Neighborhood Threat

FRIDAY NIGHT
The boyfriend was coming back from a work event, and had phoned when he was leaving. About an hour and a half later, I’m starting to be concerned that he’s not home yet, combined with being concerned about the noise from the street outside. There’s more than the usual volume of murmuring, loud shouting, bottles being thrown, traffic backing up.

I’m about to pick up the phone to call 311, when I hear a key in the door. The boyfriend had been home for about half an hour, but was on the corner monitoring the shouting and bottle breaking. 311 told him that he had to call 911 because of the bottle throwing. The boyfriend also noted that everyone from inside the club appeared to be on the sidewalk.

The cops did show up about 20 minutes later but at that point the crowd had dissipated and the bottle breakers had headed elsewhere.

SATURDAY NIGHT
We came back from babysitting my niece and nephew in Jersey around 2am (their parents had gone to Live Earth). Banker St. was as busy as it would be at 8pm on a Friday night. Cabs are pulling up and discharging people on the corner every few minutes. We are trying to unload the car with a SUV impatiently waiting for us to move away from the trunk so they can pull up to the bumper and park behind us. I stood on the sidewalk waiting for the SUV to park, because it was full of girls wearing club gear, and didn’t trust them to not ding the car.

It wasn’t that hot but we shut the windows and turned on the air conditioning because in the hour it took us to get ready for bed, the noise was ridiculous. People standing in the middle of the street hugging. People having conversations for 10 minutes as they get into a cab, blocking traffic, causing drivers to honk. Etc.

Sunday morning, the street was full of trash. i mean, FULL OF TRASH. At first I thought that one of the newly-supplied city garbage cans that stand on the corners of Banker St. and Franklin St. had blown over, but they were there (and full to the gills). The street was full of hundreds and hundreds of club postcard fliers EVERYWHERE. Studio B has gotten good about cleaning up the sidewalk right in front of the club, but the residual trash that goes down the block to 239 Banker (which is unoccupied) and the industrial properties across the street are now accumulating trash after busy nights as well.

Some calls to 311 are on the list for today.