Cops valiantly protecting Brooklynites from the Idiotarod. (from the defunct Brooklyn Record).

I was at a Christmas party next door last night, and started talking with a cluster of guests near the food table. Turns out one of the group was a guy who grew up in Bed-Stuy, talking about how Brooklyn is cleaner, safer, more fun, and cooler all the time. “Look at Bushwick — this neighborhood is so much better!” We shared stories about how it used to be — he particularly liked my story from my dad about fishtailing at 50mph to keep thieves in late-’70s Bed-Stuy from breaking into his delivery truck. His stories about random crime were, of course, first-hand; mine were passed down from my father and others.

“Yeah, everything gets better here every year except the cops.” I perked up, of course. We then began sharing stories and complaints; one of his was that a cop lured him off his mother’s stoop with a beer in his hand, and when he stepped on the sidewalk he was issued an open container ticket. We also talked about people ticketed for walking their bikes across the sidewalk from their stoops to the street. “Don’t ride your bike at the end of the month” was advice we shared on avoiding being a victim of citation quotas.

He said a friend of his was stabbed four times on the Metropolitan G platform, though the station houses a police precinct. A cop stumbled upon the guy laying in a pool of blood and asked him if he was okay. “I’m fuckin’ bleeding!” his friend responded, and was reprimanded by the cop for his attitude!

To hear native Brooklynites tell it (to the deep chagrin of those who like it how it used to be just because that’s how it used to be), the borough is better than ever. So why do the cops still act like it’s 1977 up in here?

A charming North Stuy street.

Hey this is interesting: an investor I know who owns buildings all around Brooklyn, including one in Bushwick, is dumping his Stuyvesant Heights brownstone to buy something else in Bushwick. Not to shit on Bed-Stuy — frankly, it would just be one more turd on a big pile. Ah, fuck it.

Sorry, Petra, but your hood blows. It’s far from the city on public transportation, it’s even more bombed out than Bushwick, and has a gazillion units of projects. Sure, there are some tree-lined, beautiful streets, and this house is on one of those. But that section needs to really work on seceding from the mental picture of “Bed-Stuy,” because it’s not doing them any good.

Whenever I do an apartment roundup, I notice all kinds of Bed-Stuy apartments listed as Bushwick. Even aptsandlofts.com listed their 1060 Putnam condo, which is very nice, as Bushwick — but it ain’t. So sorry.

The bell tolls for Pig-Stuy — it’s overpriced, it’s menacing, and it’s just plain stank. As Bushwick becomes more and more acceptable in polite circles, the market is correcting away from our neighbors across Broadway.

This is a couple weeks old already, but I just keep being reminded of it: the people on Brownstoner were shitting their pants over someone’s jaw-dropping audacity in painting part of their brownstone white. I read the post, laughing to myself at expressions of outrage more fitting with genocide, and the snarky comments making fun of the brownstone fascists. In the end it turned out that the home’s owner was simply repainting an approved color, and the white was just primer. Whew!

Last week, Petra from the Bed-Stuy Blog came to our hood and had some iced tea with me at the Wyckoff-Starr. She brought up the white paint fiasco almost first thing, at first probing me to see if I, too, shared the outrage. When I laughed in response, we started poking fun at the kinds of cushy lives these hyperventilators must lead — if this is what gets their blood boiling, life must be pretty cushy indeed. To prove the point, she posted a photo of a lovely, tall, well-cared-for brownstone — painted shocking white! The horror!

Fortunately for Bushwickers, we won’t ever have to worry about overzealous preservationistas calling the history police on us for such infractions — most of our buildings are brick or woodframe, and were built to be painted. (Though I can envision an as-yet-hard-to-imagine future where neighbors call 311 on each other for other minor crap on the more intact blocks of South Bushwick.)

Don’t get me wrong; I like historic buildings, and agree that many of the new buildings going up are just plain nasty. But it’s not always practical to keep every single old house around forever under the pressure of huge housing demand. In light of this, flipping out over a mere paint job on a block full of multimillionaires and their flawless houses comes across a bit hysterical. No?

And talk about pricing out the lower-income among us — historic districts are an old tool in the art of gentri-fu. Only the wealthy can afford to buy 1- or 2-family homes on land so close to the center of a megacity. The fact that anyone even knows about this minor infraction is testament to that.

The Changeling in Bed-Stuy challenges my characterization of Bushwick proper as the Bodega Belt, and that her hood might have more bodegas per capita. Mm-mm, girl, you need to take a walk up in here one day — you cannot stand on a Bushwick corner and not see a bodega — some corners have two and even three!

And of course then we have more demographic and definitional concerns to take into consideration — is any minimart in New York City a bodega? I think you have to have at least heard one or two Santería stories about a nearby market to even begin claiming you’re tops in bodegas. And if you go inside a random shop, it better have a big table on which the Caribbean answer to vegetables is offered for sale: yuca, yautía, boniato, onions, platanos, garlic, avocadoes. Goya products better be present on the “high class” aisle — if you keepin it real, you get Diana or Kirby, or whatever local brand is even cheaper than those. Pasteles in the fridge made by the lady down the block? We cool. Otherwise, you frun-in’.

This is the first I have heard of Habitat for Humanity building multifamily homes, and I have to say it’s pretty cool. Housing subsidies and projects only perpetuate the cycle of poverty — 70 years of public housing and are there any less people on assistance?…and for that matter, how many generations of the same family get assistance? Usually when something doesn’t work for seven decades, you try something else. Habitat homes can break this entitlement cycle and work people back into the economy as workers and property owners.

Let’s bring some of this into Bushwick!

Ownership Projects? May 1, 2007