“Claude???” © 2015
Claude my eccentric cousin, bought a clapboard house in Park Slope…some years ago. It was older than the brownstones that were scattered thru Brooklyn’
The shanty’s exterior facade …just another shingled wreck …like the rest of the surrounding neighborhood.
Its mixed-up, inconstant interior, a mishmash which had begun its long-life, as an individual family home, built in the 1800’s. It had been reinvented a couple of times.
The last renovation, had it chopped into a single occupancy, S.R.O. dwelling.
It had had good bones once, but now its bones were weak and arthritic.
The vacant structure had 5 bare fireplaces, (in other words), all their mantles were missing.
The staircases to the 2nd & third floors, hung like loose trapeze ladders.
One had to be out of their bloody mind to attempt climbing… those swinging, air-borne steps. The makings of a haunted house…but even the ghosts had abandoned the place!
Along comes my imaginative, weirdo cousin to fulfill his dream, to be a landlord. So, he buys the property from “the down on their luck” … but now very thrilled couple.
As soon as he received the deed to “The Manor” …Claude thought of himself as landed gentry. Can you believe before even doing essential structural rehabilitation of the run-down staircase, etc. he employed his funds to have a stained glassed window of his “imagined” family crest… commissioned. It was a brilliantly created fantasy by one of his talented, but insane pals. The window was installed high above on the 2nd floor landing. This was so that when the sun’s rays lit the colored glass, all who dared enter his “manor”, would know Lord Claude… resided there! From what “shtetl of Europe” did this crest emerge…I can’t imagine!
His family, including me, made fun🤣 of his decision to purchase that decayed “has-been” … of a house.
Insult, to injury, the neighborhood, was run-down, too, with an abundance of derelicts, druggies, and garbage thrown about.
Claude wired pots and pans and bells hung on clear fishing line crisscross the attic, strategically, … so when the intruders, druggies, attempted to climb in…they would clang loudly.
I’m sure his method worked and gave some would- be invaders ‘the fright of their lives’.
(I gather this was Lord Claude’s version of a burglar alarm system).
His house was next door, to his artsy-fartsy friend, Percy Greenwall. Claude bought it for $18,000. It had been on the market for years…
“Thrown out money,” or so we, his judgmental family… thought & voiced.
Claude found a 😛gas pipe in the brick kitchen hearth. It was walk-in height. He examined its interior & found a gas pipe. The ever-devious Claude got an idea…He opened its sealed valve with wrench and lit the gas. This robust roaring flame, in the tall brick fireplace, made the whole un-insulated house toasty warm that whole fierce winter.
When Lord of the Manor, Claude, received an enormous, appropriate gas bill from the utility company, he feigned shocked innocence. 🙄
“How in this world could I possibly make such a bill”? I live all alone; I hardly ever cook either…so…
The pack of utility workmen were perplexed. They could not think of how, (as he vehemently claimed), to burn so much fuel.
Would anyone in their right mind “think” to do such a dangerous, wasteful, and careless act as my nutty cousin?
Over and over, the crumbling clapboard house was checked for gas leaks, and meter problems…to no avail.
The utility company never found the cause and wrote it off as a mystery.
Lord Claude never had to pay that gas bill.
