Crazy Stable

Why do I love Brooklyn? Well, there are all the reasons in "Why Brooklyn?" linked at the right, but then there's stuff like this...a 400-million-year-old boulder unearthed during construction in Fort Greene that has been promptly dressed up as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.  Thanks to Razor Apple, a cool site with all sorts of street chronicles around town.

The CrazyStable will wear its usual costume, "Haunted House," which is going to be a little less effective this year, now that the front windows are not busted and painted-over like something out of a Stephen King horror movie. We don't usually get many trick-or-treaters; I'm never sure whether it's our odd location on the periphery of the historic district (whose residents, I'm told, are swamped with eager candy-zombies), or whether only the brave set foot on our ragged front porch. The schoolchildren have long assured me that "a witch" lives inside the house; true, (blush), but I suspect this is based more on observed cats in the fenestration than on an assessment of my Crone Factor. One year I hauled a bug-eyed little girl out from under the porch; she was, she told me excitedly, looking for "da ghost."  We had a teachable-moment chat about superstitions, and now I check down there myself every so often.

Our first Hallowe'en in the CrazyStable, when we were living without a functioning kitchen or bath...or lights...I booked. Left town. Skedaddled, and left Spouse to fumble his way to the front door with a flashlight to hand out candy. Me, I was on a junket to a sun-baked  ravine near the Rio Grande, where some poor PR schmo for Gaviscon antacids had shipped a bunch of journalists to the Terlingua Chili Cook-Off.  I got cowboy boots and a hop aboard a private jet, tasted my first huevos rancheros, and sampled the incredible hospitality of beer-powered Texan chili competitors. I also met up with an amazing phenomenon, the Chili Team, a form of performance art done in front of bubbling cauldrons of brick-red spicy meat; a typical entry was a bunch of very overweight guys in chain mail singing "Wooly Bully." (This year's entrants sound as if the intervening 2 decades have only fueled creativity in the chili-performance world;  team titles include "Toad Chokin' Chili,"  "Psycho Chick," "Lurch's Cafe," and "Our Lady of Pain Medical Center."  If I ever move out of Brooklyn, remind me to move to Texas; I'll bet they dress up a mean boulder.)

Spouse was very good about being left alone in the gloomy manse, and reported no unearthly phenomenona. (The house is indeed devoid of paranormal activity, my mother assured us the following year when she moved in; and she was a finely tuned "receiver" with a long history of ghost whispering, so she ought to have known.) No trick-or-treaters, either--possibly because the electricians had forgotten to wire us up a doorbell.

This situation was soon rectified, however; in Texas, I bought a ranch dinner gong (an iron triangle and an iron stick with a rawhide hanging loop, the kind you call the hands in with, BWANGA-BWANGA-BWANGA-BWANGGGGG).  It was very effective, at least for those visitors with the nerve to use it with gusto; it served as our doorbell for at least a year.

Want to see the sort of wooden house we actually wanted?  Brooklyn blogger IMBY has a sweet mini-tour of some of the precious li'l frame row houses still hanging on in the 'South Slope' (the part of Brooklyn's Park Slope that never quite made it into the 'Brownstone Belt').

 The years have not been kind to most of them; unlike this gingerbread doll-house, the vast majority fell victim to the tin men (and vinyl men), and had their  little touches of workingman's class, their cornices and porchlets, amputated, and facades slapped over with siding or faux-stone. We used to call them 'rat shacks' (a term I owe to Tom Wolfe). But some sensitive souls are saving what's left and retrofitting what was lost, with delightful results. These blocks have a great vibe, too--a jumble of big roughhouse buildings and these farmhousey gems, all scrambling up the Slope with New York Harbor sprawling in the distance.

When we were house-hunting 20 years ago, our first dream was, "a little brownstone." Bwah-hah-hah, those were already bespoke, far out of our price range--even the tiniest, crummiest ones, even then. Then we thought, how about a South Slope brick? Nope--people were flipping them like hotcakes. Okay, we figured, how about a South Slope rat shack? We could fix it up, make it cute. By the time we looked, the rat shacks too had floated above our fiscal grasp--location, location, shaddup, we know, it's Park Slope after all.  And that is how we found Flatbush, and instead of getting an expensive little ratshack, got a dirt-cheap 3,000-square-foot rat palace.

Well, 'dirt-cheap' until we got our first heating bill. There is nothing quite so good at disseminating heat into the outside world as uninsulated woodframe construction, and there was a reason that enormous ratty old wooden freestanding houses weren't selling like...hotcakes.  At least the South Slope rowhouses have the protection of party walls,  huddled next to each other like penguins for mutual warmth. Anyway, for those who ask why one little couple bought such a big house to heat, that's the story of how we couldn't afford a smaller house...like the cuties on IMBY. (Which is, by the way, a very bleak/funny chronicle of the grab-n-greed school of quickie real-estate development in that area; check out his archived posts on demented demolition teams, tree-mutilators, and other outlaw construction madness...)

In keeping with my 20th-anniversary-of-house-ownership musings, today's New York Times "Home" section prompted winsome memories of our transition from a one-bedroom newlywed flat in a Park Slope brownstone to the vast recesses of the CrazyStable. The "Room to Improve" column, a Q and A, starts with this cri de coeur: "My fiancé and I are moving from a small apartment to a huge house. Help!"

"Not to worry," counsels the Times' decorating maven. "Turning a big house into a comfortable home is as simple as making good choices when combining texture, color and size. Begin with a theme."

Wow, yeah, absolutely. You can see my still-20-something self here, in what is now our kitchen, just awhirl with possibilities. A theme, a theme. Pea-soup green? Exposed BX cable? Or perhaps filth-encrusted radiators reflected in broken mirrors? So many choices for a neophyte mansion-dweller!

According to a Wired magazine dude quoted in the Times, our first order of business should have been to "define the concept" and "come up with a unified visual language." When we moved our clutch of Door Store laminate bookshelves, beige corduroy couch, and painted-pine family castoffs to the cavernous CrazyStable, I think our best-defined concept was "squatting." (Hey, our couch met the Times' recommendation to use "neutral uphostered pieces to help warm  up a space and make it more comfortable." At least until the cats, in a protracted state of cabin fever, ripped it to shreds that winter.)

There we huddled in more than 3,000 square feet of squalid frontier. Whole rooms, and one entire floor, stood virtually empty except for their lonely sink-and-towel-bar "detail" left over from boarding-house days. We holed up in two rooms in the second floor ("bedroom" and "living room"), and lived without kitchen or bathroom (just a toilet and sink) from October to nearly Christmas of that first memorable autumn, stopping on our way home after work to shower in my Mom's Manhattan apartment. We shut the doors to our "safe rooms" to keep the cats from roaming free (see the holes in the walls? The electricians left them everywhere after upgrading the wiring, holes big enough to swallow cats, although I believe the technical name for them is "squirrel holes." Not that we didn't have those, too.) We lived all together, the cats, their litter, their food, and us, and ventured out into the gloom to use the loo and wash up. At the time, I worked down the street from the infamous Prince George Hotel, a warehouse for the homeless; as I'd pass its chaotic lobby, I'd look up at the milk cartons stored by resourceful mothers on the windowsills, and wonder if I could bring myself to do it. I missed milk, those two months; and after eating nothing but deli take-out and fast food until we got the downstairs kitchenette working, I gained a new and lasting empathy for the dietary shortcomings of the urban poor.

But back to décor. In the Times, an architect from Greenwich, Conn. suggests "tempering your house's size with furnishings of a commensurate scale"--for example, with a "whimsical" $4,000 nine-foot version of a desk lamp, which broods over the tubular chair in their photo like an escapee from a Pixar short.  We could've used that sucker. After the electricians left, we remembered--oops, we had no lighting fixtures to go with the new boxes and outlets. Suddenly the high-ceilinged rooms and hallways were plunged from bare-bulb-lit splendor into blackness. For awhile, we raised and lowered a worklight up and down the stairwell for our nighttime excursions from the "safe rooms"--it felt like descending a mine shaft.

As for furnishings, we had little time or energy to worry as to how we'd fill those 14-odd rooms. Half the first floor was earmarked for my mother within the year; there were plenty of packing crates and construction materials to scatter among the rest. I stepped up my scavenging, acquiring useful tables and other items from stoop sales and garbage, and set them about. Most of our tchotchkes would stay in storage for years; we didn't unpack our china until 1991, still wrapped in its 1986 newspaper.

And eventually, we did manage to fill a surprising amount of square footage with some sort of furnishings, although not the "complete collections" endorsed by the Times (such as a 10-piece ensemble with a $5,600 couch, "which incorporates chenille and bamboo"--whoa, the kitties would love that). Instead, like a tide-washed pirates' cove, we absorbed several shipwrecks' worth of old stuff from various deceased relatives. My folks, Spouse's parents, my friend, several aunts and uncles...all left us flotsam and jetsam, which now creates a sort of collage of lost but fondly remembered households. Aunt Louie's crooked pine bookcase...Aunt Rosemary's credenza (complete with Uncle Charlie's botched refinishing job, now further sullied by juice from a rotting pumpkin)...Daddy's childhood bookcase, Merian's nightstand. With a few more bits from Ikea along the way (mostly for Child), it will have to do; I have a feeling that the "complete collection" phase of our décor-acquiring life has slipped away. My grand theme now is "comfy stuff that cats can destroy with impunity," along with "items that evoke people and places we love," from Child's cartoons to Aunt Louie's Indian temple gong and our Archie McPhee rubber lizards. And it's good to know that, after 20 years, we still have "room to improve."

...or apples, or cats...is hard this time of year, when everything seems to happen at once: Child's school and extra-curricular activity stuff, church stuff, work stuff, house renovation stuff...not that we have over-scheduled lives, mind you. In fact, we practice Involuntary Simplicity (the low-budget version of that trendy Voluntary Simplicity).  But whatever happens, happens in overscheduled bunches.

The CrazyStable and I were both overdue for a host of tedious health check-ups, and needless to say, the house came first. Stained glass restored and re-instated: check. Heating system cleanout and tune-up: check. Got a guy to agree to patch  roof: pending. New back fence: Next week.

And yesterday, our tree wizard came over to give Rootbeard the the Mighty Silver Maple (a.k.a. the Ent) a check-up, too. Tree Wizard kicked Rootbeard's tires, er, roots, and declared that the monstre sacré appeared to be healthy, although still growing robustly at four stories' height or so... but he does need some top pruning to reduce the risk of his taking out a chunk of the roof in a storm.  This will not be cheap...but when you live in a symbiotic relationship with an Ent, precautions must be taken. 

Oh, yeah, and this week I went to the doctor, too...fine so far, thank God. No termites, blight, or mold, just some structural sagging and rust...

Top: The Moscow Cats Theatre

Bottom: detail, "Joachim's Dream,"  Giotto (and an Ent)

Oh, no...just when we were about to pick up the heat gun like an Olympic torch and have another bash at the front-door woodwork, here comes the annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour this Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 21 and 22...an irresistible ramble through all sorts of fascinating grubby lofts and garrets, where some wonderful stuff is being created within sniffing distance of the famous industrial-effluvia canal.  ('The Venice of the North,' as we like to snicker--although it will be only a very short time before some developer of 'luxury' condos will undoubtedly say this with a straight face.)  Of course, the studio tour is frustrating on one level, because in past years we have seen art we'd actually like to own, art that is theoretically "affordable," but not (sniff) for us...but what the hell. Just looking and chatting with the artists is great fun. I'd also love to do the Bedford-Stuyvesant House Tour on Saturday, too, to meet some fellow brave renovators (Brownstoner entry for October 17 has details). Spouse tends to mutter anxiously about going to Bed-Stuy, which is pretty amusing, considering that we had friends and family who didn't want to come here to the Flatbush frontier.

That heat gun may have to wait for another weekend...we are nothing but undisciplined thrill-seekers. Meanwhile, I have found an apparently sane guy who says, sure, he can patch the Valley of Death on the roof...and our Tree Maven is scheduled to come for  an elder-care planning visit for Rootbeard, the mighty Ent. Now if we could just get our poor senile renal-failure boy Raffles to stop making whimsical feline excretions in the hallway, life would be Looking Up around here.