12/30/07 Sunday

Oh it's been a while since I posted (new) photos. The last day I drove in 2007, I only got 2 good pictures out of a whole 10 or so. So it was less overwhelming for me to look through such a little amount of shots. I think I came down with a slight fever this week.

Chelsea, I guess you kinda figured that out. For some reason hot dogs and tropical fruit drinks go well together I guess.

Linden Hill ,Brooklyn

This place is fricken' awesomely creepy. I recommend never dropping off anybody here. I gotta be honest with you, 30% of the time I don't know the name of the neighborhood I am in. I have never even heard of Linden Hill. And yet I have routinely driven through this desolate place as a short cut to get to the Williamsburg Bridge from Bushwick and Ridgewood. In this neighborhood only warehouses exist. Sometimes I see the remnants of compact cars or sport utilities which have been burned almost beyond recognition. The police regularly cruise the empty streets with spot lights aiming in corners and their headlights off. The neighborhood still keeps busy in certain spots with the pungent aroma of municipal waste, as trucks are guided over abandoned train tracks. If anyone makes a regular habit of commuting through here, they tend to own sport utility vehicles with better suspension to handle the potholes and the train crossings.

A while ago I knew someone who rented out a loft with a few of his friends here. The deal was the whole neighborhood was zoned for industrial use, and therefore the loft was illegally rented, and cheaper. But if there was any problem with the landlord, the tenants could all be kicked out. The inspections were a real hassle too, not to mention the loneliness of the neighborhood.

Neighborhood distinction:

It is hard to know what neighborhood has what name, because there are so many names, and a lot of neighborhoods expand into the territory of other neighborhoods. The real-estate market has it's own set of rules for creating names and taking names away as well. Each map puts different names in different places. 

Williamsburg is ever so popular, and so almost all of Bushwick is being called Williamsburg. Chinatown has expanded so large it has taken over almost all of Manhattan's Little Italy, and more of the Lower East Side as well. Hell's Kitchen is only referred to orally or for historical and sensational merit. The maps will either refer to it as Clinton or the Far West Side. The Far West Side is actually south of Hell's Kitchen in my opinion, just a name reserved for a neighborhood with nothing but taxi garages and the convention center. But some refer to the area south of Hell's Kitchen or Clinton as Chelsea. In this northern Chelsea is also the plant or flower district, and the fashion or garment district. NoLita, is some cooked up real-estate term for North of Little Italy. NoHo, is North of Houston Street, but just like NoLita, it should be conglomerated into the larger surrounding neighborhood. SoHo is South of Houston, but that designation And the TriBeCa (Triangle Below Canal) have been around long enough to be real neighborhoods. There are neighborhoods within neighborhoods. Downtown, Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Harlem, and Uptown, are larger generalities where other neighborhoods reside. As far as Brooklyn and Queens, there are so many neighborhoods, I still don't know where they all fit in.

Any questions? I know I have a few