Gerritsen Beach #66, 1/31/07

So here it is, the last post before my vacation. It was very cold today, so of course I chose to go to a library right near a beach. Since my landlord has decided we don't need any heat during the day (as of this writing it is 5:14 pm and the heat hasn't been on since sometime last evening), I figured the outside wasn't going to be much colder than my apartment. Therefore, I needed a greater challenge than the harsh winds of Gowanus; I needed to venture out to the heretofor unknown (by me) area of Brooklyn, Gerritsen Beach.

No wait, actually what happened was when I was reading the Howard Zinn book (see last entry) I remembered the existence of a book named Johnny Got His Gun, an anti-war book from the Vietnam War era, and also remembered that I had been meaning to read it since high school. The Gerritsen Beach Branch had the most available copies (according to the online catalog), so it won the honor of my presence.

Branch: Gerritsen Beach
Location: 2808 Gerritsen Ave. (at Bartlett Place)
Transport: walked up to 7th Ave. and Flatbush, B train to Kings Highway, B31 bus to Gerritsen Ave. and Bartlett Pl.
Books: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo; Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Date: Wednesday, January 31, 2007

A quick aside, you'll all be happy to know that the landlord just called and is gonna come figure out what the problem is. So hopefully that'll work out, he seemed friendly enough on the phone anyway. But you know how they are. He's just trying to catch more flies with honey than with vinegar! And that fly is me! But little does he know, I already had some honey mustard today on a sandwich. So there.

This library was quite a different experience from the past few. While the buildings have generally been very nice, the last several I'd seen were all made around the same time, and therefore had very similar designs (large, imposing rectangles). This one was not only built very recently (1997) but is trying to have a sort of beach/shore type feel to it. I liked it a lot, partially because of the bitter cold juxtaposing with said beach imagery. The selection was fairly standard - what do these libraries have against science fiction? - but there were some neat decorations, including one of these old bicentennial flags.

I roamed around in search of a second book I wanted, and finally settled on Heart of Darkness, another one that I somehow missed in high school. I loved Nostromo and am fairly certain that I could easily become obsessed with Joseph Conrad if I read a few more of his books. I am already halfway through Heart of Darkness, and I love it, big surprise I know. Appropriately enough, both of these books were in the "young adult assignment" section.

Something interesting happened to me after I left the library and before I got the bus back to the subway station, but I'll post the pictures first, as one of them is a good visual aid to the story.



Full shot from across the street.



This part looks kinda like a barn?



Here's the clock tower. The actual time was about 1:30 pm. Maybe it was struck by lightning at one time.



If you go to the full-sized image and look closely, you can see the ornamental owls here. No, I am not obsessed with owls.



Even wider shot from the bus stop.



The beach/park across the street...



...and another view of it. Here you can see all the tall grass, which there isn't really a scale for, but believe me, it was tall. I decided to go check it out, and there were a few little footpaths cut through it. I started walking down one, and hadn't gotten far before I realized that I could only see the top of the library building, and couldn't see the street at all. Then I turned around and saw a clearing with three fairly large gentlemen in it, not too far ahead of me.

They didn't seem threatened by my presence at all, and it was a public place, but there was no way either they or I were at all visible from anywhere except for the general area right around where we were. If they had wanted to do shady dealings in the middle of a day, they could hardly have found a better place. And even if there was nothing shady about it, the locals probably didn't want some tourist skulking around. I always assume that isolated peninsulas have more hardcore locals than other places. So I hightailed it back to the bus stop.

Only other thing to report: the white-haired librarian at the information desk looked so mean that I was afraid to take a picture of the weird '76 flag I mentioned earlier. Plus, I haven't taken any pictures inside of the libraries yet, why start now?

Well, I'm off. As I said I'll be back in a couple weeks, and hopefully I'll have lots to report. Keep checking though, if you want, cause I might try to blog on the road, or something. Have a good beginning of February everyone!