Damn You Craig’s List, How You Get My Hopes Up

First the literal hole in the wall ($35 a month), now a tree house for $150 a month:

Williamsburg sculptor Adam Dougherty put his South Fifth St. backyard tree house up for rent as a gag — but learned that in Brooklyn’s sky-high real estate market, it was no joke.

Since last Saturday, the Craigslist.com posting has drawn more than 30 prospective buyers, renters and vacationers — even though Dougherty never had any intention of branching out into property transactions.

“I thought people would immediately take this as a joke, that it would get flagged,” said Dougherty, 29. “But the sincerity of some of these people!”

“I can’t blame ’em,” he added. “I mean, $150 for a place to stay in New York? That sounds like a dream.”

It was no dream to Gabriel, a “young artist currently sleeping in my van.”

“I’d be up for a summer of sleeping outdoors,” he e-mailed Dougherty.

Then there was Ryan, who figured out there probably wasn’t any running water in the tree house and typed this question: “If I need to, can I shower at your house?”

Although the ad said only “$150 – Tree House,” most who responded assumed the dollar figure was either for a weekend stay or the actual sale price, Dougherty said.

The year-old pinewood triangular house hovers 23 feet over Brooklyn, and fits up to 17 people at once, he said.

The 12-by-12-by-10-foot shelter is empty, except for a light hooked up to a 23-foot extension cord that runs down to his apartment.

Your Doubt Is Shedding All Over Me And It’s Making My Eyes Water

The Daily News sheds doubt on the story (about which doubt was earlier shed) that one “homeless drunkard” could have set the fire that destroyed all those historic buildings (and severely singed a cat):

The Polish immigrant accused of igniting the inferno that devoured historic warehouses on the Brooklyn waterfront may have a solid alibi.
Leszek Kuczera was feeding horses and cleaning out a campground 85 miles away in upstate New York when the Greenpoint Terminal Market went up in flames May 2, the contractor who hired him told the Daily News yesterday.

“It would have been impossible for him to have started that fire because he was here, working for me,” said Zbigniew Sarna of Pond Eddy, N.Y. “I hired him a couple days after Easter and he lived in my home until I brought him back to Greenpoint on May 11. I wanted him to stay because he was a good worker.”

Sarna’s claim casts doubt on the case against Kuczera, who confessed on videotape to accidentally starting the city’s biggest blaze since 9/11, according to police. Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne declined to comment about the development but said detectives had been dispatched to Pond Eddy to check out Sarna’s story.

Kuczera, 59, was indicted Monday on charges of reckless endangerment, burglary and arson. He is being held on Rikers Island and faces seven years in prison.

Tom Cleary of the Legal Aid Society said it too will check out Kuczera’s alibi. “If it’s strong enough, we’ll try to get him released,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Polish Consulate wants to know whether the interpreter the NYPD provided for Kuczera — who speaks hardly any English despite having lived in New York for 15 years — understood what the suspect was saying.

Kuczera told cops he and another man were trying to burn insulation off stolen copper wire when they accidentally started the fire, police said. But Kuczera’s wife, who says the horrors her husband witnessed working at Ground Zero after 9/11 turned him into a homeless drunkard, said, “We never believed he started this fire.”

“How can a person be accused of such a thing without knowing the whole story?” Hanna Kuczera, who lives in Lublin, Poland, asked the Dziennik Wschodni newspaper.

I Like Nice Things, Or The Quietest Neighbor (Excepting A Cemetery, That Is) Is A Vacant Lot

First chowder, now condos (.pdf):

All Joe Chan wanted to do was bring a “Manhattan-style” condo tower to a run-down block in Boerum Hill.

And then all hell broke loose.

More than two-dozen people gathered recently in front of a vacant weed-infested lot owned by Chan. The purpose: to stop Chan’s 11-story tower after he likened its aesthetics to that of the evil island on Brooklyn’s western front.

“Manhattan-style,” he had called it.

Them’s fightin’ words in Boerum Hill.

“We don’t want what he has proposed,” explained protest organizer Deborah Kaufmann, who lives next door to Chan’s empty lot, formerly an auto garage. She believes his 11-story “tower” will spoil she calls the neighborhood’s “brownstone” look — though she readily
admits that her four-story home, 100 yards from the 14-story Gowanus Street Houses on Hoyt Street, is a regular old house and not one of the storied 19th century models.

“Manhattan is a borough full of very tall buildings and the canyons they create. Brooklyn is a borough of brownstones and similarly sized buildings,” explained Lydia Denworth, president of the council. “Manhattan has been built one way and Brooklyn another. We like the way Brooklyn’s been built and we want to keep it that way.”

Ironically, Chan believes he’s doing the Baltic Street homeowners a favor by turning the broken-concrete lot into a glossy new tower. To him, Manhattan equals wealth and wealth equals “nice” — and who doesn’t want that?

“I don’t know why [the neighbors] don’t want a nice building, they’d rather have an empty lot with rats,” Chan told The Brooklyn Papers, adding that he had never faced such opposition in Queens or Manhattan.

The idea that Manhattan would oppose that which is “Manhattan style” seems odd, but no matter.

Then there’s this from a Manhattan-style apologist:

“I don’t agree, but towers aren’t perceived as good neighbors anymore,” said Robert Scarano, a prolific architect whose seven-story South Slope tower has been caught in limbo since the stricter zoning became law last year.

Scarano isn’t siding with his critics, but merely showing that he’s another Manhattan-style architect who is willing to listen.

To a point.

“I’d like to hear the community opposition,” he told The Brooklyn Papers, “if [someone] tried to build the Williamsburgh Bank Building tower today.”

He’s got a point there, you know. The Williamsburgh Bank Building is pretty ridiculous . . .

We’d Hold You In Higher Esteem If You Only Did What We Asked

Just in time for today’s big meeting, the Times finds the space to consider the weird racial battle underway in Congressional District 11, snagging this howler:

Karim Camara, a Brooklyn minister who succeeded Mr. Norman in the State Assembly, said that Mr. Yassky, rather than running himself, would have “earned a place of higher esteem if he had agreed to be supportive of a black candidate.”

Rough Crowd 1984, Rough Crowd 2006

Long ago, Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood succeeded in permanently closing a pool facility that had become a dilapidated magnet for a rough crowd. This summer that same pool will be used for rock concerts in order to raise awareness and money for its hopeful reopening:

A run-down public swimming pool that’s been empty for more than 20 years is making a splash again this summer — as a concert venue to help spur interest in its renovation.

The McCarren Pool opened in Greenpoint in 1936 and was closed in 1984 after the community board complained it had become a nuisance.

Over the next two decades, it became a target for graffiti vandals.

Last September, the Parks Department allowed the outdoor pool to reopen as a dance-performance space in an effort to call attention to the venue — and this summer, several concerts produced by Live Nation will hopefully do the same, said Parks Department spokesman Philip Abramson.

There’s no budget money for the pool’s renovation, estimated at more than $40 million, and having popular bands play there is a good way to raise funds, Abramson said.

But Phyllis Yampolsky, head of a group looking to revamp the pool and its grounds into a “multi-use, all-year-round facility,” doesn’t think so.

She said the community does not need giant rock concerts.

See also: McCarren Pool.