My house has seen a lot. Based on its size (small!), it’s probably one of the oldest houses on the block, and would have witnessed the construction of the brick buildings around it. It might have seen a rail line that would turn the corner right here at Jefferson, turn south on Central and chug to the Cemetary of the Evergreens; due to municipal ball-dropping, a company was never assigned the route.

But the years, and previous owners, have been harsh. A house that once stood in the back yard burned down, and only the foundations and a few feet of brick wall survive, trees having long ago grown up through the floors and weeds having decomposed into several feet of dirt on top of the rubble. The interior of the house has been hacked up many times — the rooms have been flipped around all over, and bluestone slabs in the floor leave a hint to where fireplaces might once have been. But the most shocking damage is to the facade: a once-ornate front has been ripped off, replaced by poorly done stucco and cheap white flashing. My carved wooden double doors were ripped out, replaced by a smaller, single door, the extra space in the frame filled in sloppily with random pieces of timber. My storefront has been gone for almost 70 years — the Italian family that owned the house sold jewelry here.

The full horror of it was revealed to me the other day when I received a photo from the City from “around 1940.” Brace yourself: below is the before and after:

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I have the patio I set out to build mostly complete…I think. The whole process has been very organic, changing as I went along. It’s hard to get a project like this done with only sporadic access to a vehicle. Even so, it’s only been about three weeks since I started. I’m just waiting to be able to get more junipers for the stair “risers,” and the thyme for the cracks in the brick. More views: more »

My backyard used to be a house. It was likely even older than my current rickety old house, because access to the yard is through the main hallway — a century ago one would go through the public area of the front house, exit through the back door, and then cross a small courtyard before entering the back house. What I have left is the bottom half of the first floor of the house — most of the brick walls were smashed to pieces, according to the previous owners, when the city cited them for having ruins too tall for the DOB’s tastes.

So since I have finished cleaning up the left front area of the “raised garden” part of the yard (the part inside the old house walls), I took a minute to plan out the patio I had been envisioning there, and got to work building retaining dams out of some of the scrap plywood left in the yard. When I had the dirt level in the far corner, I just started arranging the bricks, tapping them with a rubber mallet to sort of even them out. I’m leaving generous cracks between most of them, into which I’ll put potting soil and then seed with creeping plants that do well in cracks. This will have a dual purpose of securing the bricks without just slathering cement all over the place, in addition to creating a “gardeny” patio space. The area between the plywood dams and the old walls will be an in-ground garden.

Being a history and architecure dork, I was having a moral crisis involving the original bluestone and brick steps into the front of the old house. They were already half-destroyed, but the coup de grace is the fact that the goofy addition on the back of my house sticks out over the bottom of the steps — even if I fixed them, nobody could walk on them as intended. So I decided to demolish them and reuse the salvaged materials in the garden. As I worked, I thought about the long-dead men who might have mixed the cement and laid the bricks I was now snapping apart. I felt guilty for undoing their handiwork. But seeing the patio come together, my guilt faded and I grew excited at the promise of summer BBQs.

I wonder how common this sort of thing is in Brooklyn. In the scheme of things, we’re a young city, but we have a disproportionate share of ruins. Anyone have a similar experience?

Holes which would have held the original floor joists.

Bluestone from the half-demolished stairs.

This weekend, we spent about 15 hours combing our backyard with pickaxes, fishing out everything that wasn’t dirt. At one point, we decided to stop digging down, as we had already pulled out 6 55-gallon bags of trash from about 100 square feet of dirt, and there seemed to be no end in sight. We hurled the pile of dirt and crushed bricks back into the 3-foot-deep hole and moved on. A patio will go there, anyhow, and I have pretty much decided that any vegetable I plant will be going in raised planters.

As you can see (maybe not) from the photos, the part we combed is about a foot lower with the trash removed. And it’s all fluffy and churned, so it would probably be about 6 inches lower than that if it were as packed-down as the rest of the yard. The trash dumping began at least 30 years ago, from our guesses, based on the soda bottles that list sugar as the sweetener, instead of corn syrup. We also found a local connection — an old Schaefer’s beer can, brewed right here in Bushwick until 1976.

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Uh, well, it’s all still there…mostly. Yesterday some little punk stomped all over the really fragile flowers. Purposefully, with malice. What a hell his life must be. So about 30 seconds after I noticed the crushed flowers, I yelled at another kid who stooped down trying to touch the flowers. He came up to me babbling in kid-nonsense-speak about talking to somebody “down there” and I snapped “you can talk to somebody down there without touching my shit over here.” I immediately regretted saying it. But then his mother walked past and starting flipping out about saying that word to a child, blah blah blah, and she said “fuck” about 19 times. When I pointed this out to her, she screeched (already halfway down the block) “IT DOESN’T MATTAH, I’M THE MOTHAH!” Sound logic there, I guess.

Today, I came home from coffee with a friend to find two plants missing — yanked out of the bare earth, roots still stuck in the ground. You’d think the kind of person who steals flowers right out of someone else’s dirt wouldn’t care about flowers to begin with. Well, I swore I’d win, so I’ll just replant something else. And pick up the trash that has collected inside the planter again. 95% of the people who walk by admire the flowers, especially as they get bigger and grow in number as the days go by. So for them, I will persevere.

Fuck the vandals and thieves. They’ll be gone within the year anyhow.

It’s actually the first full day in the life of my new sidewalk garden, which yesterday was a dry gray patch of dirt, a raggedy old stump, and gray concrete bricks. It’s now has a new, budding tree, blue and white amaryllis bulbs waiting to burst with color, and a few other wispy grassy flowers, with the gray concrete blocks reincarnated as a temporary wall. My neighbor says “they” always steal his flowers, but I figured, mine are so small, what would be the point?

Well I of course woke up 4 times last night to look out the window and check on my babies. All good. Then this afternoon I look outside, and some punk pushed one of the blocks on top of one of the plants. No big deal — I put the hearty ones on the edges. I put everything right, picked up all the trash that had accumulated for the day, and went back inside.

I will win this fight. Let Bushwick be green!