By David Crohn

My fealty to the heat continues. Its hegemony continues.

Observed a friend: “It’s like we move and no air is displaced. Everything is just heat.”

Indeed. Late summer’s heat vacuums out the air, and with it goes all impetus.

Usually I like that this column compels me to fling myself far from home into whatever parts of Downtown remain obscure.
Last week, for instance, seeking a green oasis, I befriended a local gardener and a furry chicken.

But who says “The Block” has to be a travel journal? I look out my own window and see plenty to write home about: my own home.

Very little actually happens here though. It’s quiet and out of the way; besides my turn-of-the century tenement and its twin next door, the architecture is new and drab.

Across the street that whole side of the block houses a strip of plopped-down professional dwellings whose base functionality and characterlessness seem out of place in what was actually Jane Jacobs’ nabe, and a major inspiration for her “Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Two blocks east, Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. At the White Horse nowadays, only weekday happy hours are bearable if rabble rousing hedge funders wasted by 7 p.m. on Friday nights aren’t your bag.

But all that, as long as it’s around but out of earshot, is just my speed. A reluctant curmudgeon at heart, I found a patch of a fabulous neighborhood that’s OK shutting the fuck up for a minute so a person can think.

The drab buildings also make it affordable (by Greenwich Village standards). A year ago this past February I paid nearly $500,000 for my medium-sized one-bedroom. Every month I mail off a reasonable $713 check to the managing agent in Queens.

A heap of money? Yes. Could I, with that same purse, have afforded a near-monarchical manse in Rhode Island, or an endless swatch of land somewhere far west of the Mississippi River? Yes, but here, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter is sort of a neighbor. As are Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, Calvin Klein, Naomi Watts and the guy from that one reality show.
I live quietly. I write about a different block every week. My life and my world, though small, are nice. Manageable.
Problem is, living here has also made me into what I call a fist-waver. Fist-wavers are the dedicated, motivated, civic-minded busybodies and complainers.

Stepping out my door, looking north and then south I can always find something to wave a fist at. A mostly innocuous, figurative fist, but still.

There’s the dog shit everywhere, the cabs and truck drivers that don’t have the four seconds to give to the stop sign at Perry and 11th Streets.

Does my ultra-local paper, WestView, report on any of this? Yes, occasionally, but never enough, it seems. They are always on a rampage of preservation. Knock it all down, I say, when the choler in my system rises to an unstable level.

Which is actually not how I feel about the Julian Schnabel building, a cerise-colored sore thumb poking up from an unlandmarked patch of far West 11th Street. The standard fist-waving standpoint on this is that it is very, very ugly.

One day I exited my building to find Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, loitering on the corner. Meanwhile, across the street a film crew was setting up. He was preparing to tell a local television station about the horror this luxury condo has wreaked on the area, aesthetically speaking.

I know Berman from another story I wrote about the South Greenwich Village and how important it is to protect that neighborhood’s old treasures. He’s a great guy: passionate, smart, affable. His position regarding the Schnabel is tenable, to say the least: The building’s design, flat, uninspired, a kind of Orwellian neo-Gothic, is a painful reminder that some people with a lot of money do not know how to spend it.

I agree with Berman almost all the time, which I think came through in my article (especially since NYU, the story’s antagonist, the antichrist for local preservationists, didn’t get back to me). Which is why I only feel a little bit guilty saying this: The Schnabel building is not that bad.

Sure it’s an ungodly pink, and Schnabel waited until it was finished to literally unveil it, but I have seen worse. Been to the Lower East Side lately? Or Bond Street?

All this matters, the see-sawing opinion of a single fist-waver, because it’s all we have. And by us I mean the Washington Street-between-Perry-and-11th-Street folks.

But there isn’t, all in all, much to wave a fist about. In a city with a withering infrastructure and nowhere at all to take a piss, there are still places where you can settle down. And park a car, even. The co-op board is friendly and forgiving. The trees are green and plentiful; my deli sells the New York Times and El Diario and rice and beans and is happy to accept UPS packages while we’re at work.

The heat won’t let down; it doesn’t know about letting down. Even the raindrops are warm and gather in mean spurts of debilitating fury.

Here, though, on Washington Street, the breeze from the river nearby is palpable. And there’s always just the right amount of things to complain about.