Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

The Q hates himself sometimes for always looking North. There's so much going on south and west of me it's easy to forget I started this blog thing to circumscribe the train station the Q at Parkside. In fact, quite a bit is happening in the microhood I call Caledonia, due to the decades long stint of the Caledonian Hospital on Parkside, now known to the world as 123 on the Park. Those 123-ers have now gone public with the brand new building they're building just next door:

With an entrance on Parkside, it'll function very differently than 123 and change the often quiet and dark stretch a great deal. But once again, like SO many renderings before it, do you notice something about the people drawn in the rendering? Look close:

Yep. You noticed too? Every single one of them is fit as a fiddle and lean as can be. Not a chunker among them. No flab on these cats. The inherent size-ism* is clear as a bell. I mean, what are the chances that six New Yorkers and one kid are going to be trim and fit? I mean, outside Chelsea. For shame.

If I've heard the old saying once I've heard a hundred times: "as East 21st goes, so goes Caledonia." It's a fascinating street, especially "our" section from Woodruff to Caton. I particularly love that one limestone house holding on for dear life, alone and proud. There are two fairly big vacant lots with new projects going up, and one looks like this:

 I'm no architect, but that seems like a whole lot of studios to me. The ones that say "kitchenette," that's like a dead giveaway yes? Or is this an SRO building? Methinks the former. The other site has no rendering, but appears to be developed by a company called Brookland. Here's a ton of projects they're working on all over the borough. Lots and lots of them are in Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy, so they clearly have Central Brooklyn on the brain in their wallet.

Those projects alone match all the new development the Q witnessed around here in his first dozen years. As I've mentioned many times, my home road of Clarkson is hosting a steady stream of new projects, many on my own block. I was particularly saddened to learn that this house next to the Haitian Pentecostal church known as Mount of Olives will be torn down by the end of summer:

I remember being told when I first moved here that these two houses were "kind of sketchy." When you hear that word, always be skeptical. The house on the left is essentially the rectory for the church next door. And while they're not the best landscapers, they're about as sketchy as a hipster taking a painting class. Then the house on the right, the one that just sold, is home to an extended family of people so sweet and friendly hardly a day goes by I don't exchange pleasantries with them. They loved hanging on their porch. I learned yesterday that they're decamping for the south. That is, Ditmas Park. Don't cry for them, Argentina. The purchase price was probably well beyond their wildest dreams when they purchased the place decades ago for a song and a small pile of Susan B. Anthony's. But geez Louise I'll miss this little stretch. The brick town houses are apparently being bought too, amassing enough land to make a tear-down scenario likely. Would be a shame, since each is essentially a three family house right now. Three family house with 4-6 mailboxes that is.

*to those who haven't caught on, including the people who regularly email me that all the folks in these pictures are white, I'll let you in on a little secret. My talking about their weight is actually sarcasm, and yeah, I'm noting that they're white. But I don't really want to get into a whole thing about that, because it tends to get defensive and ugly. So shhhhh, don't tell anybody.