In Brooklyn, Courtesy Means Leaving Your Name And Number

Only in New York, kids, only in New York (.pdf):

Courtesy is coursing through the streets of Brooklyn like Brangelina gossip through a high school cafeteria.

The Boerum Hill Association, in conjunction with Assemblywoman Joan Millman (D-Brooklyn Heights), has started distributing plastic placards to double-parking Brooklynites in hopes that they’ll leave their phone numbers on their windshields, in case the cars they are blocking need to be moved.

“Sorry for blocking your car, neighbor!” the placards read. “If you need to get out, please call and I’ll move my car at once.”

There’s space below for the driver to write his name and phone number.

The association started distribution on Wednesday, March 30. The placard is also downloadable from the association website.

“Courtesy is contagious, and that’s what this is all about,” said Sue Wolfe, president of the Boerum Hill Association.

. . .

The Park Slope Civic Council is considering a similar program although some Slopers think it’s unnecessary.

They are solving a problem that doesn’t exist,” said George Shea, a resident of 10th Street. “Most people put their number on the dashboard. And those who do, will get their placard while those who don’t, won’t.

“If the civic groups want to do something useful for me, they can clean up the trash on Seventh Avenue. It’s a mess!

But another Park Slope resident wished someone had given him a placard when he moved to Brooklyn years ago.

“I didn’t know you’re supposed to put your phone number in the window,” said David Shenk, a writer who lives on St. James Place.

“Then, one day, I got a note on my car, saying, ‘If you EVER double-park without leaving your name and number, I’m going to hunt you down.’ As you can imagine, I have a very detailed note now.”

And When You’re Pitching This Script, Make It Clear That Brooklyn Itself Is A Character

In the literary free-for-all that the “mafia cop” trial has become, Brooklyn itself becomes a character:

It could be argued that one of the most intriguing characters in the trial of Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa is not a person, but a place. As absorbing as the witnesses, the lawyers and the two defendants is the borough of Brooklyn, which has arisen in the trial as something like an empire of the ill-fated and often illicitly employed.

Countless times, Brooklyn — or specifically southern Brooklyn — has been painted as a universe of two-bit deals and three-time losers, of gangster bars and catering halls and auto-body shops. It has come to seem in testimony like a world where people are forever swapping envelopes of cash and owing money to their loan sharks and their mothers — a world of which a witness could say, without a whiff of irony, “I was having some bad times and I committed bank robbery,” or “a few times back in the 80’s people paid me to make their cars disappear.”

. . .

Countless times, Brooklyn — or specifically southern Brooklyn — has been painted as a universe of two-bit deals and three-time losers, of gangster bars and catering halls and auto-body shops. It has come to seem in testimony like a world where people are forever swapping envelopes of cash and owing money to their loan sharks and their mothers — a world of which a witness could say, without a whiff of irony, “I was having some bad times and I committed bank robbery,” or “a few times back in the 80’s people paid me to make their cars disappear.”

Backstory: Alan Feuer’s other article about the literary flavor in a murder trial; Feuer is obviously making notes for a wonderful script and/or novel.

I’ve Been Crushing Aggregate, You Little Punk While You Were Still Swimming In Your Daddy’s Balls

Contractors bemoan the closing of Red Hook Crushers (another great band name), which means they’ll be forced to travel to Maspeth (gasp!) to dump concrete detritus from Brooklyn construction sites:

The “new” Brooklyn is being built, stoop-by-stoop, gut-rehab-by-gut-rehab, bluestone-by-bluestone, in neighborhoods like Boerum Hill, Prospect Heights, Gowanus, the South Slope and Clinton Hill.

But a big problem has emerged: Where will the “old” Brooklyn be thrown out?

In Queens, actually.

Last month, the city shut down Red Hook Crushers, a company that played a vital, and often-overlooked, role in the borough’s surging construction industry.

For two decades, the company’s crushing equipment along the banks of the Gowanus Canal have taken in broken up cement, demolished brick walls and other debris and churned it into base material to be used again in roads, runways and sidewalks.

But since Red Hook Crushers closed on Feb. 8, hundreds of small-time contractors — the thick-calloused guys who rip up an old concrete stoop and turn it into a Yuppie’s bluestone dream — are now being forced to truck that unwanted cement all the way to the closest similar facility in Maspeth.

And all that driving is driving them nuts.

. . .

“I work in all these up-and-coming neighborhoods, fixing sidewalks, rebuilding stoops, renovating backyards,” said John Kiamie, owner of Sure Foundation.

“Now I have to drive to Maspeth — it’s two hours, back and forth on the BQE! — to dump the old stoop or sidewalk after I fix it. If I make two trips, I lose half a day on the road while my workers just sit around waiting for me to get back.”

Kiamie said he’s now turning down the small jobs that were his bread-and-butter.

“They shut this guy down without a contingency plan!” he said. “What am I supposed to do?! It’s clinical insanity! It’s a good thing it’s not our busy season or I’d never be able to stay calm!”

And don’t pretend like thick-calloused guys don’t have a keen sense of irony:

The reality is that the Crushers once-desolate Gowanus site has become very desirable. Whole Foods, whose first Brooklyn supermarket is being slowly built next door, is said to covet the space, and new apartment buildings are springing up in an area once written off as a waste land.

“The irony is that Whole Foods dumped plenty of concrete with us,” said Crushers co-owner Tom Saccomanno Jr., a copy of Pit & Quarry magazine on his desk.

Like Saccomanno, Kiamie said he certainly welcomed newcomers.

“If they want to turn the Gowanus Canal into a new Venice, God bless ’em,” he said. “It’s great. They’ll need us to do the work. But I need a place to dump the garbage or else the BQE will be a parking lot all day and all night.”

The Department of Sanitation, for its part, says that contractors will just have to “deal with it.”

Nearly Swallowed Whole By A Brooklyn Street

The first few words of this story almost make it one of the best ledes ever:

A terrified Florida woman was nearly swallowed whole by a Brooklyn street yesterday when the cracked pavement collapsed under her SUV after a water main break, authorities said.

Then again, the story is strange enough as it is:

Nancy Batista, 46, would have been trapped in the 20-foot-deep hole in Bay Ridge if not for a pair of anonymous good Samaritans who pulled her from the mangled Ford Explorer, relatives said.

“The guy ripped the door open and said, ‘I got you!'” said Maggie Nieves, 45, after talking to her shaken sister, who was treated at Lutheran Medical Center. “She said it felt like Niagara Falls.”

As water gushed atop the Explorer at 3:35 a.m., a mystery military sergeant and a passerby rescued Batista, who, at first, was too scared to get out of the 15-foot-by-20-foot-wide hole.

“She was scared she might misjudge the step and that she would go down and nobody would be able to get her back up,” Nieves said.

Batista, who traded Flatbush for Kissimmee, Fla., a few years ago, was at a stoplight on Fourth Ave. at 73rd St. when the ground suddenly caved in.

“All she remembers is making a turn and the street opened up and swallowed her,” said Nieves, who first saw the wreck on TV when their mom in Florida called her Harlem home.

Gallons of water and a 2-foot-thick section of mud and debris collapsed along 300 feet of subway tracks below, shutting down the local R line between 36th St. and 95th St.

Coney Island Burlesque Paves Way For Organ Grinder Chic; Monkeys Most Affected

Italian stereotypes forgotten, visitors to Coney Island will enjoy the return of organ grinders — with monkeys! — when the boardwalk’s high season starts in earnest next month:

Mayor LaGuardia banned them 70 years ago, but organ grinders will return to Coney Island next month — and maybe bring their monkeys, too.

To kick off the amusement mecca’s opening day April 9, dozens of the once-prominent street musicians plan to crank out old-time hits such as “The Sidewalks of New York” on their automatic music machines.

“It’s a lot of great music,” said Coney Island USA chairman Todd Robbins.

. . .

The machines, some more than 100 years old, were once hugely popular in New York, especially in neighborhoods such as Little Italy and the lower East Side, where Italian immigrants settled.

But in a bid to stamp out Italian stereotypes, LaGuardia banned the instruments from the streets.

“This was cranked up by every Italian immigrant who came to the United States, until it became so noisy that Fiorello LaGuardia had to shut ’em down,” said Aldo Mancusi of the Molinari organs that were made in southwest Brooklyn.

In his biography of public-work whore Robert Moses, Robert Caro claims that Moses once called LaGuardia a “little organ grinder,” a charge Moses denied (although Moses did admit to referring to the Little Flower once as “Rigoletto,” albeit lovingly).