet casing; the bullets had shot out the rear window of an SUV).

So I thought Decatur might have been so spooked by the commotion that she had gotten herself really lost. Anyway, we kept up the searching and the fretting, I made flyers and posted to lost-pet web sites. But things wrapped up pretty much 20 minutes after I put up the flyers.

I noticed the parking lot gate was open, a guy from Luis Refrigeration was changing the tire of his company van, so I went in and asked if it would be okay to look around for the cat. I went to the back of the lot, which was covered with that bamboo-like stuff I so detested from my old back yard, shook a jar of cat treats and called her name. Like it was nothing, Decatur emerged from the underbrush. Just like that.

She was no worse for the wear, despite having been outdoors for all the huge storms of late. the tire-changing guy said that he had seen her sleeping in the cab of one of the trucks that park there. I brought her back inside and she seemed nonplussed to be home. In short, my sympathy levels dropped at light speed. Damn these cats!

Anyway, she's back home and she's being sweet again, so all is well. We have the house on lockdown so nobody's coming in or out for once. We're not sure what to do about the pregnant cat, I'm hoping to relocate her to the backyard, but she seems to be fine with living in the lot across the street. That may be the most ironic aspect of Decatur's sojourn: if she left because she didn't want to share space with the pregnant cat, why then did she move herself to that lot, where the very same cat spends most of her time? This is the logic you get from an animal with a brain the size of a walnut.

I'll have more stuff on the stray population, we have some real characters around here!

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Bad Stuff, Bushwick, Cats, Good Stuff, Pets, The Yard | Comments Off

We are not daily beggars

May 31, 2007 – 1:19 pm

Freddy the Formerly Stray Cat scared us the other night when she climbed over the back fence and into the church yard behind it. She wouldn't come back, bedding down in an old milk crate and staring at me critically when I tried to convince her to come back inside. I feared we'd have to start all over with her, slowly luring her back to the house, but the next day she ran into the kitchen like nothing had changed. But it had …

On a previous night, she got into a growling match with a big male cat that had traipsed into the yard. Now it seems she and this cat were pals; they slept next to each other in the church yard and hung out together on the patio. Not only that, but her ambassadorship seems to be attracting others. The other night we were sitting in the living room when I noticed a cat sitting on the kitchen counter. This is not unusual, but it wasn't one of our cats. It was a Russian Blue, looking pretty much show-quality, if a little on the thin side. He had come through the open window that sits above the counter. And Freddy's original friend kept lookout on the window sill. It then occurred to me that I had left that window open the night before in case Freddy decided to return, so they'd probably already done a dry run for this infiltration.

I don't know if these cats are strays (gently used) or feral (Born Free), but they bolted when we inched over towards them. The Blue cat really was a lot better-looking than pretty much any of our cats, it makes me wonder if I can trade some of them in. But we haven't seen it since. Meanwhile, the parade of neighborhood cats continues unabated.

Out on the street there are tons of street cats that appear to go from stoop to stoop looking for handouts. We keep getting visited by a calico kitten who momentarily garnered my sympathies because I thought she was covered in her own blood. I carried her out to the back yard and stuffed her full of cat food. Then I noticed the 'blood' splashed on her side much more closely resembled Kool-aid. I guess that's 'street smarts.'

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Bushwick, Cats, Funny to Me, Pets, The Yard | Comments Off

You can't deny the things you see

May 30, 2007 – 6:46 am

Whoa. What's up with this:

Arts Space in Brooklyn to Get New Digs

Galapagos is moving to DUMBO … ?

I don't whether to be surprised or say 'good riddance.'

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Music, Real Estate | Comments Off

There's no place for a street fighting man

May 29, 2007 – 12:54 pm

Here's something to waste some time during your workday: Google Maps has added a 'Street View' feature that allows you to see a 360-degree panorama of your location. Granted, they haven't mapped out the most important areas of the city yet (namely, in front of my house), but I'm sure they're working on it. Oddly, they have actually mapped all of Bushwick Ave, which comes within a block of my house. This is odd because I would have thought they would have mapped out Broadway first, which runs parallel to Bushwick Ave. Then again, in my few driving experiences here, I noted with disdain how screwed up Broadway is. For such a seemingly vital thoroughfare, it's pothole-ridden and stoplight-laden. Anyhow, the photo above is a bodega I often frequent at the end of my block. My house is actually the other way down the street, but that view is particularly boring-looking under the eye of this map service. When they get down every street, though, you'll really have something. This should have some interesting ramifications. Now people can virtually walk down Atlantic Ave in Brownsville and East New York with impunity.

Meanwhile, it was a lovely weekend all around. One semi-disappointment was that the tree service guys never came back for all the remaining detritus. They had told me to keep a good portion of their fee as a deposit, which would be collected when they showed up to take all the vines and leafy parts. The logic involved was that this material needed to dry out to be easily handled (all the wood goes to a chipper and gets turned into mulch). Saturday came and went without a word, even after I tried to contact them. The forecast for Sunday was rain, so I got antsy, thinking if the whole reason they left this stuff was because it needed to dry out, getting rained on wasn't gonna help. So i got out the contractor bags and went to town on it. It wasn't actually that difficult, and soon I had almost all of it bagged. Now I just have to dole it out to the trash, and I've just saved a tidy sum on my tree/ladder issue. Still, it's not exactly good business practice to leave your customers hanging, especially since this guy was trying to sell me on many of his fence and deck-building expertise.

[via Curbed.com]