photo by Hrag Vartanian

This pop art grafitto is just before the Bogart L entrance. Haha, vote. Hey, it made a difference all those other times!

Begging to be a bar.

I went on a stroll through the hood this weekend, and as I walked down Cypress from Palmetto to Troutman, I took photos of some interesting carriage houses and garages.

Interesting but scary.

Nothing special, but has a large, mature grape arbor on top.

Hard to tell from the photo, but the facade is brick and has a slate roof.

“Intact” houses, Troutman between Central and Evergreen, from the BushwickBK flickr pool

ohai i can has car?: One brave glutton from NY Mag’s Grub Street tried out SMSCab, a car company you can text instead of call. Yes, from Bushwick.

Ridgewood Drift?: Somebody on subchat seems to think the improvement happening in Bushwick is somehow spreading from Ridgewood. pff. Queens people.

Bushwick Drift: Kevin Walsh of Forgotten NY mentions in his book about New York: “…Ridgewood, [which] real-estate flacks hype… as the next stop on the M train for Williamsburg and Bushwick refugees who’ve been priced out of Brooklyn.” Actually, Ridgewood is hardly cheaper than Bushwick right now, and if you’d rather have a nicer apartment… and block and neighbors and air, you brave the sucky M ride and get the marginally cheaper place across the Queens border.

From Slick to Sick: A Bushwick native reminisces about the amazing Batterman’s Department Store which stood where, if I remember correctly, that shitty Duane Reade is now at Flushing and Broadway.

You heard it here first, through several grapevines: 116 Troutman, aka “Troutman Gardens,” that gigantimus concrete thing going up on Troutman Street and Central Avenue, is not to be senior housing. It is not to be subsidized rentals. It is not to be income-restricted coops. It is to be at least 146 condominiums, with one-bedrooms for $300,000. I attempted to get more info out of the developer’s office but the number I scraped up just rang and rang.

It lands with a thunderous fist in the middle of this gap-toothed, half-burned-down, industrial fringe part of Bushwick proper. Several hundred people with upscale tastes and the wallets to back them up will descend on this one little block to live in a megapalace built on the former site of the Castle Braid Company factory. This development, together with several new-construction condos and rentals going up within one block — not to mention the thousands of students, artists, homos and hipsters already flooding into the immediate area — is sure to transform this part of the neighborhood into a bustling, amenity-packed enclave.

The developer is Mayer Schwartz, the owner of the “mini-mall” on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, and the Opera House Lofts on Arion Place in Bushwick. As someone who seems to understand how to manufacture “cool,” I’m guessing Schwartz won’t leave us with an eyesore like the Nightmare on Grove Street. This building, at least, fronts the street properly and adjoins its neighbors, the way things are traditionally constructed in New York.

The prices seem steep, but not as steep as the stagnant 979 Willoughby. 54 St. Nicholas had no problems selling out at $300K for 6 smallish one-bedrooms, though they were undeniably lovely, and a very different product.

More info as it comes!

#1 — $1050 — 3br: What the hellll? Okay, here’s my analysis: this must be rent-regulated, which means that it must be in the lovely beaux arts and art nouveau blond brick building at 41 Jefferson Street, across from the amazing St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. The small windows in the pictured bedroom probably indicate it’s one of the ground floor apartments, but I can’t tell. The kitchen is massive, built-ins are in an almost tacky abundance, there’s a dishwasher, there’s free laundry, AND pets are accepted! You’d be dumb, just…dumb as dirt, not to go check this place out.
PETS OK Jefferson Street and Bushwick Myrtle JMZ

#2 — $1175 — 2br rr: Basic railroad with a sunny kitchen that could accommodate a café table. Aside from the annoying, off-putting, duMb-GurL wr☆t☆ng in the ad, I can find few drawbacks to the actual apartment: great price, good location, decent condition. I caution, however, that it is not at all “super close” to Greenpoint, or even Williamsburg. Gawd. Or rather, omigod!
CATS OK Grove and Irving Myrtle/Wyckoff LM

#3 — $1500 — 2br: It says three bedrooms, but it seems to suggest one is an office, so I’m sticking with two, still a good price for a nice two bedrooms and an office. Interesting floors, decent new kitchen (counters “in Granite!”), and in a “private house” in an intact little pocket a block from Irving Square.
Weirfield and Irving Halsey L

#4 — $1100 — 2br: Also says “can be three-bedroom” but we’ll just stick with the fact that it is a two-bedroom. It’s still pretty cheap, but then that’s because it’s in Siberia: by the Wilson L stop. It claims the rent is below market because it’s winter. Seems like a decent place for the money.
PETS OK Schaefer and Wilson Wilson L

#5 — $1300 — 2br: A nice apartment in a pretty building, with a cool, young landlord who lives nearby. He says they often have BBQs and screen movies in the backyard in the summer. The place is a bit far from the subways, I have to say. Utilities are “50% off” — forgot to ask him what exactly that means and it’s too late now.
Central and Putnam Gates JZ

Dishonorable mention: aptsandlofts.com again takes the category with this cheesy, flavorless, charm-vacant new construction POS they’re trying to unload on unsuspecting students who don’t know any better. It doesn’t even say where it is except that it’s “walking distance to the J train” — oh, good, cuz the rest of Bushwick is sooo far from that filthy stepchild line. The price for this echo chamber-like three-bedroom dorm in an architectural travesty? Three thousand, two hundred dollars. US ones! Get. Real.

from the wtf file: Ugh, god. East Willie? “Flat”? “Stu-stu-studio”!? Is this an ad for an apartment or a fucking emetic? This would be a perfectly fine apartment — cute details, good layout, pet friendly, okay price, liberal views on modifications — but this contact person is an utter douchebag. Furthermore, it’s on the Bushwick side of Flushing, not East Williamsburg. At least there’s “no credit check, dude!”

Anyone whose responsibility it is to maintain their sidewalk in Bushwick knows how difficult it can be. The trash accumulation here is epic. I am always picking up bits of trash and do a full sweeping once a week. My tree pit is a magnet for condiment packages, tissues, and of course, dog shit. In October, I got a $100 litter ticket on a Saturday afternoon, just hours after I had actually done one of my full sweeps. Despite an experienced neighbor’s insistence that it was futile to fight the ticket, I followed the appeal instructions to the letter.

Today, three and a half months later, I got a letter from the Environmental Control Board, in which the judge wrote:

“I find Respondent’s testimony credible. In light of the facts and circumstances described above, I find Respondent has established that reasonable efforts were made to keep the area free from debris. Therefore the Notice of Violation is dismissed.”

As long as you are slightly less lazy than the bureaucracy, you can win. Fight all your tickets, property owners! It costs $3 to send something certified… if you have time to get to the post office and wait for that bureaucracy’s rusty gears to grind.

I noticed this a couple weeks ago, but I never see any activity here. The door is never open. All I can see is this marquis in the window, on the right end of the tortilla factory on Flushing between Bogart and Central. Sorry the moving sign didn’t render on my crappy phone camera, but it advertises tattoos and piercings. Just slightly more exciting than when the crappy Chinese lingerie store opened across the street.

click to enlarge

A friend in the hood whose aunt lives in Martin County, just past the civilizational borders of South Florida — NOT a cosmopolitan area, in other words — showed me this clipping from the local paper that she sent him. We don’t know which paper it was, and none of the text comes up in a search. I knew South Floridians were already aware of the “coolness” of Bushwick — my mom tells me her friends say buying a house here is “brilliant.” But I didn’t know it was all, Miami’s equivalent of Mystic, CT sending reporters to “get the local scoop.”

Anyway, they got most of their facts right. Bushwick Car Service (718-497-7148) are the people to call when you need a car, though I suspect they were chosen for the article because of the name. They also got where to eat and drink off the Morgan stop more or less right.

The worst of the worst is the names they made up that they claim are actually used to describe Bushwick (or the Morgantown area) — Bushburg (okay, a few douches have used that), Willwick, Billwick, Buburg, and WesWick. Buburg!? The fuck. If anyone does use these alleged nicknames, I do not want to know. As you may have noticed, the focus is on the Morgan area, but then the park down on Knickerbocker is mentioned, and that’s solid Jefferson stop territory.

Props to the Stuart yahoos for making fun of hipsters, I suppose… I feel a little bad that they can’t get a break even from people who think West Palm Beach is a no-go ghetto zone.

Not sure if you’ve noticed, but there is an overabundance of Argentinean and Argentine-owned places to eat in the Williamsburg area, and now there’s to be one more. I personally know a handful of Argentineans who live in Williamsburg, and inevitably, some of them are leaking over into the fair burg of Bushwick. Their transriparian cousins are also in evidence, in such places as Angel’s Fruit Market on Knickerbocker, owned by an Italian-Uruguayan for the last 30 years and change — and even my next-door neighbor. FYI, Argentinean restaurateurs, I swear to you that if you open a place in Bushwick, I will eat a steak there once a week for a year. Promise.

My question to racemonger anti-gentroids is: since Argentineans are white, is this bad? Or since Argentineans are Hispanic, is this good? Here’s a tissue to wipe the brains leaking out your ears from the pressure of this one.

My grandma was in town this week on one of her occasional visits to see my 2-year-old cousin in White Plains. She and my uncle took the train down to Bushwick this Friday to see the house and have dinner at — where else do people take their family? — Northeast Kingdom. Moron that I am, I forgot she is recovering from screwing up her knee when she was in Italy a few months ago, and arranged to meet them at the Morgan stop and just walk them back to the house. Took longer than I realized: “You forget, your grandmother is old now,” she admonished. “Bullshit,” I responded with indignation.

Of course we live upstairs — my uncle frowned as she made her way up them. It really only took about 30 seconds, but she was definitely “differently abled.” They poked around the apartment for a minute — “you got a loooot o’ work to do here,” says Grammy — and we plopped down on the couch while Luis called Bushwick Car Service to take us to the restaurant. They always say 5 minutes, but within 60 seconds, the car was honking and Grammy hobbled her way back down the stairs.

Like everyone who goes in, they loved NEK. My uncle, involved in various aspects of the restaurant business his whole life, was impressed. He asked whether we feel protected here; the answer was of course “no,” but neither do we feel threatened. As it seems to be in New York, my grandmother, a native of the Bronx who grew up in Jackson Heights, had absolutely no bearings in Brooklyn, as if it were a whole other country. “Ridgewood is two blocks that way,” I said, and pointed out the window across Wyckoff. “Oh, it’s right there?” I went into a story about how my doctor is in Ridgewood and one day I went, they wrote my name down and said “All the Italians here today!” She replied, as if to contradict me, “Ridgewood used to be all German.” Yep.

We walked them to the Starr Street entrance to the L and said our goodbyes. “You did good, honey,” she said, and gave me a kiss. As they eased down the steps, I said, “you know how to get back?” Uncle Keith fake whined “oh, we’ll manage, don’t worry about us.” We all laughed as they turned the corner into the bowels of the station.