When Fiction Is Fact and TV Reality

In a fiction piece in the current issue of The New Yorker entitled Demolition, Louise Erdrich describes a particularly loathsome (and cuckolded) contractor:

Ted had built many of the newer houses in Pluto. He was also responsible for most of the least attractive buildings in town. He bought up old properties — graceful houses just beginning to decay and churches that had consolidated their congregations or lost them to time — then he stripped them of their oak trim or carbed doors or stained-glass windows and sold it all as salvage to people in the cities. He tore down the shells and put up eightplex apartment buildings that were so hideous — aluminum-sided or fake-bricked, with shingled mansard roofs or flimsy inset balconies — it was a wonder the town council couldn’t see it.

Sounds like Ted would fit right in here in Brooklyn!
Photo by MaRkoP