I bought the parcel for $710,000 with the help of a 2.25 percent line of credit with Wells Fargo, and began renovations with the intention of cash-out refinancing in six months, after upgrading the interiors and facade. As the owner of a pickup truck and a small motorcycle I’ve always lusted after a garage in New York. It was here that I found my house and its large detached garage, on a 25-foot-by-127.5-foot lot. To the frustration of recent gentrifiers a Guyanese reggae club (Slogan: “Jah is living”) had been operating illegally, packing eight hundred people at twenty dollars a head into a backyard, with a cut, according to another neighbor, going to blind-eye-turning cops. Bedford-Stuyvesant, until recently, was, in the words of one of my neighbors, “the ghetto of America” (slogan “Bed-Stuy, do or die”), but is now branded as Clinton Hill, which is branded as Fort Greene, which is branded as “Brownstone Brooklyn.” On two-block Claver Place the smell of ganja wafts most evenings. Why am I thinking about all of this? I bought a three-story, wood-frame, two-family dwelling in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and am preparing it for tenants. But to the same degree that I lust after what’s produced under these brand names-with exceptions: Viking fridges are junk-I am offended by how much they cost, and how divorced from manufacturing reality, let alone ethics, the pricing seems to be. Such items are overwhelmingly engineered by Germans (Bosch, Duravit, Dornbracht, Miele, which sounds Italian but 100 percent isn’t), often by bona fide Italians (Alessi, XO, and Bertazzoni, which was originally La Germania, natch), occasionally by Americans (Viking, Sub-Zero), and in one case by New Zealanders (Fisher & Paykel). Recently I have aggressively indulged this weakness in the realm of high-end domestic appurtenances-namely appliances and fixtures. As a friend once put it: “I have a terrible defect. My head turns, my attention is captured, I am almost wounded (definitely smitten in the beaten-or-struck sense of the word), when the right object hits my eye in the right way. I’m smitten by everything from fabric patterns to the pennant-shaped washers beneath the chromed lug nuts of one in every ten thousand eighteen-wheelers. Furniture, fixtures, appliances-it is an across-the-board phenomenon, with unpredictable, contradictory-seeming implications. I have a quasi-erotic attraction to well-built and beautiful objects. “Philadelphia Chippendale! And all I have to do is go to the police.”
#CRAIGSLIST BROOKLYN FULL#
“I’d rather have one nice piece than a room full of junk. “Believe it or not, we have two Philadelphia Chippendale chairs.” “I made a list of things I liked at the museum. She’ll find him an apartment, and persuade her husband to lend a hand, too. She vows to give him a job-under the condition that he turn himself in to the police and serve a few months in jail. The film Six Degrees of Separation ends in a conversation between a matronly uptown art dealer (Stockard Channing) and a street-kid grifter (Will Smith). And don't miss the author in-person at Greenlight Bookstore on July 16 as he reads from and discusses More Curious with his editor. Read an exclusive excerpt from the book below, in which Wilsey’s subject strikes close to home: renovating his Bedford Stuyvesant building with fixtures and fittings from the wealth of Craigslist.
Wilsey travels across the country to profile restaurateur Danny Meyer, to explore the art of Marfa, Texas, to visit NASA. The essays in Sean Wilsey’s brand-new collection were written for a variety of publications, from National Geographic to The London Review of Books, and their subject matter is just as expansive.
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