The Shwick!

You've probably heard me refer to it many times throughout the 9 months that I lived there-the Shwick. Short for Bushwick, the not so nice neighborhood where I lived in Brooklyn. It could be described as "gentrifying" or "up and coming" but I feel a more accurate description is "shithole". It was filled with dilapidated warehouses, hipsters and poor Latino families. The L train wasn't running literally 9 weekends while I lived there, which made escaping very difficult. I would have to walk 15 minutes through a neighborhood where I  felt like I had entered a third world country to get to the nearest subway, which didn't run after 11PM. My last month living there a girl was raped at the station.
Now why the f did I choose to live there you may ask. Good question. To escape my last roommate situation in Astoria, which had quickly soured. See The Roomie. This whole disaster hadn't left me with a lot of time to find a new place, and I needed something cheap, since I was only working part-time at my museum. This didn't leave me with many options and the place I found was definitely the best of the bunch. See The Apartment Hunt. Looking back, it did definitely work out for the best--my roommate and I got along well and she was also unemployed so there was no pressure as to why I was only working a couple days a week. I also got to hang out with the adorable Baby Kitty:

                                                                                     Like a bawce

Though there were some mornings when I did want to kill her--she would throw bitchfits outside my door with her nonstop meowing. Then when I finally let her in she would tap me in the face with her paw until I opened my eyes. But other than that I am going to miss that little fatty. I was probably already grumpy in the mornings for another reason. I had failed to look out of the window when I saw the apartment for the first time. So it was an unpleasant surprise when I discovered right below my window was the trash area. And since those who resided in my neighborhood did not work, the things that were being thrown away at all hours of the day and night were bottles. And every morning our super, who may or may not have been legally retarded, emptied the trash, while screaming into his cell phone in Spanish. For the rest of my days I will now have a complex surrounding the sound of clanking bottles. Add rapid-fire Spanish to the mix and you may as well forget it.
One of the culprits of these empty bottles were a group of dudes who would once a week have a party on my building's stoop with their pit bull. The one that lived there was always very polite to me, but get him riled up on Coqui and add in a few of his boys, and it was a whole different situation. There were quite a few weekends when I would leave my building, dressed to go out for the night, and would be greeted by "Yo Snowflake!" and "Come drink with us beautiful!". No thanks.
Then there were our neighbors across the hall. We could never quite figure out the situation there but I think we've gathered that it used to be a couple who lived there who used to get in epic screaming matches. We had the police come to our door a couple of times asking if we had heard anything suspicious and one time we even had a couple of attorneys show up asking if we could tell them anything. Who knows what happened there because not long after a new rotation of rowdy residents moved in. They were a few trashy, disgusting women, with a toddler. They were rude as shit and always left their garbage in the hall. And apparently one of them was a heroin addict--one night my roommate and I took turns watching through our peephole as the paramedics took her out on a stretcher and into an ambulance, yelling something about opiates the whole way. Claaaaassy.
But the worst of the worst was the bedbug incident. See The 48 Hours from Hell. A month after all this we had to go through the whole thing again (minus the laundry) because the exterminator company failed to tell us that they needed to spray twice. Once again, we cleared everything out of our rooms, put all our clothes in plastic bags and almost gave Baby Kitty a heart attack.
Now it wasn't all bad in this "up and coming" neighborhood. The rent was cheap. There was a delicious taco stand a couple blocks away, as well as a 24 hour organic grocery store, with delish breakfast sandwiches. The subway stop was a 30 second walk away (when it was running) and I had a laundromat on the same block. There was even a good restaurant (Northeast Kingdom) and bar (Pearl's) close by. The downside to all of these things is that they were jam-packed with hipsters. And not your typical skinny jean and Chuck Taylor wearing ones. This was a whole different level. Ponchos, huge beards, Lisa Frank backpacks, bouffant hairstyles and  ripped tights were just some of the accessories I would see, and that was just on my short walk to the subway. The L train offered further fashion-watching, none of which was trendy or flattering. Though I'm sure it exists somewhere, I have never seen an area with such outrageous hipsters. And I wouldn't have minded--I respect the arts and challenging the status quo. But their bad attitudes! Right up there with JAPy girls if you ask me. Wherever I went, I was stared down and made to feel like I didn't belong. And I'm not even that preppy. Perhaps I just oozed not wanting to be there and they could tell. Maybe they are still socially awkward from high school. Or maybe they were just rude. I think I had a hipster hold open a door for me twice, I never had one try and talk to me, and once when I stepped onto the L train with roughly 145 pounds of groceries in my arms, not one of them offered me their seat.
I gave both hipsters and Brooklyn a chance, but I was more than ready to leave. From now on I will act like a true Manhattanite and venture back only when I want to get wasted in Williamsburg and entertain myself with some good people-watching.