A Four Dollar Movie

We discovered our local movie theater this week. On Tuesdays, all day, you can see a movie for $4.00!!!!!! That means that 3 people can see a film for almost the same price of one ticket in Manhattan. They also have matinee prices: any show before 5pm is $5.00.

The films are your usual mega-plex fare, but for $4, I'd sit through almost anything on a hot summer day or night. This evening we saw "The Bourne Ultimatum". It was not as bad as we expected, and we actually thought it was pretty good. But it was a $4 good. We probably would have been more critical if we had paid $10.50.

The Sunnyside Cinema definitely has character. The interior hasn't been updated since probably the 1970's, the films are scratchy and there is soda splashed on the screen. But I can't believe it's only 4 bucks!!!!!!!!!

Ode to Julius Schmidt

While tearing out the plaster and lathe walls, the guys unhooked the main radiators so we could get behind them to frame out the window wall. These old behemoths are very heavy (about 300 lbs each) but beautiful at the same time. We plan to get rid of them and install baseboard heat, similar to what is used in Europe.

These old radiators and the heat brings me back to another day from my past.
My sophomore year at the Kansas City Art Institute, our professor Dale Eldred brought in his friend, Julius Schmidt, a master caster. He had been teaching at the University of Iowa, but rumor had it that his way of casting was not up to the safety standards so OSHA periodically shut down his foundry. In the casting world, he was a legend. He is responsible for introducing iron casting to the academic art departments first at Cranbrook Academy, by designing his own furnace system and was so dedicated to his craft that he had a cult-like following.

I remember the casting process being very strenuous and built muscles in my arm I never knew I had. The first week with Julius, he drove a group of us to the local dump to look for old cast iron radiators. We hauled the heavy pile of scrap back to the sculpture studio and then took turns crushing the radiators into 3" pieces with a heavy sledgehammer. That took about a week, hammering every day. We looked and felt like ex-cons working on a chain gang.

Julius taught us the process of melting iron in a cupola of his own design. He used a method discovered during the Industrial Revolution, of alternating coke (derived from coal) with the iron to to be used as fuel. The handful of us donned heavy leather gloves, jackets and boots in the late September heat and spent hours shoveling the mixture into the furnace.

When Chaim and I first came to our house to an open house and met the owner, Rachel White, I noticed a cast iron sculpture of a nude figure in the side garden. Rachel told us she had graduated from Alfred in the sculpture department and had studied with Julius Schmidt. She had bought the building hoping to turn it into a sculpture studio and make art. Unfortunately the grind of this city chewed her up and spit her out, landing her in Coral Gables Florida.

I hope this does not become my fate.
Julius Schmidt, is still alive and casting. I think he is probably in his eighties and is still a professor emeritus at University of Iowa.

The Crew of Joes

At 8:35 on a Sunday morning, Frankie and his crew of four people came to begin the electric job on the house; Ralphie, Joe, Johnny and Ralphie's brother, who we thought was named Spencer, but later found out his name is also Joe.

We got lucky with the weather, and it wasn't as brutal as it had been. Very efficiently they snaked cables, drilled holes, knocked out patches of plaster and re-filled the holes. They also convinced me that I can frame out the whole house and save $1000. So tomorrow I order about 50 2x4s to begin the framing job, and hope to have it finished before we order the sheet rock. The guys left around 6pm after a few Heineken's. All in all, it was a very pleasant and an unsweaty day for me.

Trash Pickup: Second Round

Joe Taco told Chaim that Joe the Malaysian from High Pearl Seafood Restaurant (one of Chaim's favorites) is in the garbage business. So for our next 2 tons (and hopefully our last) of garbage awaits in the garage for the second dumpster to arrive.

Chaim and Dumpster guy taking a quick break before our final garbage is driven away.

Mondays and Thursdays are garbage pickup days. So last Wednesday, Chaim stocked our fridge with beer and seltzer and went to the bank to get some cash for "Operation Sanitation Bribe". The plan was to run outside when we saw the city garbage men and palm a $20, give them some refreshment, in the hope to get them to take some of our bags. Unfortunately they were gone by the time we woke up.

At around 12pm, we heard the noise of garbage trucks, so Chaim ran outside to try again. Ray, the developer from down the street was already outside shaking his head. Apparently, the truck had gone by but the Sanitation Police was trailing behind, so "Operation Bribe" was abandoned for the whole block once again.

Rebirth Of A Salesman

Unlike Arther Miller's play, the salesmen in the year 2007 are still alive and kicking. They no longer go door to door, but they still carry their travel cases and sample kits and drive over to make house calls.

This was the week of window estimates. I've seen a lot of windows and been fed so much technical information about vinyl welding, double pane, triple pane, Argon gasses, Krypton gasses, and what the standards for UV coating, bla bla bla bla bla..... And since these gases are clear and odorless, who would know that these so called energy efficient windows have Krypton in them, unless Superman was trying to break in.

All of the schpeal is actually quite boring and my eyes begin to glaze over after the first 10 minutes. We just want some windows, and anything is going to better than the 1930s single pane, cracked and rotting away framed windows we have, so we are easy customers.

We got three very different quotes, each $1000 different from each other, but the quality seem the same. The first salesperson who came to the house was actually a woman. The first woman I've dealt with in over a month, which was very refreshing. She looked like the typical lesbian gym teacher (short hair, golf shirt with company logo and buff) but was very efficient, knew her stuff and did not try to sell us anything we didn't need. We liked her the best out of the lot.

I Haul, U Haul, We All Haul .....

We all know that renting a $19.95 per day U-Haul van, never adds up to $19.95. But it is still much cheaper than hiring a big company and getting a bunch of Mexican guys working for slave labor wages. The last load of Chaim's belongings from the U.E.S. would be carried off in a U-Haul, which we rented on the hottest day of the week....of course.

We decided that since we were now Queens residents, the Brooklyn U-Haul branch we were using, being served by disgruntled workers, was no longer needed. So we reserved a van at the nearest Queens branch, which was located on the BQE....could that be possible??? It turned out that they were on a service road off the BQE and we had to walk a maze-like path to get there.

Upon signing the papers, and xeroxing Chaim's driver's license, the U-Haul manager told us that we had to leave one form of ID with them to rent a truck. A green card (which we didn't have), a car registration (also don't have since we don't own a car), military ID (don't have), or a passport (which we were NOT going to leave with them). After arguing back and fourth, telling that manager that we have rented countless times from U-Haul, and have never been asked this request, he finally gave in and said that he would call a friend to verify that someone knows us....
HUH?????????

So I gave them Christine's name and number, who they promptly called at 8:05 am.

U-Haul: "Hello, is this Christine Barney?"
CB: "Yes"
U-Haul: "Do you know a Micki?"
CB: "Yes"
U-Haul: "Thank you, good bye."

That was the inane phone conversation, no last names were used, no explanation, and we have no idea what that could possibly prove.

Later I read the rules and regulations of U-Haul which states that:
"(U-Haul) may hold a passport, green card, auto registration, long distance phone bill, military ID, or some other meaningful assurance you work out with our rental manager."

Could this rule have been applied to the Queens branches since they are assuming that such international clientele do not have valid driver's licenses??????
VERY BIZARRE!

My First Dumpster

After realizing that the Sanitation Dept. was not going to pick up our garbage, we decided to call for professional help. How much garbage could we possibly have accumulated anyway? Chaim single-handedly carried it all down from the second floor to store in the garage.

I called about 15 companies and each one gave me totally different quotes; anywhere from $300 plus $150 per hour for 3 guys to load the garbage into a dump truck, to $2000 plus tax to get a 10 yard dumpster. I found out that a yard could differ depending on who I spoke to: one guy told me that one yard of garbage was 3 construction bags worth, another told me it was 8.

I chose to go with the company that I could understand, and the secretary was nice to talk to. A Polish woman named Helen who worked for a company called Carty (or maybe I liked them because they sounded like a character in an episode of of PeeWee's Playhouse.) Half of the companies I spoke to were rude, or I literally couldn't understand their English.

3 tons of garbage getting ready to be hauled away

The parking situation proved to be the most stressful. Helen told me that we had to have at least 30 feet of space so that the dumpster could be dropped off and picked up. I felt a bit guilty hogging 4 car spaces in front of the house when we didn't even own a car. The dumpster got dropped off right after the street cleaning crew swept through our side of the street, in a rainy downpour. Christine came over for some physical and moral support, and being a home owner and previous dumper of illegal construction rubble, she told me that we had to begin filling it IMMEDIATELY!!! or others would come by and start throwing in their garbage.

So Christine and I spent most of the day dragging the dusty bags from the garage into the dumpster. Thank goodness it was a rainy day or the dust would have been unbearable!!!!

In the end the scale at the dump-site read 3.29 tons!!!!! We made another 8 bags of garbage since the dumpster went away, which we drove over to Dumbo, and left in my studio building garbage room. Believe it or not, we still have two more walls to deconstruct.

Construction- Day 2

Another hot and sweaty day, especially since I donned on the demo-getup: my uncle Mitzi's car mechanic coveralls on top of another layer of clothing, with a mask and constantly fogging up goggles. But even with all these layers, somehow the particles of fiber-glass from the ceiling managed to get inside my clothes.
Chaim has been helping to take down the bags and bags of rubble and bundles of lathe, to store into our garage until we can figure out what we can do with it.



As I trudged on during the hot afternoon, I had flashbacks of the days back in the Midwest, when a bunch of us recently having graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute, spent a year trying to renovate a derelict warehouse. Back then, the grueling job was a team effort choreographed to a repetitive soundtrack of Guns and Roses, with a high learning curve and lots of breaks for beers and open fires for barbecues. Almost 15 years later, there is no soundtrack, I work in silence except for the hammering and my own breath (since I cut all power for fear of electrocution), my body is not used to the work, because I have not swung a hammer over my head for more than one or two poundings to get a nail into the wall to hang a picture.

We wake up very, very, very, very, very, very, extremely sore.

On the third day, we take a break and go to a barbecue pool party in New Jersey, where I proceed to float and wash away the last two days.

Food Dynasty

We went to our neighborhood grocery store this evening. I was a bit skeptical about it since the outside is littered with not only garbage, but sketchy old men trying to recycle cans. It looks like any Key Food you'd find near any housing projects, but when we went inside, we were greeted by a nice surprise.

The store was VERY CLEAN, cleaner than the Gristedes in Brooklyn Heights. Every aisle was organized and everything on the shelves was straight and lined up neatly. The meat section was impressive, and they had items we would never see in Brooklyn Heights or the UES; such as a whole refrigerator case of packaged pupusas, bricks of Mexican cheese, turkey legs cross-cut into 1 inch chunks, halfway decent beers, and passing the bakery section, Chaim excitedly exclaims, "Look Challah! There must be Jews who come here!"

But the best part of our new grocery store is the service. The cute Asian check-out girl actually acknowledged us with a friendly hello, and after handing over the correct change, sorted the handles of the plastic bags together and gave them to us.

Food Review #2

Korean BBQ
I can't remember what the name of the restaurant is called, (and no mention of it in English on the business card) but it's three blocks from our house!!!!! They were both excellent.

We were famished, so I didn't think to take pictures of our food, but it was delicious! We sat down and were immediately served half a dozen or so small plates of panchan, (also called banchan). We were exhausted and had no interest in cooking our own food so we stuck to the standards. I had the dolsot bibimbap, and Chaim had OJingO BokUm (Squid and onions sautéed in spicy sauce). There were a few other tables of Korean business men drinking shochu, and they had dishes we had never seen before, that we will definitely try the next time.

Construction in Woodside Heights

We've begun the demolition at full force. We would like to take down the patchy ceiling and end up with exposed beams. It will increase the height of our rooms plus it will remind me of the first loft I lived in, about 10 years ago, in Williamsburg. Taking the plaster and lathe down is the easy part, kinda like picking nail polish off, or scratching at scabs. It's the garbage created from the demo that's proving to be a bit more challenging.

We are also in the process of getting estimates:
Plumbers, roofers, electricians, oil tank fillers, etc..............

We put out our trash onto the curb last night. Some recycling and some heavy bags of concrete dust. In the morning, the recycling was gone, but all the other bags remained. We learned from Joe Taco, that we are supposed to slip a $20 or so to the garbage men. Apparently New York's Strongest needs a little bribe to stay strong.

Rose Bushes For The Birthday Boy.

Last Monday I dug out the three rose bushes from our new garden. Chaim is deathly allergic to bees, and roses attract them. Roses are fabulous to have when you get a few dozen in a box wrapped with a nicely tied bow delivered to your door from a secret admirer, but to grow them is a different story. They are the poodles of the plant world; fussy, finicky and a pain in the butt.

good bye roses.

On Tuesday Chaim and I rented a U-Haul van to move a bed and other necessities to our new house. And so it was perfect that we had a vehicle to bring the uprooted roses into Manhattan to meet Jim and Isy for Jim's Birthday dinner.

Jim hoisting the roses into their car.

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?

Food Review 1

Last night my friend CT, Chaim and I went to a restaurant called Piola.
We went because Chaim had seen a flyer for an art show displaying photographs of mangled money by an artist named Anthony Savini that he wanted to see. So we decided to go have a quick drink and snacks there. The photos were ok.

As we entered, we were greeted by mobs of children running around and the restaurant had the atmosphere of Two Boots Pizza, with it's brightly colored Romper Room decor, but with a bit more of a suburban feel.

I started off with a KIWI CAIPIROSKA, which sounded refreshing but ended up so sweet with chunks of muddled kiwi, that it would have been better as a Popsicle instead of a drink.
My friend ordered a SGROPPINO AL LIMONE which was described on the menu as ice cream and vodka... interesting??? but in the end it tasted like a melted cheesecake. Chaim stayed on the safe side and ordered a beer.

It took us a while to order the pizza because they had too many combinations, and finally in the end, we got the MARGHERITA described on the menu as: Tomato sauce, mozzarella and basil. We thought the best way to see how good a pizza joint is, is by trying their basic staple. Just as Grimaldi's cheese pie needs nothing on top to make it amazing. Sadly, when our Piola pie was set down on our table, it paled in comparison to the Brooklyn pie, and had one sad little piece of basil in the center, acting as a fig leaf covering the center junction of the slices.

This would be a good place to take your tween age children for a birthday party. If you want great pizza, I'd go elsewhere...

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.