Newsflash: Worst landlords not in PLG

Brooklyn Junction pointed us to this New York Times map of the 200 apartment buildings with the worst record on hazardous code violations in the City. While Bed-Stuy and Bushwick are loaded with offenders, our own Prospect Lefferts manages to have zero. Which makes you wonder: with winners like these* in our midst, those 200 buildings must be reeeeaaallly bad.

UPDATE: Curses! My attempt to link to several PLG buildings with serious housing violations has failed due to the lack of permissable deep-linking at the City's HPD site. Details to follow.

Officer Timoshenko Way?

Eugene Mathieu shows he's willing to tackle the tough issues: our City Council rep has proposed co-naming Rogers Avenue between Lefferts Avenue and Sterling Street "Officer Russel Timoshenko Way."

Got an opinion? Argue it at the upcoming Community Board Meeting (Nov. 27), but call ahead of time if you want your three minutes. Personally, I think we ought to erect a statue of Jerry Bennett, the guy who saved 17-year-old bicyclist (and jazz prodigy) Melvin Brison after an SUV ran over him at the corner of Rutland and Rogers.

Help the city put more trees in PLG

An earlier post discussed what homeowners can do to get street trees in front of their houses. But what about getting trees in places that aren't yours—like large apartment buildings, schools, or commercial strips?

In the past, nothing short of personally lobbying the property owner would make it happen. But thanks to Flatbush Gardener, we just found out that Million Trees NYC is asking residents to recommend new sites for street trees throughout the City.

So what about it, people? Where does PLG need street trees? ...wait, don't tell me, tell the NYC Parks and New York Restoration Project: click here for the form.

The Parkside Q station (pictured) tops my wishlist. The plaza in front of Parkside is decidedly un-parklike: an unwelcoming concrete slab with no greenery of any kind. Half of Parkside Ave. (gmap) here is treeless, which is especially unfortunate because so many people pass through here. 

PLG History: Integration!

The New York Times archives are a wonderful thing. They have scanned, posted and made searchable the entire news archive since 1851, and it is free for subscribers. One article we came across, from 1930, addresses an issue that most people step gingerly around—racism. Here's one person who didn't: Mrs. Ella Morris.

As surely one of the first people in Lefferts Manor—if not the first—to rent to African-Americans—excuse me, Negroes, you'd think that Mrs. Morris was a hero. You would be wrong. You see, according to the Times, her house at 54 Midwood "was advertised 'for sale or for rent to colored people only'... after neighbors objected to her taking in white roomers."

That's right: the single-family deed restriction in Lefferts Manor left Mrs. Morris unable to rent out rooms and led her to give over the house to African-Americans as an act of revenge because her neighbors were probably just as racist as she was. 

But perhaps I'm misjudging ol' Ella, and her heart really was in the right place.

"The family coming into the house," said Mrs. Morris, "is a large family. I have given them a long lease but it contains a cancellation clause which can be applied in the event the house is sold." On the front and the West of the neat little building are large canvas signs sill advertising the house "Sale to Colored People Only."  The "For Rent" part of the sign has been painted over. Mrs. Morris said the signs are to remain until the house is sold.

Um. No. PLG's first racial pioneer was a spiteful little cuss.

Feral Caturday

In PLG feral cat news: After months of indoctrination, Ethel has left the colony at Hawthorne at Flatbush for poshier digs. Known by locals as the "friendly" feral, Ethel's new caretaker tells us that she adjusted relatively easily to life indoors, using the litter box and covering her business as if burying the dead. As an adult feral, however, she prefers the outdoors when weather permits.

Back at the colony, Tabby II—possibly the only remaining fertile adult in the colony—recently gave birth to three kittens. The litter is currently nesting in the warm basement of a nearby apartment building. The woman caring for Ethel, known to residents of the building as "the cat lady," hopes to find a rescue group willing to take on new charges.

FERAL CATS ON YOUR (PLG) BLOCK? 
Send photos and reports to the email there on the right.

Update on Loew's Kings Theatre

Last year, you may recall that the city sent out a request for proposals to develop the historic Loew's Kings Theater on Flatbush (at Tilden). Lo and behold, there is news, but not especially good news: Jack Katz, director of the business improvement district, told the Brooklyn Eagle that nobody "was really interested in keeping the theater in one piece."

One problem is that renovating the giant theater will be insanely expensive. No surprise there. But here's the shocker: Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College, which is about a mile south of the theater on Flatbush “objected to a theater going in there because it would be competition for them."

The Eagle article also suggested that BAM is dangerously close to the Loew's.

Brooklyn Junction argues that clustering would be good for all the theaters, making Flatbush a destination for Brooklyn arts. I'm not convinced clustering in itself is such a great idea, but if buying that argument means throwing off the inevitable attempts to ruin another historic site by turning it into fancy offices and condos, I'm sold.

Reading this blog

Hello and welcome. Before creating any misconceptions, let me say up front that we're going to be posting irregularly: anywhere from a couple of times a week to once every two months.  Quality over quantity!

With this in mind, I highly recommend using a newsreader so that you know when we update. If you are one of the people who have no idea what RSS is, trust me when I say that it would make reading online a whole lot easier. A news reader will tell you when your favorite sites update and allow you to keep track of articles that you intend to read later. (I use Bloglines, so that's what I'll recommend. Here are some instructions.)

Thanks. We look forward to reading your comments!

Getting more trees on your block

When people in New York describe a block as "nice," what they often mean is that it has more street trees than speeding cars (whether they are conscious of the fact or not). Aside from the benefits Brooklynites usually associate with trees, trees have a decided traffic calming effect: drives travel slower on blocks that have them.

Since our block—and areas south and east of us—could use more trees, I passed info out to my neighbors on how to request a free tree in front of their houses. I made about 70 copies of the documents below and folded them into a flyer, which I placed in mailboxes of homes without trees on Fenimore, Hawthorne, Winthrop, and Parkside blocks from Flatbush to Nostrand Avenues. If anyone else would like to try this, here are the documents I made (along with the city form). Feel free to alter them anyway you see fit, but if you're outside of PLG, you may need to make sure to change the community board on the Letter to your own.

Letter to neighbors (doc)
Outside page (pdf)
Request_a_street_tree_form (pdf)
Community Board 9 address (cut-and-paste onto envelopes - for PLG and Crown Heights only)
Fold all of the above in half, and include an long envelope with your community board's address.

Though in the past it has taken well over a year for the city to plant requested trees, someone at the Parks Dept. told me that they're getting a big bag of money for more street trees as part of Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC.

How to strip paint from brownstone woodwork

I've spent a good chunk of the past year stripping the woodwork in our old house, so I thought I'd share some observations for those inclined to do it themselves.

Point #1: stripping several decades of paint off of woodwork makes almost no rational sense whatsoever. The job is so insanely time-consuming, it would have made more financial sense to rip all all the old mouldings, buy replicas at Dyke's, and spend my time bartending instead (not that I know how to bartend). That said, I'm compelled not only to keep stripping but to show you people how to do the same, because, as they say, misery loves company.

My stripping began in the kitchen, with some window trim that had been painted brown. Fortunately, there was only one layer of latex paint, so it was easy to remove with a chemical stripper. (After experimenting with a bunch of different brands, I stuck with PeelAway 7. ) It took maybe 6 to 8 so hours to strip and clean one layer of latex paint off casings for a tall window on the parlor floor.

In contrast, the woodwork upstairs has taken approximately forever. The paint upstairs dates to around the 1920s, is loaded with lead, and thick as hell. I tried all methods of stripping to figure out what would be fastest (including the silent paint remover) and found the easiest way was to manually pull off as much paint as possible with a 6-in-1 scraper.

Because the wood was finished with shellac in its earlier life, much of the paint on flat surfaces lifted right off. I noticed that winter is the best time to scrape because the woodwork shrinks a bit in dry weather, making it easier to pull off the paint. In scattered sections, I poked a hole through the paint down to the original finish, which often made it easier to lift a few days later.

For detailed areas, I used the PeelAway. While it worked on the most recent layers of paint (latex) within minutes, I ended up leaving the stuff on for 24 hour periods because the older paint was a real bitch. Through trial and error, I found two treatments of PeelAway (with at least a day or two inbetween) worked best. When I did more than that, it tended to discolor the wood underneath.

To avoid safety problems with lead dust, I wore respirators that I bought online and hung light plastic dropcloths from the ceiling, enclosing the immediate area around the mouldings. The rest of the room was also covered in plastic dropcloths, which I frequently replaced.

Here's what the corner detail looked like after a 24 session of PeelAway. The gummy mess just beneath the corner moulding is residue from the chemical, which I should have cleaned better. The only way to get that stuff off after it dries is to put more PeelAway on it (you can wipe it off a few minutes later). The lesson here: for the final round of stripping, carefully clean off PeelAway, using denatured alcohol.

A modest proposal for brick streets

A couple of months ago, a friend and I started a web project, People's 311, to photograph and map 311 conditions around the city. As part of that effort, I walked all over PLG and other parts of Flatbush taking photos of potholes, damaged street trees, and the like. One thing I noticed is that several streets off of Flatbush Avenue (like the one here) have handsome brick entrances that are in many cases less than handsome due to missing bricks and haphazard repairs. It's as if the DOT previously cared about the look of the streets but has since given up.

Here's a thought: Since a number of these bricked streets are missing bricks, why not sacrifice one of them and remove its bricks, then use the salvaged pieces to fix the others?  I'll send this to the Community Board and see what they have to say.