Overheard and Overseen

I just passed by a young-20s, well-groomed, nu-Greenpoint couple who, it appeared, were in the process of being ticketed by two police officers for drinking beers out of brown bags while strolling along Nassau Avenue. Now, this is no strange occurrence, seeing people brown-bag it (or no-bag it) along Nassau, but they're usually old, leathery Polish men who have probably drank their body weight in vodka hundreds of times over. This, though... this was entertainment!

What dialogue I caught went something like this:

Girl: "...you need a warrant for that!"

Cop: "No I don't."

Girl: "You can't just look in there without, umm, probable cause! You need to get a warrant first..."

Oh my. Perhaps she was sleeping in high school Civics class the day they were discussing the finer distinctions in search and seizure law, namely, that one's apartment and a paper bag fall into substantially different categories. Come on, honey, all they need to search your CAR is reasonable suspicion and a chip on their shoulder! I know your daddy's probably a lawyer out on the Island, but I'm afraid you're shit outa luck this time around...

I arrived back at the house, and had myself a couple minutes of a porch-sit. A guy walked by, glanced at our recently-installed aluminum gate, and his face immediately reflected the tacit question, "What the F*CK is that!?" I chuckled silently, because I then knew what I look like every time I walk up to the door.


A straight-on view of the gate can be found here, and a detail of that weird, recurring Mercedes hood-ornament thingy exists at the end of this link. And thus ends the pictoral series describing our building's multi-month metamorphosis. We live in a fucco-coated, south-Florida-esque row house in the garishly-gated community of Little Poland.

Guess that's Brooklyn living.