BROWNSTONE VOYEUR: Life in a Stylish Shoebox in Boerum Hill

BROWNSTONE VOYEUR is a joint project of casaCARA and Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn.

THIS APARTMENT IS REALLY SMALL. If you dance like a dervish, I wouldn’t recommend doing it in Jane Rosenbaum’s apartment.

Just two rooms totaling 375 square feet in a pre-war State Street rental building, it’s nevertheless got a ton of charm and some good DIY ideas, yours for the copying. Such as:

• Limited color palette — white and periwinkle blue – keeps the tiny space from looking too busy. (This takes discipline! I intended to use only blue and white in my Springs cottage, but keep bringing in things that are red, brown, green, orange…)
• Secondhand furnishings were all painted periwinkle to unify them.
• Round table folds, below, to store against a wall. Open, it seats six for dinner.

• There’s a Murphy bed, below, behind a white curtain in the living room (and you thought they were only in Marx Brothers movies!)

• Salvaged chandelier in the living room is painted white and used with candles. Bookshelf up high makes use of every inch.

Moving on to the only other room, the kitchen:

• Galvanized buckets organize utensils, below.

• The cabinets are painted with chalkboard paint; Jane uses them to display the menu for dinner parties.

Jane is an interior designer — her website is here, in case you missed it up top;-) She worked previously for Wolfman-Gold, the NYC housewares company known for its all-white look, and in display design at Henri Bendel in Ohio.

She ran this ad recently on the Boerum Hill listserv:

Don’t like the way a room looks? Change it now! Living Room, Bedrooms, Dining Room, Hall and Kitchen Spruce Ups include: paint colors, window treatments, rugs, accessories, fabric, lighting, and rearranging of furniture, if necessary. Dining Rooms, Halls and Kitchens: $300 each. Living Rooms and Bedrooms: $375 each. Bathrooms: $150-$275 www.janeinteriorsnyc.com

A Landlady’s Woes

LEST YOU THINK it’s all done with smoke and mirrors, let me re-cap some of the things I’ve had to deal with in the past two months as the owner of four very old houses (two in Brooklyn, two in Philly) and a landlady with 10 rental units:

• Finding tenants for a very special four-story, 6 bedroom townhouse in Cobble Hill. (Actually, they found me, via this blog.)
• Painting the interior of that house ($6,000), removing several years’ growth of ivy from the back wall ($1,400), and otherwise getting the place spiffed up and ready for the incoming family.
• A punch list of additional repairs with which my new tenants very politely presented me, requiring the services of plumbers, appliance guys, and a handyman.
• A late-night call from tenants in Boerum Hill who’d blown a fuse while trying to air-condition and microwave at the same time. (Yes, a fuse – the only apartment in the building that doesn’t have circuit breakers.)
• Next door neighbors in Boerum Hill who are convinced their basement floods in heavy rain because of the placement of my drain pipe. (Unresolved.)
• A notice from the City of Philadelphia telling me of a leak in the water main from the street in front of my South Kensington house to the building’s water meters. Cost of repair, which is my responsibility (as it would be in New York): $2,800.
• Vacancy in rear unit of the South Kensington double-trinity house, but not for long: it’s on the verge of being rented, all things being equal, to someone who lived in that very unit years ago, when the building was owned by the woman who sold it to me. He saw my listing on Craigslist, recognized it immediately, and is excited about moving back to the same space, renovated and under more responsive management.
• Persistent roof leak at my 1810 Queen Village building, now reaching down past the top floor apartment to the apartment on the floor below. Tenants tired of catching rainwater in pots. $4,000 estimate from the roofer.

It seems that a lot of old-house maintenance issues occur in high summer and the dead of winter, when extreme weather causes flooding, freezing, and so on.

Then there are the problems brought about by extreme economic conditions, or perceived such conditions. The latest doozy is tenants in Brooklyn asking for a 20% rent reduction in mid-lease because they’ve heard there’s been a softening of the rental market. (Would I ask tenants for a rent hike in mid-lease because of a bullish rental market? I don’t think so!) No doubt in some parts of town there’s a glut of product: mostly unsold, newly built condos now being marketed as rentals. There’s no glut of unique 4 BR brownstone duplexes.

I said no.

Went to See the Gypsy: Brooklyn’s Storefront Psychics

4th Avenue near Dean

HAS ANYONE ELSE NOTICED the proliferation of storefront fortune-tellers in downtown Brooklyn? They’re popping up like the acupuncturists and qi gong studios of a few years ago (that seem to have stayed in business, mysteriously). On every other street, it seems, there are neon signs reading “CRYSTAL ENERGY” in 2nd story windows and buildings in unlikely locations emblazoned “PSYCHIC” in huge red letters.

Naturally this has aroused my curiosity. First, how do they pay the rent? Fortunes at $5 a pop take a long time to add up. What kind of scam are they? Money-laundering operations of some sort? Does anyone seriously patronize these places for “answers to all questions on Advice, Love, Money, and More!”? Are they a sign of recession desperation, perhaps?

Second, are they pure, utter bullshit, or might there possibly be something to it? I’m not a hard-core skeptic in these matters. For a while in the ’80s, I was a frequent client of Pia’s, a skilled (so I thought) tarot card reader at the Gypsy Tea Kettle near Bloomingdale’s, whose readings seemed deeply insightful at the time.

So the other night around 8PM, when I was in Brooklyn to meet and greet my new Cobble Hill tenants, I knocked on the door of one of these storefronts — the one at 60 Fourth Avenue, near Dean Street in Boerum Hill (above).

Ann looked the part, in a house dress with hair flying. Her red-painted anteroom is three feet wide; through a door, I could see small children running around in a room with a TV.

She seemed surprised to have a customer. I was determined to give her nothing to go on beyond my first name and date of birth, which she requested. I didn’t ask any questions, just to tell me what she ’saw.’

She gave me a penetrating stare. No cards, no crystals. For $5, she said, she would tell me two things about myself. As it turned out, I got three, and the news wasn’t so good:

• My energy, she said, was weak. True, I was kind of wiped after three days of running around the city. Also, it was a hot, humid night, and my eye makeup had smudged.
• Regarding my ‘direction in life’ (her words), Ann told me I was taking “two steps forward, three steps back.”
• My “’sharkras’ are disconnected.” Which ones? I wanted to know. “Could be any of them,” Ann replied.

In order to find out more, she said, she’d have to “do some research.” That would cost $75. I declined to pursue it. It was all very soft-sell. She seemed to want to get back to her grandchildren. I asked her where she was from. Romania, she said, “but I was born and raised here.” She didn’t have an accent.

I took a shower, got a good night’s rest, and am glad to report that Ann’s ‘reading’ was, indeed, utter bullshit. My energy is great, my chakras are humming, and for every three steps forward, I take only two back.

Atlantic Avenue near Bond