BK Baby

Heidi Powers

We Live In Brooklyn, Baby

The name was adopted by the neighborhood association in 1964, a nod to the generous front yards, and Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who commanded a regiment of troops from Maryland in the Battle of Brooklyn (Frishberg, 2016; Gill, 2016). The neighborhood is also known as "Little France." Before moving here, my only experience with the area was celebrating Bastille Day on Smith Street. With traffic barriers in place, the pavement is filled with sand for bocci ball courts accompanied by festive jazz bands and merguez sausages. If you arrive early enough, you can snag a Pernod Ricard fedora from the booze kiosks, though I have never been so lucky and have had to settle for the bright plastic yellow sunglasses instead. What I remember most distinctly about coming here, though, was leaving. Traveling by Vespa, I would stare at block after block of beautiful brownstones while weaving in and out of standstill traffic heading back to the Manhattan Bridge via Clinton Street. I scoffed at the idea of living here, where the immaculate dwellings with their pretentious and uptight facades flaunt the financial prowess of their inhabitants, staunchly declaring, “YOU are not welcome.”

each one a stepping stone edging me across the East Village and closer to the estuary that divides the boroughs. In hindsight, I think it was my view between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, long before the Parks Department had a revitalized either waterfront, that piqued my interest in those distant shores beyond the drowned valley. Back then, it was hard to get me above 23rd Street and further west than Broadway, let alone across a bridge or through a tunnel. I used to say, "You may as well move to another state if you're willing to move to [fill in any other borough here]." I ate those asinine words when I saw NYU students pushing their branded bushel bins to the new dorms on Avenue D. The time had come to leave my beloved Alphabet City with its colorful mix of junkies, celebrities, hipsters, and aged misfits. When we finally found an "affordable" apartment, we packed up the two dogs and three vintage Vespas, crossing over the East River to Carroll Gardens, Breuckelen.

I called three apartments “home” during my first 10 years in NYC,

friend climbed a rickety wooden ladder left in the hall by workmen to take that painting, replacing it with a silver-framed poster of Robert Doisneaus' Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville. Regardless, it was surreal; every time you stepped into the hallway, it was as though you entered a transitional space akin to falling through the sandworm's door in Beetlejuice. I was convinced the super bought the cheapest items available, but what were the chances of finding the matching paint and tiles in such an abominable color scheme?

Situated between Court and Clinton, 2nd Place is not nearly as elegant as her sister streets. Like the rest of the block, our building had wrought iron fencing enclosing the three sides of the front yard, complete with the creaky gate that always hung slightly ajar. The walkway was about four feet wide leading up to the stoop and surrounded by an ample garden space enclosed by a 12-inch-high concrete bed. The garden's center boasted a flowering dogwood tree flanked by a solitary rose bush near the front gate; the ground entirely covered by a thick blanket of English ivy. You wouldn't know it unless you saw the tree in the spring, but it must have been grafted together when it was a young sapling, blooming half white and half pink. Like all my housing experiences in NYC, I traded cheap rent for an apartment in varying degrees of disrepair. If put on paper, the unspoken agreement between landlord and tenant would read something like: "I, the absentee landlord, hereby declare I will not raise your rent if you refrain from making requests to me, complaints to the city, and take every repair and expense upon yourself." 96 2nd Place was no exception. The linoleum flooring and the interior walls were pistachio green, set ablaze by the luminescence of the naked fluorescent Circline bulbs. Even the stairs were not spared, the treads and risers covered in the same peel and stick tiles, secured by staple gun. The dark wooden railing stood out in bizarre contrast, providing the only visual distinction aside from a painting of St. George and the Dragon in the entry vestibule and a gilded framed sinking ship strangely hung at the top of the 12-foot ceiling above the door of apartment 1. A few years after I moved in, a

Above me, in Apartment 3, lived our most mature residents, the New School's Department Head of Game Development, with his two geriatric dogs and artist wife who had recently appealed to the Port Authority for approval of a floating walking bridge across the Buttermilk Channel to Governors Island. When that didn't pan out, she processed the experience in a piece entitled The Play About the Bridge (Walking on Water). Apartments 1, 2, and 3 showed a united front at the performance held at the Triennial Exhibit in Lower Manhattan, riding our bikes back home together across the Brooklyn Bridge afterward. Below me, in Apartment 1, lived the director of the movie The Clovehitch Killer with his girlfriend-then-wife, who was a talent manager for Warner Music Group. The youngest of the crew, they had a YouTube show called So You're Dating a Vegan, which regularly featured our garden and stoop as well as the tenants and dogs and even the neighbors as we taste-tested their creations. On their wedding day, Apartment 3 and I biked over to Prospect Park to celebrate with their friends and family. The Garden Apartment housed a married couple of ex-bartenders with a grumpy old salt-and-pepper shepherd. Other than being on our local community board, we knew nothing about them, and they did not interact with us other than a brief “Hi” when they walked through our daily gatherings to their front door.

When living is cheap, you'd be surprised at what you’re willing to tolerate. The kitchen drawer pulls and knobs were a mixture of plastic and metal spanning rentals from the early 90s. There was a hole under my kitchen sink to a mysterious abyss that harbored families of roaches and mice. The doorbell did not work, severed by a frustrated renter before our tenure who could not get it to stop buzzing. If Apartment 3 took a shower at the same as me, only one of us got more than a trickle of water. We were burgled by raccoons who came through the kitchen window and made off with a bag of hamburger buns. When I texted the scene of the crime to my neighbors, Apartment 3 reported they had caught them red-handed trying to drag a 40 lb. bag of dog food out their window. Neither of us could get the landlord to replace the screens, now rendered useless by the bowling ball-sized holes in them. We went a week without heat or hot water when the CO2 alarm in Apartment 1 sounded in the early hours of dawn during the winter of 2016. The FDNY responded first, and they immediately called in the DOB who locked our boiler, instructing us to find a chimney sweep and contact them when the repairs were completed. I used Yelp to find the company in Bay Ridge that did the work and hired a local handyperson for the cap installation, taking the expenses out of my rent payment. My landlords, still in Florida, insisted this would "all go away" if we "greased a few palms." I wondered how to add bribery of a city worker to my itemized receipt.

Carroll Gardens is a wealthy neighborhood, and neither we nor our building fit the mold. After moving in, Apartment 1 and I ripped out the ivy, discovering a peculiarly large number of crack pipes beneath the foliage. Located on the south side of the street, we only got sun until noon. It was a six-year experiment of what we could get to grow and a ceaseless battle to protect it from the five canine inhabitants. After much trial and error, we potted herbs in the front in containers, encircled the dogwood with hostas, let mint go wild in the deep shade of the right border, and stuck a Dwarf Korean lilac tree discarded by a neighbor in the corner opposite the rose bush. The ivy was resilient; after a while, we quit fighting and used it to create a privacy barrier by weaving it through the right side of the fence. Every year we took turns adding plants, and if they did not thrive, we replaced them or mulched instead.

Years earlier, I had seen an older man from my window trying to shovel snow by himself across the street and went down to help him. It turns out he owned that building, and we remained friendly. When I approached him regarding our predicament, he offered us the only apartment in his personal home a few streets away on Union. Apartment 1, who had just had a baby, came home from the hospital and moved out the same day, a superhuman feat I can only attribute to youthful vigor. Apartment 3 begrudgingly re-signed, but within the year broke the lease when my new landlord had a vacancy in the same building where we helped him shovel snow. The Garden Apartment held out the longest but the most adult of us all, they managed to buy a place in Windsor Terrace.

In 2017 part of the facade broke off during an overnight nor’easter. Our neighbors called 311 as debris had fallen on their walkway, and they had a showing of their million-dollar co-op scheduled for later that afternoon. Within ten minutes, the FDNY showed up, and within three days, the city had erected scaffolding around the building by emergency order. The job was given to the lowest bidder, who destroyed our little garden. As our plants began to wither, it felt like a piece of all of us did too. After about a year, the landlord finally hired a management company to get the mess sorted when it became clear neither he nor his son, who lived on the Upper East Side, were prepared to take on the city. Nearly two years later, the same day the scaffolding came down, new leases, with a rent increase of $550 a month, were slipped under our doors.

My bathroom, a relic of that old way of life, is in the hallway outside my front door, well-lit by three skylights. Though adequately renovated, there is not a straight line in the place. The ceiling slopes a difference of three feet from the front to the back. The faux-wood floors have shifted with the building and buckle, bend, and sink in high traffic areas. The white plaster walls are bumpy and lumpy, unceremoniously concealing ancient irregularities of unknown origins.

My new apartment, close to Red Hook, does not have a front garden. The buildings this far west were built for the dock workers who had no use for such dalliances. Hemmed in between the BQE and the 76th Precinct, the street is loud and dirty. Solid walls of four feet high brownstone enclose the stone-tiled courtyard. There is no gate, just an opening with two steps that lead you to the stoop and garden apartment entrance. We are situated on the north side of the street and receive full sun all day. I put bright red hibiscus and Mandevilla in the pots out front next to the pale green Ascot Rainbow euphorbia. I wanted something cheerful not only for us but also for any passerby who, like me, still casts admiring glances at these grand old houses. I recently hung a wreath made of plastic sunflowers and ferns on the outer front doors at the top of the stoop, which opens into a small foyer with intricately laid grey and black porcelain tiling. A small folding table with a mail basket sits in the corner with a handwritten label reading, "Franks – Tribuzio," the name of my recently deceased landlady. My landlord grew up in this building, enduring the hardscrabble life many immigrants experienced. His entire family of six lived on the parlor floor. Later, his mom was able to buy the brownstone, leaving it to him in her will. The smell of stale smoke rests heavily on the walls, and the dark industrial carpet covering all four stories. Though I have the entire top floor, evidence of the original three tenant SRO remains.

“Hey,” I said, “On my walk over, I noticed the hallways were being repainted at 96.” "What color!?" the others curiously exclaimed in unison. "Pistachio green," I replied with a smile and signaled for another round.

Leaning back into the conversation, I masked the bittersweet twinge in my voice, knowing there was a possibility this would be the last time we see each other, at least for some time, as our lives move on in different directions.

I recently passed by my old building on 2nd Place for a long-overdue meet-up with Apartments 1 and 3 at Abilene on Court Street. I noticed the doors were propped open, and I peeked in before continuing on my way, joining the group at an outdoor table. Apartment 3 bought a fixer-upper in the Catskills, splitting their time between Brooklyn and upstate. Apartment 1 was soon relocating to Arkansas to work on a new script. His industrious wife had started her own agency after Warner laid her off during the pandemic. As the only essential worker, I regaled them with harrowing tales of my Covid commutes. We laughed, recalling the misadventures of our five dogs, only one of the originals still with us. While we sat reminiscing, interrupted by occasional greetings from passing friends and neighbors, I thought about all I could have missed if I hadn’t moved to Brooklyn.

Frishberg, H. (2016, May 19). A Senator From Maryland: How Carroll Gardens Got Its Name. Brownstoner. https://www.brownstoner.com/history/carroll-gardens-brooklyn-neighborhood-name-history-origins/Gill, J. F. (2016, July 11). New Roots in Carroll Gardens. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/realestate/new-roots-in-carroll-gardens.html Gill, J. F. (2016, July 11). New Roots in Carroll Gardens. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/realestate/new-roots-in-carroll-gardens.html

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