Crazy Stable

Sorry to have left you in the grasp of the hysterical Captain Jack Sparrow for so long...but this is how it's been going here:

No, sadly this is not an allegory of me breaking up the cement pad in the back to plant more perennial borders. I wish. (Which reminds me, I have to get a new sledgehammer, 'cause we used to have one and now we don't anymore. But I digress.) No, this is an allegory of me sitting at my computer toiling for pay in the grip of various clients, trying to atone for taking August off to be a full-time mommy to the vacationing Child. (The big guy on the right is Big Pharma.) The garden has gone wild--I hardly remember to go out and harvest the raspberries, and the rampant slugs are probably dining on everything else.  One of the cats is in kidney failure,  I still haven't gotten a chance to figure out how to upload pictures from my cool new E-bay camera, and my posterior is growing attached to my office chair. Plus, the 20th anniversary of our moving into the CrazyStable is this Sunday, and we haven't scheduled any sort of Festivity, because despite all this rock-breaking, our entertainment budget is at just about zero. (And that's before I get the fence section replaced, the boiler tuned up for autumn,  and the leak repaired in the Roof Valley of Death--all on the "super-urgent" to-do list.)

Gorgeous golden September days were not meant to be spent in front of cathode-ray tubes. So throw off your shackles, and go out and dance in the nearest greensward. Do it now! Especially if I owe you work this week! 

 
"Avast, me hearties! A pox on this place! 'Tis already been plundered, an' every cursed soul within is talkin' like a pirate!"

All we can say is, wow! (If Chang could see 'em now...he'd never believe it...)

Yes, the stained glass window lights are back, completely restored and re-leaded by the masters at Albert Stained Glass Studio here in Brooklyn, whose gorgeous site I urge you to check out. They really are all that. As you may recall, the bottom quarter of both the lights on either side of the front door had been long destroyed when we moved in 20 years ago, (presumably by a reach-through break-in attempt), and the raw missing chunks covered with plywood. Then, in a final insult, former owner General Chang painted them over with white house paint (we presume it was him, it was his style of "renovation").

This sorry mess was the very first thing we itched to fix back in 1987, although 20 years passed before we managed it. Encountering two broken and idiotically patched windows every time we entered or left the house was bad enough. But such pathos attended our windows'  degradation. The CrazyStable was never built as a luxury model; there is virtually no "detail" except for a few stained-glass windows that were, for their time, close to generic. But, as a result, those windows have become for us like the treasured old watch or necklace that a pioneer woman might have tucked into her luggage in the covered wagon--no museum piece, mind you, but a slender connection to a gentler past and a powerful little talisman of human dignity under duress.  We may have had squirrels, and sewage, and collapsing ceilings...but dammit, we had some stained glass.

And now it looks as good, or better, than in the (still-uncertain) year that the CrazyStable was built. The golden faceted "jewels" refract afternoon sunlight dazzlingly.  The parts that are garnet and ruby from within are creamy mauve from outside. The delicate cream-and-green border has been replicated so well that you can't tell which parts clung to their alligatored frames for at least 8 decades, and which ones fell in shards to the porch during one sad day or night at the city's nadir.

Next, we finish stripping and repainting the doorframe (sadly, not worth restoring as woodwork qua woodwork ) and refinishing the door itself (whose wood, while deeply distressed, will, I think, come up nicely after sanding, staining, and varnishing).  And last of all, we'll re-letter the gilt number on the door.  Already, I am unlearning the instinct to cringe when I enter or leave. Heads up!

Blackbird singing in the dead of night

Take these sunken eyes and learn to see

All your life

You were only waiting for this moment to be free.

                                       -- Blackbird, Lennon/McCartney 

On this utterly dismal rainy day, I have decided to cheer myself with a Friday series called "Dead Cat Blogging."  The current feline children of the CrazyStable--Lexi the Gorgeous Ragdoll, CocoBop the Grey Jackass, and Raffles (the senior boy, now living apparently contently with renal failure),* have already been profiled here. But their predecessors were so illustrious--alright, so goofy--that we recall and discuss them often. It seems right to start with the most home-grown of cats, Keisha.
Home-grown indeed--Keisha started life as the "Compost-Heap Kitty." Her mom, a slim and elusive black member of the feral gypsy tribe who roamed our backyard, had a single baby (or a single survivor, perhaps) on the warm bed of my compost heap. I looked out the second-floor window and saw a tiny coal-lump moving among the discarded banana peels and canteloupe rinds next to Mama's lounging form. A few weeks later, I heard the metronome-steady BEW! of a kitten-distress call...coming from the yard of the abandoned house behind ours. I hurried around the block and up the driveway. The baby sat shaking with hunger and bawling, as the Mama sat aloof, a few yards away. Mama gave me a level and affectless gaze that seemed to say: You want her, she's yours.

And so she was. I quarantined her up in my small third-floor study with a shoe-box-sized litter pan; my mother and I mixed up formula for her and fed it to her with an eye dropper  every few hours. The feisty little blue-eyed scrap thrived, marching around on my desk  and scattering my papers (and acquiring her first of many monikers, "Study Pet"). I tried (really, Spouse, I did!) to get her adopted, knowing that our existing clan of three cats was plenty.  But nobody offered to take her--particularly after the baby sprung a huge, weeping abscess in her neck that required shaving and debridement. (I nearly passed out during this procedure, experiencing for the first time that condition known as a "flop sweat.") The abscess probably resulted from Mama holding her in a too-tight mouth grip as she hoisted the baby over our stockade fence. Either way, after applying betadine swabs and ointment along with the eyedropper every day, she was mine, all mine.

Keisha's name came from that of a little girl who was abandoned in nearby Caledonian Hospital the same damp spring day that I rescued the kitten. Her mother left her with a note indicating that she was overwhelmed and desperate; when the mom was subsequently found and charged, cooler and kinder heads protested, and the papers reported that the young woman and child were reunited and given the support services they needed to go on.  My Keisha's name reminded me from time to time over the years to spare a prayer for the other, human mother-child pair.

Hopefully the little-girl Keisha was as tough a survivor as her feline namesake. Our Keish made a wonderful contrast to the warm-and-fuzzy threesome she joined. Part of her always stayed feral-- and that was what I loved about her. She  spurned public displays of affection, except for secretive love-fests if I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and none of the other cats were looking.  She'd stroll across the counter scrap-scavenging as we sat at the dinner table; if we yelled at her, she'd natter backtalk at us ("nyah-nyay-nyah," which obviously translated into "screw you" or worse).  Although possessed of a fine silky coat, she had a rangy build (even after the addition of a hanging pot-belly in middle age), and a sleek wedge-shaped head that prompted her commonest nickname, Wedgehead (or Wedgie, or just Wedge).  (She also got called Zippy the Pinhead or just Zip, and Hairball, and Spawn of Satan.) She took pleasure in smacking the other cats on the head, and instead of their wussy play-wrestling, she would fight dirty with tooth and claw.  She loved butter--so much so that she would streak to the kitchen from anywhere in the house at the sound of the butterdish lid clinking--but never betrayed, in 11 years of the good life, a hint of gratitude for the butter or anything else.

Wedge had an edge. She left our lives as she had entered them, with a lot of stink, thanks to some tumor or blockage of the gut, and we interred her with honor--of course--near the compost heap, her cozy cradle.  Her distant relatives still skulk down the alley and slink up and over the back fence, just stayin' alive.

* Renovation tip, since this is, after all, a HouseBlog: Did you know that cat pee makes a stupendously effective paint stripper? And can you begin to guess how we found this out? 

My thanks to worthy fellow Brooklynblogger Brownstoner for today's link. If this is your first visit to this vale of renovation wretchedness, cheer up--we will hustle you immediately off the property and a few blocks away to posh Prospect Park South, where houses just as big and a few years older than the CrazyStable were built with lavish detail and maintained with landmarked obsessiveness. A glutton for punishment, I could think of no better way to spend my birthday last Saturday than on a walking tour of Victorian Flatbush, conducted by the enthusiastic Mr. Ron Schweiger, the borough's Official Historian (a post that pays, he informed us, less than Mayor Bloomberg's salary of $1.00 per year).

I've "done" the area on tours before, but I always learn something new, and love to hear gasps elicited by the familiar streetscapes that we walk to the supermarket and library. This time, we began at the Newkirk Avenue station of the B and Q lines, which started life as the "Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Line."   The train, which still tootles through a curiously bucolic open culvert through many backyards , linked the booming city of Brooklyn (today's "downtown" ) with the grand hotels, raffish amusement parks (Luna, Dreamland, Steeplechase), and racetracks of Coney Island and Brighton Beach. It was once a steam line...chuffing through sheep pastures and fields still farmed by descendants of the Dutch settlers. The fields were sold and grids were drawn, and upon them a handful of visionary developers sketched in a new concept: the luxury commuter suburb. (By the time they started building, however, it was just about 1900, making this technically "Edwardian" rather than "Victorian" Flatbush, but I quibble.)

Ron's tour was a bit Ron-o-centric, focusing heavily on the illustrious history and membership of his temple, Temple Beth Emeth, on Church Avenue. But that was okay, actually, since I've lived down the block from this "little jewelbox" but only once set foot inside its Art Deco sanctuary.    (Here's a window; I think it's King David. No, it's not by Tiffany, but as Adam Sandler says in the Hanukah Song, "not too shabby.")

The rock stars of this tour, of course, are the great Painted Ladies and Newport-style mansions. I relished the familiar recitation of which-titan-of-industry-lived-where (the Gillettes in the shingled manse with a silo tower on Buckingham Road, the presidents of American Can Company and Ex-Lax nearby, and Admiral Sperry, the gyroscope guy, around the corner, where he supposedly built a small plane on the third floor of his house--and decided he needed a bigger house, around the corner). Two blocks south of the CrazyStable, Nellie Blye lived across the street from the home of Charles Stillwell, in whose basement Thomas Edison tinkered (and whose daughter Edison married).

But for someone who's been logging heat-gun hours lately, it was the houses themselves that took the cake. Drool, drool, drool.

This Ditmas Park dead ringer for a Cape May B&B had me worshipping, and craning my neck to love up the top-floor dormer.  According to Ron, this block isn't even in a landmark district (yet)--quick, landmark it before someone turns it into a Mighty Stucco Bloater Teardown!

(Sorry the image is blurry--I have ordered a new camera, and if the Canon Powershot works as well for me as it does for RobJ of City Birder, you are in for some mad Flatbush photoblogging in months to come.)

I also discovered an amazing streetful of California bungalow-style homes on East 16th Street south of Dorchester Road (my photo came out totally blurry--trust me, they're very cool houses).

We ended up in "the Magic Land" as we call Prospect Park South, where the day's most haunting discovery lay nearly hidden behind a chain link fence in a forested vacant lot (now owned and kept blessedly wild by the owners of the adjacent "Tara" mansion--the family of my obstetrician, actually).  Here stood the home of Dean Alvord (shown here with his son), the developer of this gorgeous enclave. Alvord went on to develop similarly lavish Ragtime-era digs in Roslyn, Long Island and Florida, where he retired like a good Brooklynite. But Prospect Park South was his first great canvas, where he sought to ''illustrate how much rural beauty can be incorporated within the rectangular limits of the conventional city block'' for ''people of culture with means equal to some of the luxuries as well as the necessities of life.'' (These people of culture, of course, pointedly excluded Jews and blacks...)

Alvord's home ( which, intriguingly, was right next to the railroad culvert, a "less desirable" location within these desirable blocks) burned in the 1950s, and remained a "haunted house" for neighborhood kids until its demolition and near-sale to a hospital for a housing block helped fuel the area's landmark designation. Now it's one lucky family's private woods, but you can see, under the leaves and moss, just one trace of its grandeur...Mr. Alvord's front steps to nowhere. 

Ron will give this tour again, by the way, on October 8, 2006, as part of openhousenewyork (punctuation theirs, not mine). And here's some more excellent linkage:

Paul Goldberger on getting "to Utopia by bus and subway":  http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E0D81E39F934A25757C0A967948260&sec=&pagewanted=print

The Flatbush Malls (our nifty flowering street medians): http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/historical_signs/hs_historical_sign.php?id=11822

And, if you must move here immediately, learn more from the new blog by Mary Kay Gallagher, the doyenne of "Victorian" Flatbush real estate: Living in Victorian Flatbush.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention...having worked up a stupendous appetite on this jaunt, I was treated by the Stablemates to an exquisite dinner in our newest Real Restaurant on Cortelyou Road, The Farm on Adderley.  No, it is not overrated, and not overpriced, either. The setting is like a fairy grotto next to a secret garden. They give you a little guest book to sign with your check; the Child sketched a pig and commented, "Mind-altering pork." (That would be the double-cut pork chop.) Spouse got the burger, which is the platonic ideal of all burgers, and I got the delicate brook trout. Brooklyn birthdays rock!