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Above: The Brooklyn Bridge. It wasn't until several days after I took this photo that I noticed that all the bridges and tunnels in New York have "No Cameras" signs after 9/11. In the aftermath of the terrorist attack, investigators had found video footage of the Twin Towers on cameras owned by the hijackers. Other footage of the Mall of America and other American icons were also found on videotape. Knowing this, the ban presumably exists to avoid making it easy for terrorists to obtain video footage of structures that could later be studied to identify effective points for planting explosives. Here's the problem that Mayor Bloomberg faces though. These landmarks are among the most visually documented public structures in the world. A search on Google for "footage of brooklyn bridge" turned up this link to a stock footage company's website (screenshot below) as the first result.
For the terrorist on a budget, there's even a DVD with footage galore of the Brooklyn Bridge produced by the History Channel, for just $15.53! As no one has kicked my door down since I looked at the page on the website, I'm calling it a serious security loophole and a great example of post 9/11 hysteria. "No Cameras"? No cameras needed! The Apartment Hunt: Day One It didn't seem that hard. On the first day of looking for an apartment in New York City, I found a likely candidate on Craigslist, the geographically-organised, free classified ad website. A 1,000 square foot, 1-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, with hardwood floors, in a pre-War elevator building, just off the south east corner of Prospect Park. And it was within the budget, at $950. I went and looked at it. I loved it. The next day I applied, passed the credit and rental history checks, and the following day I packed up everything I owned into the Monkey Bus, and headed for the rental office in Brooklyn to sign the lease. After a couple of days running around in the summer heat to ensure I had the bankers' checks for the correct amount, and that I had collected all the needed financial info, I was gagging for that dotted line.
I wasn't so concerned about location. Many people in New York are obsessed with locations in Manhattan as close to downtown and midtown as possible, but that is really only important if you work there every day, as the city is accessible from all areas at all times by subway, and the ride is free library time. With the kind of budget I had, Brooklyn was the best option, as $1,000 in Manhattan would limit you to a rat cage or an apartment near the projects.
The entrance to the Prospect Park apartment building was impressive, with turrets and a relatively recent tuckpointing job on the brickwork.
The apartment was even better: 1,000 square feet of hardwood flooring; 12-foot-high ceilings; spacious, clean, and recently painted rooms; a massive eat-in kitchen; trees visible through every one of the windows that faced on three sides of the building; and — the icing on the cake — a fire escape outside the bedroom window to hang out on in true New York style. Move-In Day The Monkey Bus was about to be reloaded with the cargo that had been brought into the temporary apartment for security reasons. The offloading had happened on the first day Duncan and I arrived in Harlem.
Computers, cameras, musical instruments, financial records, and life memorabilia were all carried out on what was the hottest day of the year and Tetrised it all back in as I'd had to do on the day I left Minnesota. The Monkey Bus had been overheating any time there was an extended traffic jam in the 100 degree heat, so I was keen to get the journey to Brooklyn over and done with. At the real estate office, Mrs. Medina the owner wasn't there but the lease was waiting, ready to sign. I began to read the document, but stopped almost immediately at one of the points: NO PETS. "This must be a mistake," I said to the employee there, "I asked Hector (who I spoke to when I first asked about the house) and he said the dog was fine. Also, on the application form that I filled in, in the space where it says 'What kind of pets do you have?', I wrote 'One eleven pound dog.'" "I'll ring Mrs. Medina and ask," said the employee. She explained the situation on the phone to Mrs. Medina, and then handed the phone to me to talk to her. "NO PETS!" she shrieked, "None of our properties allow pets!" I was speechless for at least a whole five seconds. "I asked Hector verbally if a dog was okay," I reminded her, "I wrote it on the application form that you read and processed. And now I'm here at your office, having loaded up my van with everything I own, having driven from Harlem on the hottest day of the year, with $1,900 in bankers' checks made out to your company." "NO PETS! You can give your dog to a friend or the RSPCA and take the apartment, otherwise you can't have the apartment." "But this is your mistake, not mine. I have nowhere to live. You need to do something." She did something alright. She terminated the call and hung up on me. After a few more conversations with Hector and other staff, it was clear that the evil bitch wasn't budging. I was totally and completely fucked, worn out, with nowhere to live, and everything I owned packed into a bus that I couldn't even drive back to the temporary apartment for several hours as it might die on the FDR Expressway. Meanwhile, Maysoon and a friend of hers were fifteen blocks away at the new apartment, already moving the first of my stuff upstairs. I made the bad news call and, after the inevitable disbelief and promises of deferred explanation, we arranged to meet at the northeast corner of Prospect Park. I was having serious trouble driving, what with my head exploding and all. I was so distracted that it was getting dangerous to be on the road, so I pulled over the moment I saw Maysoon's car, even though the parking space wasn't legal, and got out the van with the Roo dog. It wasn't a pretty moment and it was about to get uglier. After a couple of minutes, a parking space opened up nearby, and I rushed into the van. At this point, I had to make the van as low a blip as possible on my rapidly fritzing internal radar, so that I could forget it and walk away for a couple of hours. The drive from Harlem to Brooklyn had heated the van up, the beating sun was not giving it any space to cool down any, and I was in no position to get back into NYC traffic until I'd had time to calm down. As I approached the space, 20 feet away, a woman quickly pulled over from one of the four lanes, and stopped right in front of the space, to parallel park. At this point, with no other option than driving on into a main intersection — and I wasn't about to launch myself into rush hour traffic — I drove hood-first behind her car into the space, staying in it and shaking my head until she got the message that Brooklyn's sizzling streets would freeze over before I let her park there. It was at this point, Maysoon reported later, that she thought that New York had ruined me forever. While I certainly had crossed over to the Dark Side, it was a genuine emergency, as I wasn't in any state to drive. Last time I felt like this was just after I found out I was getting divorced for my birthday earlier this year. The weekend after that news, while on a roadtrip, I almost drove head-on at over 100 mph into an oncoming car, as both vehicles were traveling at 55 miles an hour. When I noticed the other car, who couldn't see me due to a low sunset behind me, I had about two seconds before impact. As my writing this story means that I'm obviously still here, I'd like to take a moment to thank id Software for Quake and Quake II. Never again will I describe those few heady years of online gaming as "misspent". Now I understand to a new level why the US Marines train in part with video games. The reflexes transfer from the virtual to the physical world just fine. Back in Brooklyn, after a tense and terse "what happened?" conversation with Maysoon, who had to go to an appointment, I walked away from the scene to decompress with Roo the Dog in Prospect Park. This helped bring me back from the brink. After an hour or two chilling out to avoid rush hour, I headed back to the van, crossed back over the Brooklyn Bridge, and limped back along the FDR expressway up the east side of Manhattan before crossing Central Park to Harlem on the Upper West Side, where the Monkey Bus promptly overheated and squirted coolent just as I pulled into a parking space. Even at 8:00pm it was still pretty close to 100°F for the inevitable unloading. It had indeed been far, far too easy, finding an apartment in New York City.
How preventing an 11-pound dog from moving into an apartment building was worth fucking over someone who had done nothing wrong is beyond me. If the issue was as Hector claimed, that if she let one dog in she "would have to let everyone in the apartment have pets", a change which would increase her insurance liability, she wasn't thinking very clearly. The answer is to put a poundage limit on residents' dogs as many apartments do in New York. Miniature pinschers aren't pit bulls. They're cat dogs. May civilisation knock on Mrs. Medina's door one day. Although I didn't know it at the time, the delay that losing this apartment resulted in would later cost me a $7,000 website contract from a client who ran out of time waiting for me to settle and be able to work again. Time to file another complaint with the Better Business Bureau to at least get the $150 back. This probably is a better option than the extremely tempting Thelma & Louise scenario in which Roo the Dog and I don kamikaze headbands and drive the mass-empowered Monkey Bus through the front window into Mrs. Medina's office, screaming "Do you allow pets in here?!!" more from this section  • A letter to Washington Mutual and their debt collecting agency, IC System (Thursday, May 15th, 2008)  • Contact from Suha Arafat (Friday, March 21st, 2008) • Open Letter to Women Considering Using Internet Dating Sites (Sunday, July 9th, 2006) |
      
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