My Favorite Park Slope: Street To Window Peep (But Not in a creepy way)

[Photo by Flickr User benrubenstein]

Pushing a stroller up the hill from 5th Avenue to Prospect Park for adventures in the Tot Lot is kind of like hiking, only WAY worse and with even MORE people wearing Teva sandals. The only things that make that make this trek tolerable is a) I'm usually double-fisting a cheese danish and a raspberry danish (SO MANY DANISHES) and b) I always walk up Garfield Place.

Why? Because everyone on this block has huge windows and super fancy furniture, and I just want some beautiful floor to ceiling drapes, OK? It's like, SOME OF US don't have room in our apartments for all the Eames-molded plastic furniture that we see in our wet dreams. And there's nothing wrong with trolling the streets for vicarious hurrahs while binge-eating, sweating, and preparing your body for the horrors of the Tot Lot.

Also, the best time for non-creepy window peeping is twilight (OMG, KStewwwww!), when people have their lights on, but have yet to close their blinds.

So many pendant lamps. 

Who Gives a Shit: What's Your Worst Landlord Story?

As someone who's inhabited 8 different apartments in the past 6 1/2 years of living in New York City, I've had my fair share of landlords. While most have been pleasant and reasonable, one will always stand out in my mind as the worst landlord I've ever had. For the sake of this article I'll call her "Margaret." 

Margaret owned a 4-story brownhouse in north Park Slope where she'd lived for the past 50 years, having grown up there. In 2008, my roommate and I moved into the ground floor unit of the nearly 100 year-old building. 

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A Tenant's Horror Story, And All The Bad Things I've Wished Upon Her Shitty Landlord

Summer Brennan / Via The NY Daily News

I have a rich and vibrant fantasy life.  In this life, I live in a world where nothing bad ever happens to good people, and justice always prevails. It's a world where we don't give heart transplants to war criminals, and no one ever opens a golf umbrella on a city street.  This is a world where I spend every day sitting in a golden meadow, surrounded by puppies, eating delicious enchiladas and counting my Powerball winnings.  And, it's a world where Summer Brennan gets her rent-controlled apartment back just before her scumbag landlord, Robert Lewis, goes to prison, where he gets shivved on the first day.

I don't know Summer Brennan, but I've read about her plight on her blog, Fight My Evil Landlord, and again in the Daily News. In January, while she was in Mexico, she was evicted from her rent-controlled Park Slope apartment, even though she'd always paid her rent. Everything she owned -- clothes, furniture and family heirlooms -- was thrown into bags and taken to some sketchy storage locker in a remote, undisclosed location. And even though the eviction was THROWN OUT IN COURT, she still doesn't have her apartment back. Nor has she been able to collect any of her possessions.  For the past three months, she's been sleeping on a friend's couch and living out of a bag with only the things she'd packed for her Mexico vacation in January.

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And you thought your landlord was bad at fixing things

Photo via scottclarkphotography.net

You think getting your landlord or super to fix shit in your apartment is hard now? Try having to go through the bank! Gotham Gazette recently reported that many New Yorkers – including Park Slopers – are being forced to do just that.

An estimated 30,000 New Yorkers were forced to put their property in foreclosure when the housing bubble burst a few years back. Many of those foreclosures were on rental buildings, meaning that tenants were left with no one to turn to when the light fixture broke in the hallway or the roof started leaking.

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Show Me Yours: Park Slope Real Estate

IMAGE VIA PARK SLOPE LENS

SHOW ME YOURS is a new recurring column in which we do two things: show you Park Slope real estate and tell you how much it is. That's pretty much it!

Here's our latest victim Show Me Yours-er:

• Location: 5th Avenue
• Type: 1 Bedroom Shotgun
• Rent or Own: Rent
• Cost: $1650/month
• Square footage: 650
• Who calls this place home?: Graphic designer (at a record label), Web designer (at another record label), 2 cats
• What's really good about this joint?: Hardwood floors, 4 windows, 4 huge closets
• What's really bad about this joint?: Have to walk through the bedroom to the living room, janky kitchen appliances, no bathtub

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