This past Saturday I went pedaling around the neighborhood with my digital camera. I’ve been wanting to do a series of articles about the neighborhood so I needed to stock up on bad pictures. I’m from the Grateful Dead jam school of photography: just keep snapping crap and sooner or later you’ll stumble on something almost interesting. I live just south of one of NYC’s oldest and most dilapidated industrial sprawls, on the western edge of an area called Sunset Park. I know, the name sounds like sipping Mai Tais on the veranda while watching the ocean swallow up the

After the 500th time reading someone complain about the clomping feet of the tenants upstairs, and the 1000th response from a helpful someone advising them to install acoustic tile, I have to post something that will maybe get Googled for the next poor person who asks about it: acoustic tile is not a solution. I don’t have an architectural acoustics degree but this is something I learned in the trenches, building commercial recording studios and reading books by studio designers and acousticians like Michael Rettinger and Don Davis. There are two basic types of noise control: one that alters the

Chicago 2-Flat tagged me. For those who don’t know this Houseblogs game, if you’re tagged by another house blogger you’re supposed to reveal five things about yourself that most people don’t know. Then you tag five other house bloggers. Because of something I revealed about myself on this blog, I won This Old House Magazine’s Stupid Human Trick. So I don’t have much of a problem making an idiot of myself for a little attention. The challenge is finding five other house bloggers who haven’t been tagged already. Okay, here goes. I’m an Army brat who was born and partially