Crazy Stable

Sounds like a sentence handed down to a Jimmy Cagney character in an old gangster movie, but it's the landmark we're grappling with this summer. This coming Labor Day weekend, it will be two decades to the day since we closed on the CrazyStable. Staggering half-witted into this impossible undertaking at the tender age (we now realize) of 29, we had no inkling of what lay ahead. But this looming anniversary makes me realize that time, even more than money, has been the aspect of our lives most transformed by the journey.

Things here have a history of seeming to happen either very, very quickly or in geologic time, as if time itself expanded and contracted in some whimsical Einsteinian ballet. The decision to buy the place, for example, we recall as a panicked whirlwind: The housing bubble was expanding so fast, and our resources were so sorely limited, that a delay of months or even weeks seemed likely to lock us out of the market forever. (This, in fact, proved to be true--one of our rare correct financial intuitions.) And as the market soared, my recently widowed mother was in freefall, depressed, anorexic, and in imminent danger of winding up on our fold-out couch when she couldn't face another night alone in her Manhattan apartment. (The possibility that she would wind up anywhere else but with us never entered our minds--not yet, anyway.)

And so we made a frantic offer on the first few places we could afford that were big enough to accommodate us all in two separate apartments. (Thank God, at least we realized that my mother was unsuited for the spare-bedroom/share-the-couch arrangement.) As it happened, most of these houses were far bigger than big enough--an irony we only understood when we started to pay our heat bills. (We quite literally couldn't have afforded a smaller house, the kind sane people buy.) There was no leisure for pondering, or researching, or comparing; the real-estate agents would stand around in bored impatience like villains out of Dickens, reminding us of how many others were lined up to snap at each nasty morsel we viewed.

Our first walk-through of the CrazyStable, as ghastly as it was, left the vague impression of space and light and possibility, of squared-up timbers, and of honest decay ready for debridement instead of sleazy modern "remuddling." (No "original detail," but neither was there any dark faux-wood paneling, dropped ceilings, or interior Astroturf...just lots of rotting plaster and red-painted floors.) In a hurried glance, I could envision a parlor floor-through studio for my mother, a big eat-in kitchen for us upstairs, and an office and guest room on the third floor--and somewhere out there in back, a garden. [Spouse, by the way, claims that he remembers little of that first visit, because he is cleverly "blocking" it.] That sad and frantic March, we put down most everything we had on the scariest, sorriest house on the block.

And then time stretched...as we awaited the approval of our mortgage, a process that apparently required more consideration and paperwork than the preparation of a Vatican encyclical. April, May, June passed, countless phone calls were made and ignored, and still the bloody mortgage was "pending." We would drive past the house (to see if it was still standing, and to try to comprehend the scope of our folly), and Chang fils would spy us on the curb and scramble out to nag us. "When mortgage?" he would hector. "Lot other people want house!" (Once, he tempered his rant with a kindly comment about the length of our earlobes. "Long!" he said admiringly, tugging mine--which are, I think, of only average length. "Means long life!")

Finally, the mortgage came through (after I called the bank pretending to be a New York Times reporter, then wept noisily at our elusive loan officer for 10 minutes.) Closing was another whirlwind, Moving Day was a veritable "fog of war"...and then, after the dust settled, began 20 years worth of "renovation," about 87% of which has involved absolutely nothing happening. Years at a time during which our finances just about covered lightbulb replacement, and our skills and energy never rose to the task at hand. (In fairness, we were coping with a parade of dying relatives and then, in a rapturous change of pace, a new baby.)  To this day, people come for the first time, look around, and say, "So! How long ya lived in this place?" I imagine they expect the answer in months. Mortified, I usually hedge: "Oh, heh heh, longer than you'd think!"

And that is why I want to celebrate 20 years in the big house, even though we're not even remotely "done." But we've survived, and we're still married, and the Mater was sheltered to the best of our ability, and now there is a Child who professes to love the house fiercely in its blowsy state of half-repair. Come September, we may host a house-warming, and a house blessing too.  It's time.

This house arrived in our lives like a mute and traumatized child, dropped off by an incoherent parent who disappeared without a trace.  Over the years, I've made forays into piecing together its history of abuse and neglect. Some bits have emerged with startling clarity from the City of New York's dusty record books and web databases (like a "liber" volume with records of the owners of this parcel of land, going back to Dutch times!)...and some have proved elusive (like a precise date of the CrazyStable's construction, somewhere between 1906 and the 1920s).

There are rocks I haven't turned over yet, but what has emerged so far is a picture of a serially unloved foster child: a boarding house at least since the Great Depression (as were so many of these big places), and before that, a two-family with a variance for "lodgers."    A set of 1940s blueprints reveal that our chopped-up and inexplicable layout was already in place by the Eisenhower administration. By the 1970s, the CrazyStable was owned by one General Chang, who was, according to block legend, a retired senior aide to Chiang Kai-Shek. Perhaps this helps explain why he taped and barred the windows shut, locked the thermostat in the basement, and surrounded the house (on all four sides) will a stockade fence (topped in spots with barbed wire--giving the impression of a lunatic frontier outpost), then filled every room with fellow Chinese immigrants.

The Chang years were a dreary blank ...until last week, when a curious yawp was emitted by the city's bureaucracy in the form of a notice in the mail about the "Violation Re-Issuance Program," offering amnesty for ancient code violations.  I was skeptical that we had open violations on record at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). I'd thought everything on record about the house's physical status was on file at the Department of Buildings, whose website I've mined like a girl Googling her new boyfriend. (At this point I am reminded of the Soviet "Bureau of Bureaus," devoted to furniture with drawers, in Mel Brooks' early classic The Twelve Chairs.)

After some wading through the mailing and then the HPD website, I fed in our block and lot number...and voila.  There it was, a little X-File staring back off my monitor:

"OPEN VIOLATIONS: There are five violations." All were filed in 1974; one was "class A" ("non-hazardous") and four were "class B" ("hazardous"). Reading them, even in  stilted inspector-ese, was a trip down Memory Sewer:

"Properly repair the broken or defective wood floor bathroom 3rd sty public hall."

"Remove the accumulation of refuse and/or rubbish and maintain in a clean condition the cellar throughout."

"Abate the nuisance consisting of concealed ceiling leak--bathroom--2nd sty apt."

"Repair the broken or defective plastered surfaces and paint in uniform color ceiling--kitchen over sink--2nd sty apt.

"Remove the accumulation of refuse and/or rubbish and maintain in a clean condition the rear yard--throughout."

Twelve years later, when we bought the house, old Chang (now deceased) hadn't touched a thing. Rear yard packed with crap? Check. (It included more than 200 glass bottles, a cut-up tree, a demolished roof, and a buried radiator, all concealed in a forest of 5-foot-high ragweed.) Ceiling over kitchen sink broken? Check (and by then the rest of the ceiling and walls had joined it).  Second-floor bathroom ceiling leak? Well, I guess that was why Chang had replaced the plaster ceiling with rusty sheet metal (below). 

Rubbish in cellar? Check--so much of it that our house inspector put a rider on his report, because he couldn't get anywhere near the foundation walls to inspect them.

And as for the "defective" wood floor in the third-floor bathroom, that problem had been resolved by the time we made our first horrified tour of the CrazyStable: There was no bathroom floor. How I discovered this involved House-Hunting Kung-Fu, a tale for next time.

But here's the most intriguing question: Who busted Chang to HPD? His boarders all seemed quiet, humble, intimidated--not surprising for (mostly ) poor single workmen, probably illegal and with little English, whose landlord kept the keys to their window gates under his pillow along with a gun (or so his son bragged to us). So who reported the open pits in this hellhole? A ticked-off ex-boarder?  A compassionate /outraged repairman or visitor? It didn't do any good, but it's the first indication ever that anyone took notice of the Stable's sad and dangerous decline.

Oh, by the way, for all we haven't done around here, and all the other stuff that has fallen apart, we've fixed those five violations quite nicely, thank you.  It will be my pleasure to give them an affidavit to that effect...maybe with a bouquet of evening primrose, yarrow and heirloom roses from the "clean rear yard."

All day within the dreamy house,

The doors upon their hinges creak'd;

The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse

Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,

Or from the crevice peer'd about.

Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors,

Old footsteps trod the upper floors,

Old voices call'd her from without.

From "Mariana," by Alfred Lord Tennyson

You will recall that, after our first opossum sighting (below), BestFriend confided that she had encountered another of these beasts on her welcome mat in the hallway of her apartment building in Queens Village.  In the interests of furthering enlightened urban wildlife management techniques, we are pleased to report that BestFriend dislodged the menacing marsupial with a hail of tomato soup cans (she was, thank God, returning from the supermarket). For larger mammals, such as badgers, one might wish to stow a can or two of Progresso pasta and bean or hearty chicken noodle.

Isn't it funny how those rural folks insist they need  guns because they live near wild animals?

Yes, we've got one of these hanging around tonight. And we are very excited, because it's the first one we've ever seen in nearly 20 years at the CrazyStable.  A few raccoons have made it over from Prospect Park to raid the garbage cans and peer in the windows, but not for years now (although to judge from some recent road kill, they are still trying). But possums? Never until this evening...when I turned into the driveway in the rain to see something hairy and pink-footed trundle purposefully behind the garbage cans, dodge under the gate, then peer out at me with pale snout and beady eyes.  It really is a Beatrix Potter creature, although one of the lesser and less endearing ones.

You have to respect anything that (to judge from the photo above) is able to sniff its toe-thumb while hanging from its tail (a feat not duplicated, to my knowledge, even by Keith Richards). Our property is a veritable possum smorgasbord, between the compost heap, garbage can, and the thriving colony of snails after days of rain. For all I know, these guys are out there every night. Reports of Extreme Urban Wildlife are common these days; black bears are sunbathing in Jersey backyards and coyotes are ordering takeout on the Upper West Side. And possums are as common as cockroaches, it would seem; BestFriend encountered one holding its ground on the welcome mat in her apartment hallway in Queens. But you never forget your first opossum. (The Child is ready to go out into the dripping garden with a tray of cupcakes and a frilly bassinet for it.) 

...or, "Why we did no paint stripping last Sunday." The Stablemates headed instead for the wild recesses of Red Hook, an isolated Brooklyn neighborhood that simply fascinates me. A strange amalgam of housing projects, ancient wharves and warehouses, stubby little frame shacks,  and verdant vacant lots, Red Hook is one of the few places that still exemplifies the "ultimately unknowable" quality of Brooklyn (see Mark Helprin in "Why Brooklyn?" at left). It is cobblestones and harbor and mystery; roses scramble over unidentiable rusty wrecks, and two demonic pit bulls perpetually guard a lunatic-looking open-air villa (or is it a demolition site?) And on Saturday, there was the Queen Mary, towering over the waterfront like Godzilla. (Photo above, by Kevin Walsh for Forgotten New York; go here for Forgotten's excellent ramble through the area, with more fine pics)

Now, of course, Red Hook is also artists and gentrifiers...and we met plenty of both by visiting the BWAC Art Show on the pier at the foot of Van Brunt Street, then the staggering new Fairway across the street.  Both are overwhelming journeys through a maze of aged brick archways, BWAC through countless bays of works good, bad and indifferent (including wonderful stuff by several friends).

As for Fairway, suffice it to say that I went back to Red Hook in the rain this morning,  because on Sunday we had to park on the street and could only buy what we could carry.  The outdoor cafe with the killer view of Lady Liberty and the "water taxi" was drenched in cold grey mist. But this time--alone, alone!--I was able to wander in a stupor (like Robin Williams in "Moscow on the Hudson," fainting in front of the miles of coffee cans).  You have to live in Brooklyn (or Moscow) to understand the concept of "pent-up demand" for a super supermarket...and so far, the ordinary grocery prices are within reason (no $7 tissue boxes or $10 bottles of detergent). But there's also the vast Planet of Cheese (plus several small Cheese Moons elsewhere in the galaxy)...at least three Meat Planets, including one with kosher bison...a Brit-fix satellite with Lyle's Golden Syrup and Lion Bars...interstellar oceans of olive oil...and clusters of fat, shiny fish (not the bleary-eyed chum of most supermarket fish cases).  It's ridiculous, obscene and lots of fun. 

All in all, I was pretty well-controlled; I got some mixed olives (under a sign lecturing me to dress my olives, but in a rare oversight, there were no little outfits for them); some sort of goat-cheese round; pricey kosher mini-black-and-white-cookies; and Leben yogurt, which I usually find only in Orthodox neighborhoods.  I did not buy an aged steak, although they are hanging up there seductively, awaiting the CrazyStable's annual summer "Steak and Cake Party." (Invitees, you know who you are.) 

 I wouldn't want to live in Red Hook; after all, Flatbush is the center of the known universe, and this desolate place is poised to lose its magic in a Williamsburg-style yuppie takeover (Ikea is coming soon, and yes, I'll shop there, too). But an excursion into the surreal waterfront kingdom of portobellos, pit bulls, and paintings is always a bracing change of pace.