Crazy Stable

It was our pleasure yesterday morning to offer refreshments to an intrepid Forgotten New York walking tour of Victorian Flatbush. The group had cookies and lemonade and heard a few tales to prime them for their exploration of the lush enclave a block away; I shared this reflection on life just outside a rock-star historic district.

Spouse and I tagged along for our umpteenth tour of our own neighborhood, because there's always something new to discover in Prospect Park South.  Newcomers always love the "Greek temple" houses, like this one on Buckingham Road...

...or this one, the raffish "Spider Web House"...

...with its Morticia Addams windows.

Here's two sweet details from Buckingham Road, a turret I've actually been inside (it's next to a top-floor ballroom in a shingle-style pile)... 

...and the exuberant palette of the famed Japanese house plus its maple foliage screen.

Several of these grande dames were having facelifts. One was stripping away siding to reveal decades-old shingles.

  This one had undergone a complete chemical peel. Some tour guests seemed surprised that Landmarks gets a say on what colors you can paint your house in a historic district. (We, on the other hand, could paint the Stable hot pink and neon green and no one could stop us. Hm, there's an idea.)

It was a four-hour ramble, too much to recount in one bite. Tomorrow: Flatbush tour, part II: Old ghosts and new gardens.

Well, we ain't going nowhere for awhile, I guess...because this is our street, Marlborough Road in "Victorian Flatbush," the heart of Brooklyn...48 hours after the snow began in the Great Post-Christmas Blizzard of 2010. Virgin drifts not only clogged our sidestreet (presumably one of the "secondary" or even "tertiary" ones that Mr. Bloomberg has advised to wait patiently for the plows)...they clogged the major cross-street. But more on that in a minute.

Here's another shot looking down to Church Avenue. A plow came by as the first flakes fell on Sunday, but since then...nothing. No ambulance or fire truck could reach us if needed.

Church Avenue itself was a slushy mess barely passable by a conga line of idling trucks. Pedestrians, even ones with canes, gamely clambered over the unplowed mountains to cross the street.

The faux coconuts adorning our local Cambodian temple were a poignant nod to distant tropics.

At the other end of our block, incredibly, we found more unplowed misery. Our stretch of Caton Avenue is definitely "primary"--a heavily trafficked truck corridor between Fort Hamilton Parkway to the west and Linden Boulevard to the east. But today it lay untouched under four-foot drifts. Here, at least, Bloomberg's excuse--abandoned cars blocking the plows--was in evidence, and then some: On our very corner, we found a mini-disaster area!

Yes, that's an incinerated taxicab. We smelled something burning last night, and figured (naturally, this being the Crazy Stable) that our basement was on fire. We never thought "outside" because we never heard sirens--the car must have burned up unimpeded by any emergency personnel. Thank God no one seemed to have been inside. As we looked on, the owner of the white car stood nearby in horror at the collateral damage to her Nissan.

Behind it, a semi, a van and an Access-a-Ride bus were all mired. Both the truck driver and bus driver had been sitting in their vehicles for more than 24 hours, and they were still there at 3 p.m. today. Tuesday. In the middle of Brooklyn...at the end of the world. Here's the video.

You know, I was a kid during the "Lindsay blizzard" in the 60's; we lived up in the hills of Little Neck, where the snowbound thing went on for days. It seemed magical to me as a kid. Now I understand why my parents couldn't get in on the fun. As for Bloomberg, he's right that a lot of numbskulls have ditched their cars in the streets; but it's a Catch-22, since the tow trucks can't reach these guys unless the streets are plowed. Somebody's screwing up big-time, because in almost 25 years here (including 2 snowstorms rated worse than this one), we've never been this abandoned.

UPDATE: The plow came through at 3 a.m. Wednesday, and I think we heard tow trucks hauling off the casualties; now suiting up to face digging out the driveway. Oh, and--as of 1 p.m., the abandoned semi was STILL THERE, blocking all traffic on Caton Avenue without a cop or detour sign in sight; plows came near it under the eye of a Dept. of Sanitation superviser-type fellow in a DOS sedan, then backed away.