(all photo: Brian Hedden)

Tree stands have popped up all across the borough. This one is somewhere in Bay Ridge, probably on 4th Avenue, probably in the mid- to high-60s.

I don’t remember exactly – I was actually quite drunk at time, and in retrospect was quite lucky to take this photo without the hyper-realistic Beer Goggles blur.

I have often lamented the passing of Stella’s Diner on 18th Avenue. Because without it, there are no diners in my corner of Bensonhurst. I love neighborhood diners, and the absence of one in my neighborhood really hurts. I never put too much thought into why there are no diners here, though, but at least now I have a hypothesis to offer to the scientific community.

Bensonhurst is a neighborhood that has no bars to speak of. Without bars, there are no people stumbling around drunk at 1am, looking for eggs, home fries, and silver dollar pancakes before they head for home. And without this built-in market of 1am breakfast customers, the economic viability of any potential diner is considerably diminished.

In case you were wondering why Bensonhurst has no bars, I already came up with a theory for that: I hypothesize that Italians drink with their families, and Irish drink to get away from them, and that’s why Bay Ridge has all of the Irish pubs.

I’m not Irish, but I drink to get away from my family anyway.

P.S. What’s with black-taxi companies requiring an address to pick up fares, and refusing customers who only give them street corners? Hello, it’s 2am, I’m drunk, I’m inside of a diner and didn’t grab the address when I came in… I just want to get home and I don’t have the mental capacity to fabricate an address. As it is, my gf and I ended up hailing a black-cab – yeah, like THAT’S totally legal – that was parked next to this tree stand. So someone else got my taxi fare. Take that, black-taxi dispatcher.