You Don’t Think I Can Wedge A Reference To “Wooly Bully” In A Story About Rent Control? Just Watch Me!

A rent control story for the ages:

For three decades, Lisa Dittmer has been on a collision course with her landlords — one involving the peculiarities of real estate and rent control in New York City — that culminated yesterday in a lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

For those unaccustomed to the range of comedy and heartbreak those factors can produce, it is worthwhile to begin with this: By law, Ms. Dittmer says, her monthly rent is $94.18, roughly the price of a pair of sneakers that will get you laughed off any basketball court in the city.

Ms. Dittmer moved into her apartment on the top floor of a three-story building in Bay Ridge in 1965, about a month before Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs released “Wooly Bully.”

“To date,” her lawyer wrote with lawyerly reserve, “plaintiff continues to occupy said apartment.”

The best reason, and perhaps the only reason, to occupy the same apartment for 41 years is rent control, a program established to address a housing crisis in postwar time, post-World War II time in particular. Under those rules, Ms. Dittmer’s rent for the apartment at 319 82nd Street was set at $80.72 a month in June 1970 and raised to $94.18 in March 1983, according to the lawsuit.

But since 1976, the lawsuit says, she has often been charged more than that. A lawyer for Ms. Dittmer, Colleen Buckley, said the amount she paid ranged from the maximum legal rent to as much as $570 monthly.

The suit contends that the landlords willfully ignored the fact that the apartment was rent controlled. The plaintiff is asking for $350,000:

Since 1976, the lawsuit says, Ms. Dittmer has been overcharged, in total, $84,465.80, which works out to $237.93 a month.

In the lawsuit, Ms. Dittmer, who did not return calls seeking comment, is seeking $253,397.40, or three times the total overpayment, plus lawyers’ fees and interest, for a round total of $350,000.

Today I Will Set Out To Offend As Many People As I Can

The Brooklyn Paper’s Gersh Kuntzman visits the banned-in-Brooklyn Brooklyn College year-end art show:

So this is what all the fuss was about? That art show that got banned by the Parks Department because it was “inappropriate” for children and veterans opened late last week in DUMBO — and I was first on line.

Anything inappropriate for kids and killers — that’s good enough for me.

Real nice, Gersh! Actually, they’re not all killers — just the ones with the little star stickers affixed to their football helmets (one for each “kill” — yee haw).

But that’s not the worst of the hyperbole:

But the real good news is that there are plenty of pieces that rise to the level of good old dirty art.

Take the masturbating hand sculpture that Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Julius Spiegel called “inappropriate.” Yes, it is a sculpture of a hand gripping a penis. Yes, the penis is erect. But the backlit sculpture, like the three others in Augusto Marin’s series, is covered in a gauzy cloth that makes it resemble a religious icon like the Shroud of Turin. Only a cultural boor (paging Herr Spiegel?) could fail to see the quality of the work or ignore the point Marin is trying to make about the perpetual clash between the “sacred” and the “profane.”

Emphasis added because I’m pretty sure Spiegel’s family survived the Holocaust.

Real nice, Gersh!

(The best thing about the Brooklyn Paper is its over-the-top New-York-Post-meets-college-newspaper tone. And sometimes the worst thing about the Brooklyn Paper is its over-the-top New-York-Post-meets-college-newspaper tone.)

He’s A Wild And Crazy Guy!

A Long Island man who was late for his . . . ah, just let the Post pick up this wild and crazy tale:

[Roman Walkowiak’s] American adventure began Wednesday morning.

He was scheduled to take his citizenship test at 8 a.m. at the Brooklyn federal courthouse.

After circling the block for more than an hour, he parked illegally on the plaza behind Borough Hall, figuring he’d rather chance the ticket than miss his appointment.

After walking out of the courthouse proudly holding his citizenship certificate, Walkowiak was greeted with a rare gift from the NYPD: a ticketless car.

But then things began to go wrong.

Instead of backing onto Court Street the way he’d come, Walkowiak, for whatever reason, decided to drive through the plaza, directly to Adams Street.

Frightened passers-by ran screaming as the red Volkswagen made its way through the crowd.

In the confusion, Walkowiak somehow missed the fact that he was headed straight for a set of about seven stairs.

When his car suddenly lurched down the first step, he just kept going. Until his car bottomed out and refused to budge.

Exhibiting the never-say-die American spirit, he didn’t give up. As shocked onlookers watched, Walkowiak flipped his car into reverse and tried to back up the steps.

The maneuver only managed to wedge the car more firmly into place.

Nearby court officers quickly pulled Walkowiak from his car and demanded to know if he was drunk.

“No, but I’m on my way to get drunk because I just became a U.S. citizen!” he said.

The officers slapped a pair of handcuffs on Walkowiak, a divorced father of a son, and dragged him right back to the courthouse.

The officers called cops, who charged him on the spot with disorderly conduct, issued a desk appearance ticket with a $300 fine, and let him go.

“I was very happy to become a citizen,” he said. “And then all sorts of crazy stuff happened.”

Celebration!

A Brooklyn-Queens Day remembrance in the Queens Ledger:

I suppose the single most delightful thing about Brooklyn Queens Day was that it was a day off from school for no apparent reason. Grownups had to work and therefore couldn’t schedule any vacation-like activities. Unlike Christmas or Thanksgiving, there were no holiday curricula, no commercials, no traditions to uphold and no family events to attend. It came in June, during the best weather and longest days. The kicker was that no one else had this day off. You could actually go to Manhattan and see to it that your Manhattan friends, if you had any, would look enviously at you from inside their prisons.

. . .

BQ Day was marvelously uncontroversial. There are no records of Bronx people protesting the exclusion of their borough. A review of Brooklyn Eagle letters to the editor from the early 20th century reveals that some people did get upset when the schools opened one year, but who can blame them?

Another lovely thing about Brooklyn Queens Day was the lack of information. We never asked, and were never told, what it was about.

Bay Ridge Hummer May Be Toadfish

A new theory emerges in the continuing mystery of the Bay Ridge Hum — a spawning fish may cause it, the New York Sun reports:

HMMMM. This mysterious sound in the waters off Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, has baffled residents for months. A low pitched vibration known simply as the “Bay Ridge Hum” heard near the shore next to the Verrazano Bridge has left some locals not only scratching their heads in frustration but deprived of sleep, too.

While several hypotheses as to the cause — passing trains, treatment plants, even UFOs — have been floated, so to speak, one new hunch is that fish may cause it.

. . .

. . . In the early 1980s a mysterious humming noise kept residents of Sausalito, Calif., near the Golden Gate Bridge, hiding their heads under their pillows for sleepless nights during the summer.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a scientific investigation was begun, resulting in a search assisted by an acoustics consulting company. Hydrophonic recordings were taken and spectrum analysis eliminated machinery as the source of the humming.

Finally, in August 1985, fish biologists concluded the sound was coming from noisy humming male toadfish.

Could the toadfish also be humming in Bay Ridge? “It is possible that it could be this fish,” said a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University, Andrew Bass. He said believes the sound could be coming from an east coast version of the underwater melody-maker called “Opsanus Tau,” the oyster toadfish.

The oyster toadfish has been described as “homely” for its large protruding eyes, broad mouth, and flesh-like whiskers surrounding a short snout. To attract a mate, it produces a vocalization — some call it a “foghorn” sound — to attract females during spawning.

Sausalito, Calif., and Bay Ridge are also both located near large bridges that some residents believe may further amplify the noise.

The toadfish’s spawning season extends from April to October, which corresponds to the time when residents in Bay Ridge have reported hearing the mysterious noise. The male locates a private nesting area often using old tin cans or decayed wood lying on the bay bottom and then calls out in his low, mournful “foghorn” to spawning females. A female swims into the nest and lays large, adhesive eggs upside-down in the nest, then swims away.

A few who have heard the so-called “Bay Ridge Hum” listened to a recording of the Oyster Toadfish prepared by Mr. Bass and said they believed it was the same noise.

Ms. [Concetta] Butera said, “Yes, I would say that this was the noise. I am hearing those fish. I am hearing thousands of them.”

Ms. [Anissa] Malloy listened to the recording and concurred, “I think the fish are making the noise.”

Ms. [Josephine] Beckmann said she also plans on notifying the DEP about the new theory. In the near future Mr. Bass plans on recording the sound himself and testing it for authenticity.