Open Thread Wednesday

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  • MaggieO

    Has anybody else noticed that the house that’s being renovated on the corner of Clinton and Schermerhorn has been completely open to the elements from the 2nd floor up for the past several weeks? I’m not around during the day so I don’t know if construction is actively progressing but there are open permits on the property (conversion to single family). One of the basement windows appeared to be open too when I went by a couple weeks ago. What do you guys think, worth trying to contact the architect and/or owner based on the permits or am I being a busybody?

  • Andrew Porter

    Wednesday is always Prince Spaghetti Day, so here are your old postcards showing local spaghetti, uh, street scenes. Here’s Montague Street, back in the day (as my brother calls it):
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b6db65ad83c08a487869574c43a0675769fe5f69acd84fb64fc835cdf47133ac.jpg

  • Andrew Porter

    And here’s Montague, facing East. Click on images to see them in Vista-Vision (or full size):
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/621bc9f2a68c7d25cabd47e3c371af644cdbfe2b16b629256487e150259243ed.jpg

  • ionFreeman

    You’d undoubtedly be being a busybody, but I say embrace it. Wouldn’t you want to be called?

  • ionFreeman

    What’s going on with the former Starbucks at 112 Montague? it’s been empty 5 1/4 years!

  • Emily Pulaski

    Has anyone noticed the strange house at 104 ¾ Willow Terrace? Once the sun has gone down, any person who walks by is able to hear strange chanting. Is it perhaps Latin? Or is it some older tongue, perhaps a forgotten dusty language from the ancient and dusty lands of ages past. Each time one strolls past, a cold chill runs through, a deep and abiding frost that seems to drop down the spine right into the soul. Do they eyes of the squirrels seem to glow? Do the knots in the tree seem to form a sigil? Is it the inversed Hadagga? What are these thoughts I seem to hear? Are they voices or something more basic like the guttural chants sung round the fires of the Pleistocene? Is that blood that runs down the walls? Are those eye which stare out from the second storey window? Surely eyes have never been that malevolent, so unhuman, as though they have never known a single human emotion. Hollow and unmoving, empty, yet stark and boring. I cannot look away. Yet I must look away. My pace quickens. Yet the assembled voices, a chorus of lost multitudes, now forms itself into a clouded, shadowy voice. “Come near,” it beckons. “Come near and find peace. Worry not. Peace comes like the sleep of ages.” My pace finds itself doubling, yet a thought seeps its way into my mind. “Turn around,” I think to myself. “Let us come explore this house. For it calls to us.” Is that my own voice? Or does it come from outside. Does it come from the house itself. Perhaps I should…no. I musn’t dawdle. I must walk briskly and put great distance between myself and this bemaddening abode. “Come,” it calls. “Come now.” The voices grow angry. I look back and now there, behind the glass, in the dark, I can see many sets of eyes, and a hand like a pale crab pressed against the glass. “Join us,” they beckon. “Join us forever.”

    I turn way form the house and make my way onward toward Hicks. It begins to rain. I pull my coat tighter around me against the cold. Wind gusts. A drop of rain falls in my mouth. Does it taste of blood? I quicken my pace again. The lights of Hicks are near and I must reach them.

  • http://selfabsorbedboomer.blogspot.com/ Claude Scales

    Is this an entry in a Bad Lovecraft contest?

  • http://selfabsorbedboomer.blogspot.com/ Claude Scales

    I understand the building owner is — how you say? — difficult. I believe Starbucks moved out because the owner refused to repair a ceiling leak.

  • ionFreeman

    At $20,000/month, that’s 1.26MM of difficult. He could have sent ten children for four-year degrees in Charm with this time and money.

  • ionFreeman

    Do you think it’s time to reinvigorate the Fort Stirling initiative? http://brooklynheightsblog.com/archives/69049

  • http://selfabsorbedboomer.blogspot.com/ Claude Scales

    It puzzles me why owners — not just this one — will allow commercial space to lie fallow, sometimes for years. I’ve heard of instances in which several siblings have jointly inherited a property and can’t agree among themselves what to do with it. That isn’t the case here. My best guess is that the owner is afraid to lease for a year to a tenant, say a locally owned retailer, that isn’t able to pay absolute top dollar, for fear that a national chain will come along looking for space it can take quickly. Why hasn’t such a revenue generating tenant shown up? The owner’s reputation may have something to do with it.

  • http://selfabsorbedboomer.blogspot.com/ Claude Scales

    I’d forgotten that one; thanks for reminding me. Perhaps we could at least start a campaign to restore benches to the Fort Stirling Sitting Area.

  • Emily Pulaski

    Don’t know. Never read Harvey Pritchard Lovecraft.

  • http://selfabsorbedboomer.blogspot.com/ Claude Scales

    Nor did I.

  • Banet

    Yet there must dozens of tenants that would rent month-to-month for a decent reduction in rent. Mind-boggling.

  • Teresa

    I could be wrong, but it seems that major road work is being commenced on Hicks between Clark & Pineapple, now, 9:30 pm. Anyone know anything about it?

  • Hayden Thompson

    I recently asked two workers what they were doing and for who. One said it was for Spectrum a second separately said the client was con Edison. Almost immediately, a supervisor ran up ordered the guys not to make any comment and “suggested” I drive on. I told him I was an reporter and he now made me more interested what was going on. The HAS been a series of surges, spikes, un- usual noise and out of phase products on the lines right in that area, so someone in civic orgs and local press should be forcing some serious answers on this….

  • Teresa

    Will see if there’s anything I can find out. Now 11pm & even with the windows closed, the noise drowns out television & a fan. I don’t understand how this is permitted

  • bpelle

    Better lock this thread up fast before Andrew sees it and chides us because the topic has been discussed many times before.

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlsiLOnWCoI Arch Stanton
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlsiLOnWCoI Arch Stanton

    Off your meds again Jeffery?

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlsiLOnWCoI Arch Stanton

    ^^^It’s a local gathering of Trump supporters anonymous…

  • Haydon Thompson

    Well, I only know what I observe on my instruments, which includes a recent model HP phase analyzer, which shows how much improper products are on local AC lines. Ask any really good electrician or better yet ask any high end audio phile why he spent typically $1000 plus for good AC filtration. The garbage on con Ed lines are sometimes astounding. Sure, sometimes that’s the result of quadrillion computers and Chinese electronics kicking back their nasty noise back into the grid. Still, I happen to know that section of the Heights had a spike in AC problems just at the time of the late night work I observed….

  • You know who this is….

    I’m sure YOU remember “Man’s Country” the Pierrepont …which I and a group of other decent Heights citizens and patriots caused to leave the Heights…BTW also, do you care to comment on who OWNED the building?…Or the morality of CC in leasing the building? Hmm…any comment on those two little “aspects” of real aspects of Heights history….

  • Hayden Thompson

    Call 311 and lodge a ‘over noise limits’ for a commercial operation complaint, get the complaint Number and follow up. Yell at Squadron’s office and the press. Go down, much preferably with one or two other persons, and “ask” the site supervisor why it’s OK to cause that level of disruption. Of course, as you are going to see the darlings please don’t even think of calling 911 and the 84 and reporting a dispute with a disorderly crowd forming…you can think of going down to the site with a bloggie or any video recording device and then posting the results on youtube.

    Ioint is, you have to get off YOUR ____ like I and my “associates” do and do something when someone acts out.

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlsiLOnWCoI Arch Stanton

    I actually don’t remember “Mans Country” But curious as to to why you are implying there would be something wrong with that? Anyway, it says in the article the owners of the building were at odds with the lessee who was the one incapable of keeping out the nogoodniks. Also, as I recall all the hotels in the nabe were similarly run-down and chock full of seedy characters. It was more a holistic problem of the times, not necessary the owners of the buildings at fault. But then again, just what are you implying?

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlsiLOnWCoI Arch Stanton

    Yeah, all that weird noise on the AC must be some sort of RF designed to broadcast out or your receptacles and light fixtures to control your mind! Better double up the foil in the ole fedora.

  • Reggie

    In other words, Jeffrey, you lied to the supervisor? Or, is there a side to you that I am unfamiliar with? You are a reporter for what outlet?

  • ykwthi….

    Someone needs a certain longevity in the Heights to know real history of the Heights or understand why and how things are now what they are.
    The man’s country plague of course was carefully avoided by the times and other media of the era. But it was plague which drew objectionable characters by the hundreds from all over the city to this wide open sex club, one of the real prototypes for the soon emerging bath scene. Ugh!
    As far as who OWNED the hotel or who in the Catholic world went to what darlings in the Archdioces objecting to the church making a deal there, well, as I said, you need the longevity….

  • ykwthi

    I have been a journalist for 51 years among my other services I try to render. As far as clients, independent or even staffed journalists who often freelance rarely provide clients lists. The last time I was, well, “asked to leave” a Bilderberg meeting I refused to give affiliation to authorities and this wasn’t stateside, so…