At last! the long awaited second half of my Greenpoint, Brooklyn tour with the Miss. Heather! This part of the tour includes the notorious “Rat King” House.
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Love the Greenpoint stuff. In the late 80s, one of my college friends moved into the city to Greepoint. He found a big apartment (3 bedrooms) and a couple friends moved in with him. All was fine until… the owner saw him one morning and said, “Hey, your friend Steve is living here?” “Yep!” “He’s, um, black?” “Yeah.” “Oh, he has to leave, the neighbors are complaining.”
He called me and said, “I thought this was New York City in the 1980s!!”
They actually got through the situation by going to a neighborhood association meeting and introducing themselves (basically, “Hi, we moved here to Greenpoint, we like it, we wanted everyone to know who we are because it’s such a close-knit neighborhood!” and the whole thing kind of went away). But freaky & scary.
As for dog shit, OMG, such an issue in crowded cities. The park near my last apt in Boston was poo central; one morning I found myself actually running after some woman with her dog yelling “Hey, you forgot your dogshit” while she tried to pretend I wasn’t there. But you can actually shame a lot of people into not being morons.
Man, I want to get there one day with the chasing people with the dog shit. Eve’s friend had her dog here for a while while I was out of town and even just the sight of this big lab pissing on the sidewalk made me feel like such a dirty bird. I don’t get the idea of having big dogs in a city like this.
It is hard to have a big dog in the city, and you have to be willing to take a lot of walks, excursions to dog parks, and all of that. The US is actually a pretty dog-unfriendly country; in Paris there are dogs all over, and they are definitely welcome on sidewalk cafes. In Cologne we saw people bringing their dogs into restaurants. (Did you know that in Houston, it’s not legal to have a dog at an outdoor cafe?) And, you can travel by train with dogs – which is impossible in the US.
Of course, in those places we also saw generally well behaved dogs. Paris has a real culture of behaving properly in public, relative to the US, whether it’s regarding your dog, your cell phone, or whatever. (It doesn’t apply when people need line up, because they have a different approach to that which to Americans looks like “shoving crowd of people”).
As for chasing people, she was a 20-something yuppie in heels. Not someone who I thought would turn around and become a danger.
hopefully she learned to pick the shit up.