Archive | Bay Ridge RSS feed for this section

Conveniently Inconvenient

1 May

May 1, 2021

Dear readers, Mr. and Mrs. Blog are once again looking for a place to live. For reasons I prefer to keep to myself, our old place was no longer meeting the needs of a pair of globetrotting iconoclasts such as ourselves (and our cat.)

(On a completely unrelated note, if anyone would be interested in buying a slightly singed and smoke damaged sofa, or some only partially burnt pants, drop me a note. Ha ha, I kid because it’s true.)

Well, as part of my brilliant plan to see every lousy house in Brooklyn, a plan which I pinky-swear is not at all motivated by my lack of money but only motivated by sense of ironic humor, I toured a home which, after some long thought and soul-searching, I declared was a house that people only move out of, not into.

But that’s not to say that it didn’t make me think. Below is a rough sketch of the layout of the last apartment I saw. It isn’t to scale, but it is close, and I did not exaggerate it one bit.

BEHOLD!

You are reading that correctly. The bathroom is in the kitchen, directly between the stove and the dining room table.

Now, if you spend as much time in the bathroom as I do my cat does, you can see the obvious convenience.

On the other hand, without being too graphic, there are some, um, “obvious drawbacks” to having the toilet three feet from your breakfast burrito. And speaking as someone who hosts lavish dinner parties, it can be unseemly when the Archbishop excuses himself from the Vichyssoise and the rest of the party can clearly hear his “business affairs.” Let alone smell them.

This is not the first time I have seen an apartment where the bathroom is uncomfortably close to the kitchen, but this is the first time the bathroom has actually been in the kitchen.

(Meanwhile, I have a singed loveseat to go with the burnt sofa, and there is a charred sport coat with most of the lapels still intact that matches the only partially burnt pants. I’ll toss in some waterlogged sneakers too.)

.

Fine Dining on the Subway

1 Jun

June 1, 2018

Ah, the subway during rush hour. The crowds, the pushing and shoving, the smells, the body odor, the homeless, the rats, the unidentifiable flecks floating in the air. Doesn’t it make you hungry?

Not me.

I really don’t know how people do it but I see it every day. Just yesterday a woman was sitting in a seat, crowded on all sides, with a series of plastic bags open on her lap and the dirty floor between her feet and from them she was taking the makings of tortillas, which she made and ate while the odor of the homeless guy across from her wafted through the air like mustard gas in World War One. 

But what is even more inconceivable to me, yet I see it more than a few times each week, is the bizarre phenomenon of people taking home pizza on the subway. 

Picture it. Rush hour. Crowds. People pressed together. And someone forces their way on the train carrying a large box that has to be held straight out and flat, taking up the room of two other people. It pokes the already crowded commuters in their backs and gets shoved and wrestled. This happens. I see it a lot. A guy gets on at Union Square in Manhattan and takes a pizza all the way home, 45 minutes, to Bay Parkway. Of course by the time he gets it home it’ll be cold, probably squashed, and it’ll have been traveling through the subway where the air has more rat particles per square inch than an actual rat. Appetizing! And worse, the part of Brooklyn he traveled to with the pizza has more pizzerias than you can shake stick at. There are a dozen within walking distance of my house, no lie. Why not wait until you get home and order a pizza? Fresh and hot! And untainted by the body odor of underground denizens.

So even assuming the pizza from Union Square is the greatest pizza in the known world, after being shaken and crushed on the train, and after getting cold in an hour of travel, and after being exposed to the foul air underground, how good is that pizza going to taste?

Is it worth it?

 

.

 

 

%d bloggers like this: