Keep In Mind That The Yearly Interest On $105,000 Of Credit Card Debt At An APR Of 12% Is $12,600, Or $1050 A Month, Which, If I’m Not Mistaken, Would Get You A Sweet Rental In Many New York City Neighborhoods

Brooklyn man discovers the joys of home ownership:

Even if $260,000 was a steal by New York City standards in 2004, David Petersen found the 1,100-square-foot row house, on 18th Street near Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, stiflingly narrow at 13 feet 7 inches wide, with dim light and low ceilings. “The ceiling fan would have sliced off your head,” he recalled, and the walls and floors sloped at odd angles. The home inspector’s report jumped with exclamation points: “Bowed floors!” “Lead pipe to water supply!” “Roof in bad shape!” “Walls not plumb!”

But for an independent filmmaker with no full-time job and not much in the way of savings — living, as Mr. Petersen says artists do, “in a quaking state of fear” — home ownership was an irresistible lure.

Renovations were in order, and the man put $75,000 towards them, basically the cost of a modest bathroom:

“I started with really low expectations,” Mr. Petersen said. “I wanted level floors and a dry basement.” But soon after construction began, he received a call from his next-door neighbor Vinny DeMarinis, a retired fireman who had grown up in Mr. Petersen’s new house. “How much insurance have you got?” Mr. DeMarinis asked. “I got a hole in my wall the size of a Buick.”

And, Mr. Petersen said, “therein began my sadness.”

. . .

It turned out that the walls between the houses there were only five inches thick; banging on a wall in Mr. Petersen’s house sent tremors down the street, and especially into Mr. DeMarinis’s home. “Any work done in any house,” Mr. DeMarinis said, “it’s really a block activity.” Each time he spoke with Mr. Petersen, he would greet him, “Dave, I’m sorry I ever met you.”

There were more surprises. The foundation wasn’t bad; it was nonexistent. The previous owner, Mr. DeMarinis’s brother-in-law, had carved his own basement by digging below the house and carting out five-gallon buckets of dirt. The house was structurally unsalvageable.

With renovation costs almost tripling the cost of the house, the man resorted to creative, Enron-esque financing:

Having siphoned off some of his loan money to pay for a print of his film “Let the Church Say Amen,” about a Washington storefront church, which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004, Mr. Petersen was approaching pennilessness, with the house nowhere near completion. He applied for a $75,000 line of credit through his film company, Beaufort 9 Films. He begged money from relatives, convincing his mother to mortgage her modest Takoma Park, Md., condo and nearly causing a familial rift. “I became like an addict,” he said. “I tried to get money from everywhere.” As renovation costs climbed to $390,000, he resorted to old-fashioned indie filmmaking methods: he used his credit cards.

But ultimately the man survived, whittling down his monthly payments to the cost of one or more used cars:

In the end, it was hardly a disaster. The bank reappraised the house at $1.25 million, allowing Mr. Petersen to take out one last loan, wipe out his $105,000 of credit card debt and lower his monthly payments to the $3,000 range (he has had to work a couple of full-time freelance jobs, as a television editor, to make them). “Suddenly I have this thing called equity,” he said. “I have worth in the eyes of the bank” — and, in theory, a little more leverage when it comes to paying for his next film.

And the man lived happily ever after . . .

The Publishing World Wags Its Finger At The Little Borough That Couldn’t

Everyone has heard how impressive Brooklyn would be were it its own city — the Brooklyn Museum, a population equivalent to the fourth-largest city in the country, blah blah. So how come the borough can’t sustain a glossy magazine? The Sun rubs it in:

Just last summer, Brooklyn had a whole stack of glossy magazines devoted to chronicling the borough’s supposed renaissance. Since then, all of those magazines have run out of money, and today, the only one still standing is the Brooklyn Rail, a nonprofit that gets most of its operational budget through arts grants.

The latest to fold is the Brooklynite, a free, glossy quarterly that has called it quits after just one year due to lack of funds. Until a few months ago, the editor, Daniel Treiman, had been planning to publish a third issue, but financial woes forced him to shelve the project and instead settle for posting online the material already written.

The Brooklynite joins a graveyard full of other failed Brooklyn magazines, including NRG, the self-proclaimed “Pulse of Brooklyn,” which ceased print publication last year; BKLYN Magazine, a lifestyle book that went on indefinite hiatus last month, and Brooklyn Bridge Magazine, a general-interest periodical that folded in 2000.

Mr. Treiman disclosed the end of the Brooklynite at last weekend’s Brooklyn Blogfest, an event dedicated to the borough’s blossoming local blogosphere. His announcement had been reported first on a blog. But according to Mr. Treiman, who lost thousands of dollars with every issue, it was not blogs that sank his ship, but Brooklyn itself.

“It’s not its own metropolitan area, but at the same time it’s too big to be a neighborhood. It’s an awkward in-between stage,” he said. “Brooklyn is both subsumed within the larger New York media market and a very disparate collection of neighborhoods.”

The borough is so diverse, so fragmented, and so big, he explained, that local merchants are reluctant to buy advertising in magazines aimed at the entire area.

For all the talk about its cultural renaissance and shared identity, Brooklyn remains quite provincial.

Junius Street In February!

First someone walks every street in Manhattan, now a man sets out to jog every street in Brooklyn:

Brand new Brooklynite Gary Jarvis plans to jog all 1,599 miles of Kings County in the next two years — and document it on his Web site, Runsbrooklyn.blogspot.com.

“It’s an absolutely fantastic way to get to know the place,” said Jarvis, a former New Jersey telephone repairman who runs about 30 miles a week.

Jarvis’ mission began June 20 when he moved into his girlfriend’s Park Slope pad after 10 years in Iowa City, where he studied history at the University of Iowa.

While in Iowa, the avid marathon runner made a pact to jog the college town’s 230 miles but neglected to chronicle the undertaking and the landmarks he discovered along the way.

That won’t happen again, he said.

Each jog will culminate with Jarvis heading home and mapping his route, which he said will be chosen on a whim each morning when he heads out the door. He’ll post the routes and his observations on the Web later in the day.

“Most people just kind of stick to their own neighborhoods,” said Jarvis, who is moving into a new apartment in Greenpoint next month. “It may sound naive to New Yorkers but to me it just sounded like a great idea.”

Jarvis has already clocked about 45 miles in parts of Crown Heights, Flatbush, Greenwood Heights, Kensington, Midwood, Park Slope, and Sunset Park. He has also seen some of the borough’s best-known landmarks, such as the Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, Green-Wood Cemetery and St. Michael’s Catholic Church.

As for Brooklyn’s 4,440 acres of parkland, Jarvis has already circled the perimeter of Prospect Park and plans to duck inside the borough’s other pastures along the way.

“As long as pedestrians are allowed, I’m going to do it,” said Jarvis, who tends to jog alone. “Obviously, I won’t be jogging the BQE, the Gowanus or the Belt, but everything else is fair game.”

7/8 update: Hey, he’s already been to Junius Street! Props to the running guy!

Trying To Convince Your Body To Dance It All Down

Takeru Kobayashi bravely defended his competitive eating title against young upstart Joey Chestnut during yesterday’s hot dog eating contest at Coney Island:

Takeru Kobayashi managed to scarf down 53 3/4 frankfurters in 12 minutes to remain top dog at the annual Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest.

The 160-pound Japanese eating machine took his sixth straight crown and even managed to best his own record of 53 1/2 dogs, which he set in 2004.

“I feel great,” Kobayashi said through a translator after the stomach-turning contest.

Kobayashi’s closest competition came from 220-pound Joey Chestnut, who struggled to stuff 52 dogs down his gullet.

The two were neck-and-neck — or rather, throat-and-throat — for much of the contest, but Kobayshi’s well-honed style of dipping the dogs in liquid before letting them slide down his throat was too much for Chestnut to handle.

“I know I can do more,” said Chestnut, 22, whose game plan was to gyrate back and forth. “I’m trying to convince my body to dance it all down,” he said.

Backstory: Let’s Return The Competitive Eating Championship Where It Belongs: The Good ‘Ol Girth-Loving U. S. Of A.

For further study: International Federation of Competitive Eating.

Gerritsen Is The New Howard

Three Brooklyn teens have taken the title of “Most Racist Beach” away from Queens, making decent people forget about Howard Beach for the time being:

Three white Brooklyn teens were charged yesterday with committing a hate crime after they pummeled three black kids riding their bicycles on a Gerritsen Beach street and incited onlookers to join in the attack , police said.

The victims — Joseph Pascall and Deon Davis, both 17, and Aaron Adams, 16 — said they cycled into the neighborhood because they were lost, a police source said.

The thugs allegedly cornered the victims with their car near Florence Avenue and Celest Court on Monday at 9 p.m.

They taunted the teens with racial slurs before knocking them off their bikes with the car, and pinched and kicked them when they tried to get away, the source said.

Cops said an unknown number of people in the neighborhood saw the incident and joined in the taunting and violence.

Alessandro Cerciello, Christopher Rapuzzi and Joseph DeSimone, all 17, were charged yesterday with assault as a hate crime, gang assault as a hate crime, aggravated harassment, menacing and unlawful imprisonment, police said.