brooklyn Archives - Brooklyn Row House

For Those Living Without A Trust Fund

December 14, 2019

Brooklyn has become the scorching hot real estate market that Manhattan was in the 1970s: a middle class ghetto surrounded by wealth, eye-popping net worths and double-digit property appreciation. Or at least that’s the case for what is referred to as “downtown Brooklyn”, a collection of tony neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and DUMBO. Thanks to what’s left of rent control and stabilization, while there are still legacy denizens living in those neighborhoods, one can’t even think about being their neighbors today without a generous Wall Street executive salary. The average 2019 monthly rent paid

Beware door-to-door scammers

August 27, 2018

This is a story from 2015 that I posted on another house blog site but neglected to post on my own. Maybe I wanted to keep contentious articles off Brooklyn Row House at the time. Whatever, it involves a large home improvement products company, Andersen. This isn’t a knock on the Andersen product — well, it sort of is — but a complaint about their local franchisee, Renewal by Andersen, a contracting offshoot. This one had a 631 area code (Long Island) but were working south Brooklyn at the time. Disclaimers up front: the dishonesty I dealt with may be

Citizen Journalist of the Year

October 31, 2017

It’s possibly the first crowd-sourced criminal investigation in history leading to federal indictments and convictions. Last February, a friend of mine, former Time/Life war correspondent, Ed Barnes, texted me about a neighborhood blog in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, called Pardon Me For Asking, run by a blogger, Katia Kelly. Katia’s blog isn’t much different than mine, with the exception that she updates hers a helluva lot more frequently than I do mine. For quite some time Ed had been working the international angles on Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s ex-campaign manager. Ed focused on Manafort’s involvement in the corrupt Ukrainian presidential campaign

Guess what I found hibernating under my kitchen extension?

February 3, 2013

I’ve posted a few articles about Brooklyn wildlife here over the years. Now I apparently have one of them as a roomate. Last week I broke a tile on my bathroom vanity and decided that today was a good day to fix it. I keep my spare tiles in a barely heated shed under my kitchen extension. As soon as I opened the door to the shed and the gamey smell hit my nose I knew that something wild was living in there. I assumed it was a feral cat or two until I saw a bunch of straw nesting

My 15ms Of Fame

February 25, 2012

At the end of August last year, there were reports of the Google Street Views car being seen around the neighborhood. For the half dozen or so people on the planet who don’t know what Street View is, it’s a terrific value-added feature that the Google Maps folks created by photographing many if not most of the primary and secondary streets around the world. Using Street View you can not only see a satellite view of your location but actual cached photos. It’s also rather hard to miss the Google car as it’s about as subtle as a Oscar Meyer

“You can do it. We can help.”

February 12, 2012

No comment necessary.

DOT sidewalk inspection scam?

July 28, 2010

My doorbell rang this afternoon. It was my cheerful postman, Kevin, and he had a certified letter for me. Certified letters are almost always buzzkillers. The envelope said it was from NYC Dept of Transportation so I knew it wasn’t congratulations from Publishers Clearinghouse. Kevin said that every house on the block, except one, got certified letters from DOT. What the hell, I’ve got nothing to be concerned about. My sidewalk and curb are in excellent condition. I signed for the letter and opened it up. Inside was a Notice of Violation that my sidewalk had been inspected and was

The High Price for Cheap Rent

November 15, 2009

On a nearby street, a line of ugly, cheaply built, 1980s-vintage row houses stand on a plot of land where there was once a neglected old Victorian. The six houses share a communal front “yard” — a quarter-acre concrete pad that gives the place all the charm of a New Jersey strip mall. To complete that grim visual, cars are illegally parked on it, usually double wide, often obstructing the sidewalk. In fact, there are more cars than one would expect from six single-family homes. A couple of months ago, I deduced why that was when I saw a small

No Night for Dog Walkers

December 21, 2008

It’s treacherous out there. After two wet snows since Friday and a day in the upper thirties, the temps crashed after sundown, almost instantly freezing any standing water on the sidewalk and stoops. It’s nights like this that I wish I hadn’t housebroken my dogs so well. They’d sooner cut their own throats than mess in the house. Worse, I can’t even push them out the door to do their business in the back yard. They just sit by the back door looking miserable. It’s also nights like this that I’d like to see public flogging of thoughtless home and

The Return of Tony Manero

October 21, 2008

You forty and fifty-somethings will undoubtedly remember the 1977 anthemic film about the disco era, Saturday Night Fever. What you may not know is that it put my neighborhood on the map. “Fever” was about the disco days and the lives of several blue collar kids in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I love talking with my neighbors about those days. They say the movie was an accurate depiction of what life was like here, at least for the disco heads. In 1977, I was a hardcore jazz poser at Berklee College of Music in Boston so I missed it all, geographically,

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