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Ignoring Homes, Thieves Make Off With Just the Gates Guarding Them
By MICHAEL WILSON
Hers was the hand of a little girl, smooth and quick, when she first learned to open that little iron gate. That was half a century ago, and while the hand aged — deeper wrinkles, better nails — the gate remained constant, its creak sounding the arrival of visitors like a doorbell and as much a part of the home on Vanderbilt Avenue as the brownstone walls themselves.
The girl was Esther Davis, and she is now 53, and she went to work on Monday and came home in a hurry to relieve the health attendant watching her aunt, and where that gate should have been, there was nothing, like an old friend’s smile suddenly void of teeth.
“I thought maybe my husband took it off to fix it,” she said. “Then I noticed my neighbor’s gate was gone.”
She looked down the block and saw a police officer. She hurried to report her gate missing, and found herself in a line of sorts that grew in front of her eyes.
“I was informed that it also happened on Clermont,” one block over in their neighborhood, Fort Greene in Brooklyn, Ms. Davis said. Then the officer’s radio barked. “The police got a report that there were missing gates on St. James,” in neighboring Clinton Hill, she said.
At week’s end, the exact number of missing gates remained unclear, street scuttlebutt putting it somewhere between several and a score. On Ms. Davis’s block alone, five gates were stolen, neighbors said, and the police said three more were taken on nearby St. James Place and one on Cambridge Place.
“We were devastated about the gate,” Ms. Davis said two days after its disappearance, chuckling at her own words. “I cannot believe I’m this upset about the gate.” But still: “The gate’s been there forever.”
The thieves struck around 8 or 8:30 a.m. Monday, a busy time on Vanderbilt, the sidewalks thick with strollers and straphangers heading for any number of nearby trains. Sidewalks filled with eyewitnesses to what they did not realize was a crime.
Then someone did. Across the street from the brownstones are the back windows of Brooklyn Teen Challenge, a treatment center for drug addicts and home for almost three months to a man named Frank Willingham, 47, who kicked PCP and crack and now works there. He looked out the window and saw a white van.
“It was curious to me,” he said, describing one man standing next to the van looking up and down the street, and another one holding a gate that he then put in the van.
Then they switched, the first guy going for another gate. Maybe they’re fixing them, Mr. Willingham thought. “Then I thought, wait, the landlord would do that. I was going to go outside and question them, but when they saw me coming, they jumped in the van and took off. As I ran to catch the tag number, they turned right and sped up Fulton Street.”
The former addict pulled out his cellphone and had the satisfaction of being the dialer, not the subject, of a call to 911.
The commanding officer of the local police precinct, Deputy Inspector Anthony Tasso, said detectives were looking for the van, interviewing victims and seeking video from cameras on the street. Ms. Davis’s husband, Vinson, has just such a camera and has footage of one of the thieves at work. “Looking like he’s an inspector almost,” Mr. Davis said. “He’s trying them as he goes along.”
Deputy Inspector Tasso said he believed the gates were being sold for scrap metal. “They’re heavy,” he said.
But a manager at one nearby scrap yard, Larry Petrosino of Benson Scrap Metal on Smith Street, said people with gates usually sold to dealers who fixed them up and resold them.
He says he pays 12 cents a pound for iron of the kind in gates. One hundred pounds would bring a thief $12. Clearly there is better money elsewhere in this niche market. Mr. Davis, looking to replace his gate, said he expected to spend $400 to $600.
While the search for the thieves continues, this is what it has come to in Fort Greene: people have slapped new locks on their gates, not on the side that opens to brownstones and the valuables and families within, but near the hinges, to protect the thing that is supposed to do the protecting. And when Ms. Davis arrives home from work, the people inside are surprised to see her, because no one heard her coming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/ny...1&ref=nyregion
Hers was the hand of a little girl, smooth and quick, when she first learned to open that little iron gate. That was half a century ago, and while the hand aged — deeper wrinkles, better nails — the gate remained constant, its creak sounding the arrival of visitors like a doorbell and as much a part of the home on Vanderbilt Avenue as the brownstone walls themselves.
The girl was Esther Davis, and she is now 53, and she went to work on Monday and came home in a hurry to relieve the health attendant watching her aunt, and where that gate should have been, there was nothing, like an old friend’s smile suddenly void of teeth.
“I thought maybe my husband took it off to fix it,” she said. “Then I noticed my neighbor’s gate was gone.”
She looked down the block and saw a police officer. She hurried to report her gate missing, and found herself in a line of sorts that grew in front of her eyes.
“I was informed that it also happened on Clermont,” one block over in their neighborhood, Fort Greene in Brooklyn, Ms. Davis said. Then the officer’s radio barked. “The police got a report that there were missing gates on St. James,” in neighboring Clinton Hill, she said.
At week’s end, the exact number of missing gates remained unclear, street scuttlebutt putting it somewhere between several and a score. On Ms. Davis’s block alone, five gates were stolen, neighbors said, and the police said three more were taken on nearby St. James Place and one on Cambridge Place.
“We were devastated about the gate,” Ms. Davis said two days after its disappearance, chuckling at her own words. “I cannot believe I’m this upset about the gate.” But still: “The gate’s been there forever.”
The thieves struck around 8 or 8:30 a.m. Monday, a busy time on Vanderbilt, the sidewalks thick with strollers and straphangers heading for any number of nearby trains. Sidewalks filled with eyewitnesses to what they did not realize was a crime.
Then someone did. Across the street from the brownstones are the back windows of Brooklyn Teen Challenge, a treatment center for drug addicts and home for almost three months to a man named Frank Willingham, 47, who kicked PCP and crack and now works there. He looked out the window and saw a white van.
“It was curious to me,” he said, describing one man standing next to the van looking up and down the street, and another one holding a gate that he then put in the van.
Then they switched, the first guy going for another gate. Maybe they’re fixing them, Mr. Willingham thought. “Then I thought, wait, the landlord would do that. I was going to go outside and question them, but when they saw me coming, they jumped in the van and took off. As I ran to catch the tag number, they turned right and sped up Fulton Street.”
The former addict pulled out his cellphone and had the satisfaction of being the dialer, not the subject, of a call to 911.
The commanding officer of the local police precinct, Deputy Inspector Anthony Tasso, said detectives were looking for the van, interviewing victims and seeking video from cameras on the street. Ms. Davis’s husband, Vinson, has just such a camera and has footage of one of the thieves at work. “Looking like he’s an inspector almost,” Mr. Davis said. “He’s trying them as he goes along.”
Deputy Inspector Tasso said he believed the gates were being sold for scrap metal. “They’re heavy,” he said.
But a manager at one nearby scrap yard, Larry Petrosino of Benson Scrap Metal on Smith Street, said people with gates usually sold to dealers who fixed them up and resold them.
He says he pays 12 cents a pound for iron of the kind in gates. One hundred pounds would bring a thief $12. Clearly there is better money elsewhere in this niche market. Mr. Davis, looking to replace his gate, said he expected to spend $400 to $600.
While the search for the thieves continues, this is what it has come to in Fort Greene: people have slapped new locks on their gates, not on the side that opens to brownstones and the valuables and families within, but near the hinges, to protect the thing that is supposed to do the protecting. And when Ms. Davis arrives home from work, the people inside are surprised to see her, because no one heard her coming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/ny...1&ref=nyregion