Easter in Sunset Park

452 55th Street, Brooklyn NY

Back in Brooklyn the next day, we began our tour with dim sum in Sunset Park. We first went to this house and encountered a realtor with the phone headset in his ear standing next to the requisite balloons signaling the open house. It seemed like an OK property, nice and big, with no immigrants illegally living in the nooks and crannies. However, when we went to the first floor/sub basement duplex, and spoke to the tenants, they told us that it was freezing in the winter, and they never get enough heat. They also told us that in November they moved in and signed a 2 year lease. We asked Tomas, the Realtor about this and he claimed that the owner said there is no lease on any of the tenants. It felt like the owner wanted out of this property so he just ripped up the leases, therefore he "doesn't have the leases" is what it sounded like. Also when we went into the sub basement, I noticed that a major supporting I-beam had been cut out (about 6 feet) to make room for the staircase they had added to create a basement living space. Due to this, the upper floors were not level in some areas, creating the sea sick effect found in many parts of Windsor Terrace.




Here is the non-heat providing dinosaur of a furnace that we found in the basement.


















So we moved on and things began looking up. We even found great spring time blocks to cheer us up a bit. Did the Easter Bunny explode?






The next house was a winner.
421 42nd Street, Sunset Park

Last week, I called about this house and the Realtor named Leif gave me the lowdown BUT told me that he had to go out of town suddenly since they are adopting a baby from Russia, and so he would be out of town for 2 weeks. However, I could call the owner and set up an appointment with her. He called me on Saturday and again on Sunday from Russia to make sure all was as planed and if I had any questions to call him. This is a dedicated worker, which I liked very much.A view of the back "yard" it is mostly concrete so there is no lawn to be mowed. There are rose bushes and some type of Japanese bushes planted in the perimeter. Also a grape vine arbor for shade, and a little plot of dirt for the herb garden.

Two views of the kitchen. It is on the ground level/ subterranean, but huge. Maybe too huge but it has all the appliances and most of the time at parties, people congregate in the kitchen anyway. The only thing Chaim didn't like was that the stove did not vent outside.

The owner's bedroom

The main staircase to the upstairs rental apartment

Living room

This is the front of the house. It is stretched out in this photo, so it's not this wide but you can get the idea.


We are going back to it this coming weekend with a friend to look at it again.

the Snakehead Dorm

43-02 56th Street, Woodside Queens

From the outside, this 2 family brick semi-attached house looked ok. We had walked passed it a few weeks ago and wondered about it. We went to an open house last weekend and found out that it has been chopped up in to tiny rooms, so that in the basement there must have been at least 10-15 people living there. When you stepped into the dimly lit drab, filthy atmosphere of the basement, it was as though we had stepped into a third world country. A Chinese man sat in the midst of this filth smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper. On the first floor, the owner's daughter was wearing pajama's (it was 3:30pm) eating cereal. That apartment was in a little better condition in that it had not been rented out to 10 people, but not by much.
Now mind you, this was an open house. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO FIX UP, OR AT LEAST CLEAN YOUR HOUSE FOR AN OPEN HOUSE!!!!!!!! The house had not seen a drop of cleaning fluid in years. The realtor showing the property was from Mongolia with a Japanese name: Arashi Ayushin.
As he toured us around the place, he said- "The Indians split up this floor into 3 apartments and rent it for a lot of money." We told him: "Do we look Indian to you? and anyway we don't want to be slumlords!"
After we left the house, I started to cry. It was the most depressing thing I'd seen during the months of house hunting. I've read about the status of Chinese immigrants, but never had I come so close to the reality of their situation.

identity crisis- the new name plan

A friend of mine asked me today if I had officially changed my last name.

As of today I still have two identities:

The DMV never took my old license back when I applied for the new one.
The Social Security people now have my new name, so all of my paychecks made out to M. Watanabe are now collecting my pension under the name Spiller.
My passport and credit cards, school ID all still have my old name.
It is very difficult to change names in the middle of the school year, so my new name plan is to begin totally anew at the beginning of September.
Plus the deed to my apartment is still under Watanabe, and I don't want to add more paperwork to that whole process anymore than there needs to be.

I sold my first book art/ sculpture piece today. When I dropped it off at the collectors house this morning, one of his assistants introduced herself to me and said that she knows me from my name.

"really? Micki Spiller? or Micki Watanabe?, because I just changed my name."

"Spiller is the name think I know. I used to work at Granary Book Press and didn't you do a project with them?"

"no but I would love to do an edition with them...Before I decided to change my name, we Googled 'Micki Spiller' and it came up clean, so there can't be another Micki Spiller!"

She looks at the card on the table, a Franklin Furnace Benefit invitation that I've just brought over.

"Hey isn't there a Hillary Spiller who does the fund raising at the Furnace?"

"No, but there is a Harley Spiller, who I'm married to who works there."

"Does he write books on Matisse?"

"no I believe that's Hilary Spurling..."

Now, I'm more than ever confused, and no matter what name one has, a person will forever be confused with another who is known for doing something totally different from what they do. It doesn't matter whether its' Spiller or Watanabe, I shall be confused with another person at some time or another.

Hymie House update

Chaim found this add in the AM NY paper yesterday. Apparently Hector, the owner/seller for the house on 83rd street in Jackson Heights has already raised the price of his house $5500 since last week when he rejected our offer.

And after much thought and discussion, we decided that we don't want it anyway!

Our New Offer

We went back to the house on 83rd Street today with Joe Taco, to get an inspection, to make sure that there was no asbestos or mold or termites or water leaks or gas leaks or other leaks and clogs. He gave it a pretty good bill of health. Of course with a house that's 80 years old, there are always things to be done. New garage door, making a door from the house to the garage, installing the exhaust fan back into the kitchen, moving the dryer and the gas line...

Here's Chaim in front of the house with the realtor Jaime. (Hymie)

We spent an hour or so there and afterward went to Unidentified Flying Chicken for lunch to discuss our next move. It began to rain, and the place was BYOB, so we sat at the lone window table, looking out onto Roosevelt Avenue eating the most delicious Korean fried chicken and drinking our Negra Modelos as we hashed out the numbers.

After number crunching, going back and fourth between the different percentages, and a little bit of numerology, we came up with a number we both agreed on, and called Jaime. He said that the offer should be in writing, so we went back to his office on Northern Blvd. After another hour in his office signing papers, Jaime offered to drive us to the subway. On the way there we passed pio pio Michelle Beaudoin's favorite place, and Jaime couldn't stop saying how great the food is there. We decided that from now on, the good realtors love pio pio chicken.

So now we have an offer on the table. Let the games begin!


some more pictures of the house:

90% of the job is just showing up on time.

Real Estate Road Kill
We had an appointment to see a house on Ithaca Street in Elmhurst/Jackson Heights on Sunday. We were supposed to meet Ariel aka RERD (AndrewII) from Foxtons at 1pm in front of the house.
We walked up to the house, stepping over a dead cat in the road.
We were 10 minuted early. There was another realtor parked in front waiting for a client.
We called Ariel aka RERD to tell him we were there waiting for him.
He didn't pick up either numbers, we left two messages.
At 10 past 1:00pm he calls to say "what's up?"
"well, Ariel, we are waiting for you to show us the house, how long until you can get here?"
"oh, I can be there in 20 or so minutes."
"Well Ariel, there's another realtor here that can show us the house, so don't bother."
needless to say, if this were a first date, Ariel would not have a chance at a second.
We had the other realtor show us the house instead.

There is a parallel between real estate and romance. One looks for a prospective house just as one would scrutinize a prospective mate; we make lists of our wants, needs, likes and dislikes. Lessons learned in love should and most likely will apply to real estate. If you are going on your first date, you want' to make a good impression. You shower, shave, dress for the part, and you show up on time. If you are really serious about someone, you show up early to case the meeting place, and then casually stroll up to your date exactly at the minute you are expected. YOU DO NOT SHOW UP LATE!!!!! This should be the first thing realtors should learn. How hard is it to schedule your appointments so that you are not running late?????

But for some reason, 50% of the realtors have been late by at least 5 minutes. And they have cars. How long have they been doing this????? Shame on them, they should know better.

Real Estate: Secondary Cast of Characters

Realtors who have no business being in the business:

Schamo- from United Homes. Apparently this is a cult that has a home base in Hillside Queens. They prey on first time home buyers by getting them to go way to the butt-fuck queens and serve you a cup of grape kool-aid. They say they have properties all over the city, but when you get on their web site, the only thing they have listed is in ghetto areas, with pictures that are drawings rather than real properties. They apparently don't know how to update their websites, because you have to go out to their offices to see new listing.

Russian Stripper Mail-order bride's madam:
A short, bad wig-wearing Brazillian woman with a Greek name, showing or rather hardly showing slumy buildings in Astoria. We went to see a property and she only was able to show us 1/4th of the property, which was a redone apartment inhabited by the chain-smoking Russian stripper, mail order bride named Georgina, who was recently married to a "zhlub" named George. When asked to see the other apartment in the building, all she was able to tell us was that there is an old lady living there, and is never seen.