Brooklyn's Industry City, or The Most New York Walk Ever

 So we're sitting at a lay berth in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, not one of our normal haunts. This particular berth is usually reserved for the clean oil royalty Retirees, a half dozen clean oil barges whose crews have been doing one cargo a month for the past 15 years and sitting and chewing their cud the rest of the time getting paid. 

That's a whole 'nother story. Anyways, the HQ doesn't normally hang out here but the retirees are out of town, either at anchor, working, or at a different lay berth and so here we are. 

        Where are we? We're at an abandoned waterfront parking lot with collapsing warehouses, rusty chain link fences, weeds, metal scrap and mooring bitts  at the water's edge. And oddly enough, there is shore access here. You have to walk through the abandoned area, past a couple of abandoned guard shacks at abandoned fence gates that are open, all looking post-apocalyptic AF, and THEN, you come to the gate. The gate has a guard protecting the steel scrap, rats, trash, and abandoned warehouses from the neighbors. And the gate has a guard. A shirtless monoglot Central American watching TV on a 30 year old portable TV, who doesn't look up if you go through the gate. 

     I guess the parking area was where FEMA stuck all the reefer trucks that Covid failed to fill up with the predicted bodies at one time, as the falling-over fences had relatively new barbed wire, now mostly trip hazards.  The whole place looks like a set from The Walking Dead. I mean it's gross... but you know what's worse? The neighborhood outside the gate. First off, there are a half dozen sketchy people, some wearing a nondescript unarmed guard uniform, some not, all gathered around the partially stripped remnants of a rusty Honda Civic.  The abandoned massive building across the street has trash blowing out of it, and glass from the hundreds of broken windows is all over the street and sidewalks. There aren't any burning barrels, but then again, I haven't been out at night. 

         Anyways, armed with my trusty roll of quarters that I keep in my pocket because I can't have guns in NY and even carrying a sap is illegal, I pass by the bad 80's movie set that is this slice of Mogadishu in Brooklyn, before crossing the gentrification line and hitting Industry City. 

      It's hard to describe Industry City. It's a half dozen or so identical WWII era massive industrial buildings, possibly ex-military, that has been turned into hundreds of small shops, factories, restaurants, distilleries and furniture showrooms. It's a very cool concept. I bought a cut of good meat from a butcher, the spices and ingredients to make tzatziki from a middle eastern grocer, and checked out the blacksmith's shop that was forging parts for the maker's workshop the next floor up. The assorted distilleries and brewhouse restaurants had an appeal too, but being as shipowners are puritanical beasts, I did not partake. 

https://industrycity.com/

     The biggest two negatives to me was that all the public spaces were infected with hipsters smoking weed, including the restaurant seating and playground. Aside from working a job that requires me to be drug-free, I absolutely abhor the smell of weed, and there were at least two dozen people smoking weed in my 30-minute walk in the common spaces between buildings. God I hate that smell. And I hate hipsters. Now I have a reason to hate them even more. The dingy-looking probably-wealthy assholes who were smoking joints upwind from where a half-dozen kids were messing around in the pretty decent playground deserved a punch in the throat or at a minimum to have ground glass shoved in their eyes and then to be thrown on the ground and kicked about the face, neck, head, chest and genitals until they changed shape. 

 But I digress. At any rate, I had a nice walk, minus all the damn people.  The walk back to the dock was pretty much as it was on the way out- I crossed the gentrification line, shifty people started going by, trash blowing about underfoot, and the 'security' guards, who very obviously are criminals with cover stories, were side-eying me again when a Canadian goose stepped in my path from between two broken down cars, got startled and flew off, honking, but unable to get much altitude in the short distance, it barreled down towards the ringleader, who let out a pretty fair high-pitched shriek and ran with his hands in the air. I then passed by the shirtless gate attendant shortly thereafter, who was still watching Univision on the 1985-era Radio-Shack portable TV and scratching his armpit fairly energetically, too much so to notice me. It is about a 10-12 minute walk to the pier from that gate, and not a soul to be seen in 50 or so acres of cracked and weedy asphalt,  which is an odd feeling in the heart of NYC.  

 I dunno. The whole thing is weird.