743: Don't You Be My Neighbor
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This house on Washington Street, New York, doesn't look like a house. It's more like an industrial building. Comes right up to the sidewalk, the red brick, steel window frames, and a grid of windows. It'd be considered a big house anywhere. But in New York, where people are doing pretty small quarters. I mean, it's huge. My building, I think, has 14 apartments. And I think this looks twice as big as it. And it's just him and his family. I don't know. The hymn in this case is Gnome Gottesman, a billionaire finance guy and art collector. The guy telling me about him is a neighbor from around the corner, AL-11. Not a billionaire, father of two teenage boys who share a bedroom. He runs a jewelry business with his wife. There's one other important feature on this immense house that he wants me to see. Bright yellow letters, neat and tidy and dignified on the bank of windows. They all read signs, no parking, active driveway. But when you live here, everybody knows he's bluffing. It's not a note parking zone, he says. Because there's no driveway. There's no garage. There's just a big door. But by pretending to have a driveway, what this man gets, he says, is kind of a real estate money cannot buy in New York. His own free parking space, right in front of his house. And parking. Parking is just beyond difficult in certain neighborhoods of New York. Like people cry over parking instead of frustrating. And finding a space in this neighborhood, I guess says. You sometimes go make the rounds and rounds and rounds and time passes. Sometimes it can take an hour. Sometimes more. I guess it says that when he first noticed Gottesman signs telling people not to park there, he respected the boxing. Initially it was very funny. I actually chuckled and I was like this guy, you know. Good for him for confiscating parking. I mean, whenever I passed it, it was like kind of funny. Like look what this guy did. With that one day, I was driving around looking for parking himself. It's taking forever. And he sees the space in front of Gottesman's house. And he decides, okay, this will be the day he'll park there. Five, ten seconds after there's a security guard or two of them that barge out of the property. They have cameras all over. So they see when you park and they run out. He says they told him you can't park here. And they pointed to the signs on the door. I was like laughing and I said, listen guys, I'm a neighbor. I know what you're doing here.
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