Crash Bang
At 5:20am I was woken by a huge crash followed by what sounded like a garbage can being knocked over. The noise had actually penetrated my closed window and the air conditioner, so it must have been loud enough to wake up the entire block. When I stuck my head out of the window I realized it had been.
The neighbors up and down the street were wandering out of their apartments in bathrobes and basketball shorts, sneakers untied, some sort of attempt at hair management. It looked like our little anthill had been disturbed, all the people milling around and more exiting their apartments to view the carnage, as seen from my third story vantage.
Directly in front of my building someone had run into a parked SUV so hard the back tire jumped the curb. The force was strong enough to pop the back hatch and the belongings of the poor owner had poured out onto the wet sidewalk. Swirls of the neighbors' conversations came from below
- He was drivin' the wrong way down the street.
- Must've swerved or something.
- Which one your car? This one here?
Someone called the police. The owner, some white kid with long I'm-in-a-heavy-metal-band hair, spent some time picking his stuff off the street. Either he had just moved in or was travelling from somewhere else because leaving that much visible stuff in your car is asking for a break-in. A firetruck arrived.
Say what you will about my neighborhood with its construction cranes and corner liquor stores, abandoned brownstones next to ones renovated for someones real estate portfolio. The people on the block who have been here the longest were the first on the scene. It will be a shame when the gentrification of our street is complete and the little community that watched it go from ghetto to fabulous can no longer afford it. What will happen to the black man with the pocked face, who bought a car and drove from Brooklyn to California back in the 70s? Or the one with the pageboy cap who shuffles religiously up and down the street on his daily constitutionals? Or the one with the dreads who wakes up at 4:30am every day and rides his Honda CBR to Queens for work, hair flying? What about the crack house at the end of the block? (Well, I guess that can go.)
Anyway, that was my morning. It's nice to see a neighborhood acting like a neighborhood - nosy, pushy, helpful, worried, being all of these adjectives as a group, held together only by an address.
The neighbors up and down the street were wandering out of their apartments in bathrobes and basketball shorts, sneakers untied, some sort of attempt at hair management. It looked like our little anthill had been disturbed, all the people milling around and more exiting their apartments to view the carnage, as seen from my third story vantage.
Directly in front of my building someone had run into a parked SUV so hard the back tire jumped the curb. The force was strong enough to pop the back hatch and the belongings of the poor owner had poured out onto the wet sidewalk. Swirls of the neighbors' conversations came from below
- He was drivin' the wrong way down the street.
- Must've swerved or something.
- Which one your car? This one here?
Someone called the police. The owner, some white kid with long I'm-in-a-heavy-metal-band hair, spent some time picking his stuff off the street. Either he had just moved in or was travelling from somewhere else because leaving that much visible stuff in your car is asking for a break-in. A firetruck arrived.
Say what you will about my neighborhood with its construction cranes and corner liquor stores, abandoned brownstones next to ones renovated for someones real estate portfolio. The people on the block who have been here the longest were the first on the scene. It will be a shame when the gentrification of our street is complete and the little community that watched it go from ghetto to fabulous can no longer afford it. What will happen to the black man with the pocked face, who bought a car and drove from Brooklyn to California back in the 70s? Or the one with the pageboy cap who shuffles religiously up and down the street on his daily constitutionals? Or the one with the dreads who wakes up at 4:30am every day and rides his Honda CBR to Queens for work, hair flying? What about the crack house at the end of the block? (Well, I guess that can go.)
Anyway, that was my morning. It's nice to see a neighborhood acting like a neighborhood - nosy, pushy, helpful, worried, being all of these adjectives as a group, held together only by an address.
posted by Amy at
9:52 AM
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