Life in Brooklyn / I Like Birds
I’m slowly getting accustomed to life in South Brooklyn. Bay Ridge might wind up being the perfect neighborhood for me, in all of its remote and eccentric charm. It’s very quiet and beautiful down here, with the stately Verrazano bridge towering over everything. My own view of the bridge is minimal. You have to crane your neck out my bedroom window to see the very tippy-top of the eastern spire over an abandoned construction site.
The fog rolls off the harbor and blankets the neighborhood with a strangely comforting regularity. It can make driving over the Verrazano feel like walking through the London streets of a Jack the Ripper story. The foghorns of passing ships lull me to sleep, or gently awake me like the distant clickety-clack of the Long Island Rail Road in the house in which I grew up.
I can’t look at the rocket launch
The trophy wives of the astronauts
Bay Ridge is about as old timey as Brooklyn gets. The bridge connects two military bases. I’m not sure what’s still housed at Fort Hamilton except for a VA hospital, but the neighborhood is dotted with armed forces recruitment centers. The local barbershops offer free haircuts to servicemen, and front lawns still display their “Support the Troops” signs, faded and yellowed.
And I won’t listen to their words
’cause I like birds
I spend most of my time in New Jersey, or on the road, for work, so, so far, Bay Ridge is more of a bedroom community for me than much of a real home. I haven’t checked out nearly enough of the local restaurants and bars. I’m a little too reliant on take-out (particularly for a nabe lacking in any Mexican food).
I don’t care for walkin’ downtown
Crazy auto car gonna mow me down
The whole driving-between-Jersey-and-Brooklyn thing has made me even less keen on ever going in to Manhattan. My car’s been in the shop this week, so I’ve been having to take the N/R to Penn Station to take the Jersey Transit. It’s an inhuman squeeze.
Look at all the people like cows in a herd
Well, I like birds
Our Congressional district is lumped in with Staten Island, and, until last year, we were the only district in NYC to send a Republican to Congress. Early on, while at brunch at a local pub, I overheard a bunch of middle-aged bellyachers complaining about the upcoming MLK holiday and speculating that with our new (BLACK!!!) president it was the first of many such holidays. Next up, Huey P. Newton Day!
I can’t stand in line at the store
The mean little people are such a bore
duck took a while to get used to the new digs. While our we were in storage, waiting to close, we stayed in a studio apartment, which greatly comforted the clingy little beast. Now in a far more spacious two bedroom, she spent her first weeks getting lost in each new room and crying. Eventually, she rediscovered the joy of windows.
Although we are once again on the second floor, this time our windows face the quiet parking lot of a church, as opposed to a busy boulevard with buses driving noisily past. Up on the window sill, duck gets calmer and actually shuts up for a change. She seemed to take a particular interest in the birds.
But it’s all right if you act like a turd
’cause I like birds
I bought a bird feeder to encourage the wee winged ones to gather by our fire escape. The bird feed label promised to attract blue jays, cardinals and other “attractive outdoor pets” (as opposed to those dead common finches and pidgeons), and, boy, did it deliver.
If you’re small and on a search
I’ve got a feeder for you to perch on
I can’t yet name every variety of bird that’s stopped by my fire escape for a quick meal. I’m not quite at the point of buying a book to recognize them, although, it occurs to me that since grandma died it does fall to someone to be the family’s resident birdwatcher.
For now, I may content myself with hanging up a second feeder and filling it with a different kind of bird feed, just to see if I can increase the biodiversity of the fire escape. Maybe I’ll add a small plant, who knows?
I’ve got a feeder for you to perch on
Yeah, I’ve got a feeder for you to perch on
(Apologies to Mark Oliver Everett)
A Real Hat
After a morning that saw me put a bid in on a spacious two bedroom apartment with a formal dining room in Bay Ridge – $10,000 down with 75% financing and a very adult activity, if ever I engaged in one – I decided to go shopping for a new hat. I’ve been wearing hats for a little over a year now: a straw hat followed by a light felt black fedora. Fashionable as it might otherwise be, a black hat clashes with the navy blazer I’ve taken to wearing lately. This is another dubious sign of maturity. As the Clash song goes, “You grow up and you calm down / You start wearing blue and brown.” A grey hat seemed in order, so I made my way to Bencraft Hatters.
Bencraft has two locations in Brooklyn. The original is located in Williamsburg, not far from where my paternal grandfather lived when he married my grandmother. It’s probably where he purchased (or, more likely, rented) the top hat he wore on their wedding day. The other, which I frequent, is in Borough Park. Inside of Bencraft, you will find the kind of intense debates, measurements and arguments over hats that made most American men heave a sigh of relief when J.F.K. attended his inauguration bare-headed. Being a Sunday, I found a dozen Jewish men (customers and salesmen) engaging in heated debates over coloring, brim size and the ever-ephemeral quality of “quality.”
A family – two older brothers and their father – fretted over the difference of a quarter of an inch of brim for the youngest of their clan. A 10-year-old girl rejected her father’s new hat as “not as good” as his last one, and chastised him for losing his yarmulke inside of a display hat and thus exposing his chrome dome to Yahweh. At the sales counter, an agitated little man complained of a barely detectable “bump” in the crown of his new hat. “I wouldn’t complain, except that this is the fourth hat I purchased from you this week,” he explained. The salesman countered, “In every hat in this store, could I find an imperfection? These are handmade hats, they will never be 100%” Finally, though, the salesman agreed to steam the hat in an attempt to work out the bump, although, he complained, Sunday was a bad day for it. He gestured to the long line of Hassidic men waiting to have their hats steamed and cleaned.
As for me, I meekly requested a grey hat in the same cheapo style as the “lite felt” fedora I was already wearing. None in my size, the salesman apologized. He did find a slightly-more-expensive Stefano. “It’s a real hat,” he explained, “as we say in the business.” Almost thirty, a real home and a real hat. How could I refuse?
Goodbye, Queens. Hello, Brooklyn
I’m not a well-traveled person. I secured a reputation of sorts in grad school, on the first day of Elaine Bernard’s global labor movements class. As we went around the room for introductions, and everyone explained who they were and where they came from (yes, yes, they were the union, the mighty, might union) and discussed their various international contacts and trips abroad, I introduced myself with a flip “Shaun Richman, AFT, Queens, NY. Frankly, I’m uncomfortable leaving Queens.” I’ve spent my entire life – nearly 30 years of it – in this fine borough, but all things have an end. I finally received an acceptable offer on my apartment. I signed the contract of sale on Friday and will be gone by November.
I’m looking to move to Brooklyn, someplace close to the Belt Parkway and the Verrazano Bridge, and within an hour of midtown by subway. Someplace quiet, pretty, affordable and in close proximity to fun. I’m not sure such a neighborhood exists. It’s the “affordable” part that’s difficult. I managed, in the end, to sell my apartment for nearly twice what I paid for it five years ago. Unfortunately, everything else went up in cost at least as much. Obvious choices like Park Slope and Fort Greene are prohibitively expensive.
I had high hopes for Sunset Park, with its ubiquitous park and skyline views. It is affordable – barely – but sleepy and undeveloped. Bay Ridge, slightly to the south, had much more appealing shopping and dining, but it’s so far from everything, I’m afraid no one would ever visit me and the neighborhood would serve as little more than a bedroom community for my Jersey commute.
Yesterday I got my hopes up about the unfortunately-named Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, but I dashed them today by visiting there. Even the nabe’s enthusiastic booster blog has trouble highlighting more than nice architecture and convenient geography:
“PLG is among the last of the neighborhoods that border Prospect Park where average working people can still (almost) afford to live… That lower price tag, however, comes with concessions – there are none of the higher-end boutiques, bars and restaurants that populate Park Slope, Prospect Heights and Brooklyn Heights.”
It was lovely, but I had a hard time locating a supermarket, a fruit stand or even a decent slice of pizza. You could call places like Prospect-Lefferts Gardens and Sunset Park “up and coming” neighborhoods, but only a fool counts on a neighborhood turnaround in troubled economic times like these. Perhaps I’m asking for too much. Perhaps simply being able to afford a roof over one’s head is the best one can hope for these days in New York. I’ve got three months until I’m out on my ass. Expectations decline on a daily basis.
This Is a Shamelessly Factional Button
Shannon Hammock just mailed me a parcel of the past: silly factional buttons from the Socialist Party’s 2001 national convention. It was the first time in many years that an organized caucus was formed to compete for seats on the party’s national committee. Although they called themselves “the Issues Caucus,” their focus seemed to be on personalities. They lumped a bunch of comrades with wildly different politics that didn’t necessarily even like each other into a cabal, the “us vs. them” that they had to “get.” And so I was opposed for re-election as the party’s Vice Chairman, and Shannon and I printed up a bunch of buttons that mocked the whole situation.
“This is a shamelessly factional button” was a properly irreverent sentiment, and I think we got comrades on all sides to wear those little yellow buttons. “No Factions” and the Rodney King button further got the point across. “I’m okay. You have ‘Issues'” was cute, I thought. The cowboy button was inspired by a bizarre, rambling attack e-mail by one young comrade from Chicago that ended with the hysterical exhortation, “Circle the wagons, boys!!!”
In another e-mail, David McReynolds had accused me of being “against Chicago.” My flippant response was that I had nothing against the city of Chicago, except that I hate the way they cut pizzas into squares. I’m really very right-wing on this issue. As my response successfully diverted attention from whatever-the-hell supposed “issue” we were debating to a free-for-all over what constitutes good pizza (I’m not actually making this up), we thought “No Square Pizzas” would make a good button. Bill Stodden later formed a “No Square Pizza” Caucus to keep up the shenanigans, but, being anti-organized factions myself, I did not join.
Much of the personality focus was on lumping myself and Greg Pason together as some kind of gruesome twosome of party bureaucrats. It was so bad that one could be forgiven for thinking that Greg’s last name is “and Shaun.” The picture of the two of us, with the word “Evil?” was a fitting rejoinder. (What’s particularly funny about that button is that there was a third man standing between us in the original photograph, but, like a good apparatchik, I airbrushed the comrade out of the photo!) The idea of floating Greg’s name as a possible Presidential candidate (even on the preposterous ticket of Greg Pason-Angela Davis) was, perversely meant to provoke a little more hostility from the anti-Greg and Shaun crowd. The supreme irony, of course, is that Greg and I, despite being good friends, could never agree on anything politically.
Finally, my sole campaign button read, “Shaun indulges my vices, so I’ll indulge him as Vice Chair.” The only campaign caucusing I did that weekend in Boulder consisted of booze and sex and lots of it (well, mostly booze). I lost, of course.