Greenpoint
Lorven Pharmacy
Culture on the Cheap
Signs of the Times
There are a number of reasons I like living in Greenpoint, but if I had to pick my favorite reason (for the purposes of this blog anyway), it would be the homemade signage. Close your eyes and envision some form of socially unacceptable behavior and I can assure you there is an angry missive— scrawled in Sharpie marker— SOMEWHERE in this neighborhood deriding it.
But it isn’t simply the pervasiveness of signage in this neighborhood that intrigues me, as I have seen numerous signs— usually admonishing dog owners to scoop their poop— in many different areas of Brooklyn. For example, I have noticed that the homemade signage to be found in Park Slope, Cobble/Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens is pretty straightforward and polite. Greenpoint signage, on the other hand, is second only to Red Hook (in my experience, anyway) in the use of profanity and threat(s) of physical violence.
The hoi polloi can keep their strollers, therapists, tea lounges, and superfluous civility; drunken Poles, empty Remy Martin bottles, feral packs of children gnawing on chicken bones and hard-hitting opening statements such as “Dear Fuck Mouth” resonate with me. It is this no-nonsense “pull yourself up by the bootstraps so you can pick up the drunk fuck next to you by the shirt collar and kick his ass” mentality that makes this country what it is today. For better or worse.
Follows are a couple of my favorite examples of Greenpoint signage with limited commentary.
It’s funny, when I cropped this image it began to look a wee bit like the Polish flag. Very appropriate to say the least.
Looks like this was written by the same person. I for one would like to meet “Neighbor”. I think we’d get along.
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