A Blast From The Past.

In this week's Sunday Real Estate Section, there is an article about my old apartment: 30 Clinton Street, and how the board turned down my first prospective buyer. The story clears up some unanswered questions I had of the woman who almost bought 6G; what she did, what her circumstances were, etc... I look back to my first apartment building fondly, and I miss especially Kemel, our super and all around great fix-it man, but don't miss the months of being on the market. Thank goodness that phase of my life is over.

Our Threshold in Woodside Heights

After 7 months of marriage, my new husband finally carries me over our new threshold!

(photo credit: Rob van Erve)

We closed in a record 1-1/2 hours on Thursday. Our lawyer, Bob Dubno, blew the other lawyer away. He was extremely together and kept things on track, when the other lawyer was fumbling with his paperwork.

Yesterday Rob and I took down my work from Proteus Gowanus, and drove it over to the new house. When we drove up to the house, Ray the Realtor, came over and gave us a nice housewarming bamboo plant, welcoming us. Chaim ran across the street to our new corner store to get some beer to toast with. He returned elated, with a six pack of Modelo Especial, exclaiming that "it was only $7.00!!!"

Rachel, the seller was so great. She had cleaned every inch of the house, and even left 4 rolls of toilet paper, extra slate tiles for the kitchen, and miscellaneous house fixing and cleaning supplies. Today we will go and take measurements and discuss how life in our new house will be like.

Final Woodside Walkthru

Rachel and Harley in front of the house.

Our final walk-thru went without a hitch. Rachel, the owner was there and told us about the house, she even left literature on how to treat the peach tree outside if it got infected with tree diseases. Soon the In Contract sign will be taken down and SOLD will mark it's place.
Our closing is today at 3:00pm!!!!!

Woodside Heights: The countdown.

Two more days until closing...............Many people, the owners and the Realtor, of the house in Woodside have told us that it used to be an old firehouse. I went to the NYPL and did a little digging around. I dug up old Bromley maps on microfiche from the 1800's and early 1900's before and after the house was built. Looking at the maps, there is no sign that our soon to be abode was ever a firehouse. Maybe a carriage house, or an auto body shop, but it doesn't make sense that in 1930, a building as small as 1000 sqft would be a firehouse. The current owners also told us that it was built for a horse drawn vehicle, which also doesn't compute. I now have my old neighbor Konstantine, a current NYFD firefighter, on the case, picking the brain of the resident firehouse historian to see what he can find.

However, I did discover, that Woodside used to be called Woodside Heights according to the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, (1914-May 1951) , a name we will definitely coin as our own. In Volume 9 of the 24 volume map series, Woodside Heights is listed along with Elmhurst Heights, Woodside, Lawrenceville, Winfield, Nassau Heights, Maspeth, and Winfield Heights. Jackson Heights is included in volume 10 with North Woodside, Corona, and East Elmhurst.

I found one other evidence of this previous name in old publications:

1898 July. Daily Star: Queens area news-

{Joseph COTTRELL of Woodside Heights had the third finger of his right
hand smashed on Saturday.  He is an engineer in the power house of the
Metropolitan Traction Company in New York.  He slipped on the oily floor
and caught his right hand in the belting.  Besides the injury to the third
finger his hand was injured, but not seriously.  He was taken to Bellevue
Hospital and after the injuries had been dressed he was able to come to his
home on Woodside Heights.}

Yesterday while reading the Metro section of the Times, I saw a community bulletin for interesting things to do in the five boroughs, and Woodside was the first one listed.
Does anyone know if there is a large Hawaiian contingent in Woodside, or anywhere in Queens?

A Weekend Project: its not easy being green

I was reading the Styles section of the paper today and came across the article about everyone jumping on the green wagon and living with a false sense of greenness just because it’s trendy and fashionable. Instead of buying the new designer biodegradable pants, wear the jeans you bought last year. And just because you shop at Whole Foods, doesn’t mean you are contributing to the environment if you are buying raspberries in the winter, since they are being flown in from Chile.

So I’ve begun thinking more about the 3 R’s as spelled out on the EPA’s web site.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.
And we decided to add another R:
Refuse-refuse buying all that crap that litters your life, if at all possible.

Bottled water consumption is another hot topic of the moment. Apparently there is an estimated 38 billion bottles that are thrown away and end up in landfills every year (even with those who recycle). “In a world where there are more than a billion people with no reliable source of drinking water, this seems very wasteful:, especially if we can drink water out of our taps.

So last month I moved in with my husband, into his tenement style apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. Ever since we met, and I had the pleasure of touring his museum apartment, I’ve wanted to update the corner between the kitchen sink and the front window where this bathtub sits, swathed with yards and yards of shower curtain liner. There is so much fabric, yet the floor around the tub still seems to get wet when ever I take a shower. And I am too short to reach the hook that holds up the hand held shower head, so I have to precariously jamb this hand-held device between the shampoo holder and the washrag hook in order to free up my hands to wash my hair.

Thus the bathtub in the kitchen improvement job began this weekend. Actually this project began about a year ago, when Chaim and I began looking for tile, being thrown out on the street or being sold in thrift stores, and stoop sales.

AFTER the tiling.

Since I am not working this summer, and because I decided to follow the 4 R's of living, I had Chaim go out and scour the neighborhood for some more tile. Since moving to the luxurious Upper East Side, I've found that this Manhattan neighborhood is a difficult place to live. For example, hardware stores here do not sell hardware, just a lot of plastic containers and lightbulbs, or operate on some type of extortion system with their pricing, or in the case of Home Depot, (across the street from Bloomingdales) they don't stock anything in their one square block store, but rather everything is stored in Jersey and we would have to wait a week to get anything. Oh how I miss Brooklyn and Sids Hardware!

Therefore, Chaim, following in his great grandfather's footsteps, who was in the "merchandise redistribution business", set out for a day of dumpster diving. He spent a good portion of the last Saturday in June, looking for tiles on the U.E.S. It proved to be a good day to troll for trash as people were moving this weekend, and throwing things out. Along with a pile of old plates and marble floor tiles, he returned with a few more items of interest. True to the weekend recycling theme, they were all green in color.

a much needed dustpan found on 76th street.

a green jacket found on 1st Ave.
notice the recycled K-SHE 95 patch Chaim sewed on,
which covers the Nautica logo.

Hallway gallery with art found in a 10 block radius of our apartment.

Japan

Imagine a country where 1/2 the population of the United States inhabits an area no larger than California. Now imagine that only 20 percent of the land in California is populated by the same number of people. This is Japan...

view looking out of our hotel in Asakusa, looking away from the downtown area.

We spent a month traversing Japan, using our Rail Pass, as only non-Japanese can. Chaim often tried to compare parts of Japan to New York City. And I remind him that this place is incomparable.

"Yes Chaim, it would be just like Times Square during rush hour...
only imagine Time Square being 10x bigger and there are 10x

more people there."

A typical Saturday morning during the beginning of summer break at Kyoto Station.
These students are on their way to a historic shrine for a field trip.

Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss wrote Horton Hears a Who, and dedicated this book to "My Great Friend, Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan." There is little doubt Dr. Seuss had Japan in mind when he wrote this book, about Horton, an elephant who finds a whole world living on a speck of dust.

Dr. Seuss-ish trees in Kyoto

Chinese food in China is just called "food" and contrary to popular western belief, Japanese food consists of more than sushi. Every restaurant in Japan serves a specific type of Japanese food: sushi and sashimi (of course) but also, curry (derived from India, but much sweeter and less hot), tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlets), shabu shabu, tempura, okonomyaki, and izakaya, to name just a few. The system is very structured and so you would never find curry in a sushi restaurant. Even with all this variety, there is surprising very few fresh vegetables and one gets tired of eating there.

Chaim searches out the Chinese restaurants and finds that unlike in NYC Chinatown, Chinese food is very expensive, but we go there anyway just so we can get a plate of sauteed green vegetables. On the other hand, we find a lot of Korean BBQ places, that prove to be much cheaper than in New York. The only problem is, this Korean food is laced with MSG. emergency hot pepper travel set

Most all Japanese cuisine is fish based and thus my vegan uncle has a hell of a time trying to find places to eat. Knowing of the sweetness of Japanese food, I bought Chaim an emergency hot pepper travel set for his birthday. It came in handy quite often. After a month of Japanese food, (mostly seasoned with soy and sugar) I was ready to get back to New York and have some real Thai.

a few days of eating Nippon style

The Firehouse in Woodside

I've always wanted to live in a firehouse! (or an airplane hanger- but firehouses are easier to come by in urban areas)

This house is right under the 7 train and next to a Mexican restaurant. I'm not going to jinx it by saying that we LOvE it, because there may be some issues....such as the oil tank buried in the yard outside.Living room looking toward the two bedrooms

Kitchen, with a stove that has a grill on it and a great exhaust system.

Side yard. The stairs in the back leads to a restaurant that uses it as their emergency exit.
The oil tank is buried under the bricks.

one of the bedrooms currently being used as an office

garage with very tall ceilings

Elmhurst update

After making an offer, we went back and fourth with the seller, or rather the seller's agent, who is not really a realtor but rather a Chinese immigration lawyer. There was another party interested in this property, but we had the higher offer, and we were more qualified with the bank.

You would think this would make the seller accept our offer........
but in the world of real estate, it apparently doesn't work this way.
The other (lower) offer came from her neighbor, and so we believe she took that one, even though we haven't heard anything back from the realtor for two weeks.

So we are moving on and forgetting about this one for a while.

Elmhurst

We went to look at this house yesterday. It is not in our targeted Landmarked Jackson Heights area but it's pretty close to the trains, and in the midst of a Chinatown in Elmhurst. It is less than half a mile from the express train Subway hub.

These are not the best pictures, but you can get the idea. It is registered as a two family that was converted from a one family. The street level has another family living in cramped quarters, and will definitely need a lot of work done to it. The owners duplex is immaculate.Here is the front of the building.

A view of the back with a nice concrete backyard ideal for a roller blade hockey game and 5 gallon bucket garden.

Bedroom

Front room with a faux fireplace.

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.

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.

Real Estate: The Cast of Characters

Jackson Heights:

Realtor #1
Madam Beaudoin- She is fabulous. We've been seeing her since early last summer when we thought we were in contract on my place. She showed us the first house we LOVED, and nothing has compared to it ever since. She doesn't show us yucky property, like the urine house, or the overly crowded Chinese immigrant hideouts, or the house that's falling over and sloping to one side. She went to Pratt and also has an interior design business on the side. The first time we were in her office, her partner Daniel Karatzas, gave us a book he published on the garden district of Jackson Heights, with a forward by Robert Sterns.

Realtor #2
Scarfania. His name is actually Carfagnia, but we dislike him so of course we don't call him by his actual name. He showed us a house we actually liked enough to put a bid on, early on in the search when we didn't know any better. That house which we retracted the bid on is now called the Baby Jonah and the Asbestos Whale. He is a slimy character, and you could just tell that he was lying when his mouth was open. Also he's from Boston, which gave a bad taste in Harley's mouth from the get go.

Realtor #3
Peggi-incum: The Chinese realtor, she tries, and will show anything. She showed us the house that had so many people living in it, and thus we couldn't see the house for all the mattresses stacked up and leaning on the walls. Most of her property has high water and electricity bills due to much laundry being done on the premises at all times. But when something undesirable appears around the corner in any of the rooms, she just chants the mantra: In-cum, you can get in-cum (income).

Realtor #4
Toupee Joe: He showed us a ranch house in the heat of the summer when most of Astoria and Woodside lost power for over a week. The poor guy had been living in motels and out of his car. When we walked up the the door of the house, I saw a bald guy standing in the doorway, and so I waved. He quickly ducked inside, and came back out wearing a toupee as though we hadn't seen him. Needless to say, the house was very interesting.

Realtor #5
Belal the Indian: The guy who talks and talks and knows everything and still can't get the information right. He is still trying to sell us stuff in Forest Hills. He shows us other people's listings. "His people" have the corner market on Jackson Heights, and it will be easy to rent out anything that we buy.

Realtor #6
sFartacus aka-Farter the Greek: So Harley and I go to see a house that is co-brokered in Jackson Heights, which this woman can't stop saying how wonderful, and mint, mint, mint condition it's in. It is south of Roosevelt Ave., which is a location we have yet to discover. We have been holding off since most of the homes south of Roosevelt are frame and not brick. But what the hell, it's worth looking. So we trek out there, it's freezing outside, and when we get there, the woman is in the small foyer struggling with the keys to get in. We all three try for a good 20 minutes, jiggling the keys. Harley and I go to the back, where I jump the fence to see if the keys work on the back door, but no luck. We go back out front, and in the meanwhile, realtor #6 has made the foyer very stinky. We will probably try to see the house again... she was very very very sorry and gave us some Japanese Mochi, which she thought were Korean, since she bought them in a Korean store.

Realtor #7
Andrew Foxtons: Young cocky guy with slick back hair, always on the go with his blackberry, wheeler/dealer type who likes to party. Drives around in the Foxtons Mini.

Co-Habitation - Step One: The Real Estate Hunt

After almost 2 months of marriage, we are still commuting back and fourth on the Lexington Ave. line. One Hour door to door, calendering where we will both sleep every 3 or 4 days. And every weekend we are on the hunt. This weekend, we ventured out to Brooklyn, and Windsor Terrace, Kensington.....what some call the South Slope.

Harley suggests we should be doing a photo essay of all the dinosaurs that inhabit the basements of these prospective living quarters:

Here is an oil tank we found in the basement of a humongous house in Windsor Terrace, well actually Kensington. The hugeness of the house it got me so excited that I didn't stop to think about the yard... who's going to mow it??? And the lovely tree I first saw, became a nightmare, as we realized we would be responsible, as we pictured it falling down on the house next door. Plus, we are not staying in New York so we can live in a suburb-like setting.

Backing up a few weeks on the earlier days of house hunting...
This lovely two family in a picturesque Jackson Heights neighborhood: Of course I fell in love with it instantly.

But then I did a bit of research and found out that it is in a landmarked neighborhood. This may sound great at first, but then looking through pages and pages of all the violations this house and it's attached neighbors have due to not having work done to landmark status, and that the neighbor on the other side is an architect, who practices out of his home, (translation: a landmark snitch) and after Harley's friends Joe Taco and Paul came to check out the place, and found that all the windows need to be replaced, (which meant windows that are normally $200 would now run us in the tune of about $600 each since we would have to restore it back to 1910,) and with 27 windows... well we gave up doing the math.
As my excited and eager face fell, so did the mood of our real estate agent #1.