teddyballgame writes in the Prospect Heights Message Boards: “So early this morning at like 7 am, my electricity started like flickering on and off (at Lincoln and Underhill) … Then at about 8:25 there was some sort of giant noise outside, and people running this way and that, and now there are a ton of fire trucks.”
UPDATE from pete_c “Transformer exploded. (No word on whether it was Autobot or Decepti^H^H oh, never mind.) Con Ed was onsite and not looking too terribly worried (do they ever?) when I walked my animal back from the big park at about 9:15am.”
“The manhole cover in front of Lucky The Ghetto Poodle’s old laundromat was taped off with fun red ‘DANGER HAZARDOUS MATERIALS’ tape. So everyone be extra careful about that stray voltage, mmkay?”
No more shocked doggies: Prospect Heights Message Boards
I heard two loud explosions around 8:30. I called 911, and was told it was a “manhole fire”, and a fire engine was already on the scene. A customer in Sabra (deli) said he saw a manhole cover shoot two stories into the air, but this is unconfirmed. A super for a building on Lincoln Place said there was a car that was forced upward by the force of a manhole cover under it, and sure enough, there was a white car with an orange pylon on its roof.
Thank goodness for Con Ed.
In São Paulo, where my wife is from, this happens every time it rains–which is every day at 400 pm. You have to learn the difference between an exploding transformer and gunfire or you will be very nervous all the time …
Remembering the Underberg
If you’re in Brooklyn, that creaking sound you may hear is the ongoing demolition of six buildings condemned by developer Bruce Ratner to make way for his massive Atlantic Yards development.
The first building to go – brick by brick – is the Underberg Building, named for Samuel Underberg’s kitchen and grocery supply company, which sits on a roughly triangular plot of land at the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Avenue. The hulking structure was immortalized in Jonathan Lethem’s 2003 bestseller “Fortress of Solitude.”
Ratner hopes to turn the site into a public plaza at the heart of his 22-acre residential and commercial complex, which includes the Nets basketball arena.
Many locals have gone online to reminisce about this historic building and its psychic and literary meaning to them. While the building may be just a dilapidated eyesore to a developer like Ratner, to many it represents a bridge to the past, memories of a bygone era.
this building has bizarre and complex meaning to me, as I stood in front of it on 9/11 and from there watched the twin towers fall while fighter jets flew low and at truly terrifying speed around the nearby Williamsburgh Clocktower. I have always loved the lettering and the color, and the way it has been, over many years, a canvas of rust and paint and graf and change. I have some photos (prints) of the traffic jams and planes by the clocktower from that day. I might try to find a way to post these if I can dig them up. i have them deeply buried away. (City Noise)
The markers I hated to write with while hitting the insides were magnums and pilots. Magnums were a pain in the ass to refill, pilots were alright, but you had to change the filter and that became messy. I used to throw an eraser tip on to my pilots, so I could get nice thick, juicy tags out of them. My favorite tools to write with were TNT’s, uni-wides and mini-wide markers with the flo-master ink. A few years later, the supermarket ink became popular and so I started hitting insdes with that. Flow master ink was difficult to get a hold of because most stores sold it from behind the counter. It was too expensive to buy and too hard to rack up. It was cheaper and more convenient for me to use the supermarket ink. The spot to rack up this ink was on Flatbush Avenue, in a store called Samuel Underberg. Almost everyone in Brooklyn went to this place to get their ink. While I was in the store, a couple of times, I ran into CREAM. RTW and SASOON.
One day, I was casing out the spot and had a thought of just dragging my hand across the whole shelf and drop every fuckin bottle of ink into a garbage bag. If I did do that, and opened the door real fast the bell would go off. But if you opened the door slowly, the bell would not go off. So one day, I went in there, through the back door with a garbage bag and opened the door slowly and must have grabbed about one hundred pint size bottles of supermarket ink. There were all colors from blue, to green, purple and black. That was back in 1985, when I did a master bomb with all that ink. I bombed every fuckin car in the insides. There was only one other writer using that same ink, during that summer of 1985, and that was this dude SAST. When you’re bombing the insides, you are bound to run into conflict with a few writers over space. I had this beef with DJ BONES (or DJ FRANKY BONES), who had a war with CI (AKA JAZ) from the MOG CREW, RE.MOG, CHARM.TNR, LOST, GHOST, ZE (AKA ZANE), BET, ROACH, and JN all use to cross me out at one time or another. BASE was a dude that always had my back and would never front on no one. (Subway Outlaws)
far as that building is concerned, I worked there for 15 years and my dad for 40! Mr. Underberg was a mover and shaker in the area for many years, involved with B’nai Brith and many other organizations, as a well as being active in boating by Sheepshead Bay back in the 40’s and 50’s. He had a bungalow there as a summer retreat and he had numerous trophies attesting to his boating endeavors. The building itself had people living on the top floors till about 1970, the bottom level housed a company called Samuel Underberg inc. which was a food store supply outfit that would have everything a store would need( carts, signs, stock moving equipment, aluminum goods etc….everything except food) Waldbaum was our largest account, but we would also deal with smaller places such as Balducci’s and Zabars. Mr Underberg passed away around 1983 and his wife lived till 96 years old, and recently passed. That building was just sold by the Underberg family and even though it was in disrepair, it is a prime spot and they got somewhere near 1 million dollars or so. I believe it will be renovated and will have offices there. (Lightning Field)