Not only were we in a hurricane, we were in a hurricane whose eye passed 250 feet from our house - corner of Washington Ave & St Marks Place in Brooklyn, according to the NOAA storm tracker. And what happened? A few downed branches. Lots of rain, that we slept through like babies, cat at our feet. And the next day, a neighborhood that looked far better than it did after the tornado that wreaked havoc last summer. Hurricane schmurricane. Category zero, you big wimp. And there I was posting on Facebook photos of the war-zone gear Regan and I had assembled the night before the storm, ready to fight our way to whatever story might happen in the 100 mph winds.

So the next day, after we had slept soundly through the whole thing, I took one of the cameras and went out in shorts and flip-flops, expecting to see something. Apparently our neighbors were also ready for Doomsday…

… and the good people at the (just opened and highly recommended) Brooklyn Bagel Shoppe on Vanderbilt Avenue had gone so far as to tape up the entrance to their basement. 

Well, in fact something had actually happened in the neighborhood. A few downed branches, here…

… but not enough to deter the people of Prospect Heights from reclaiming a still half-deserted Flatbush Avenue.

At the spectacularly ugly Richard Meier building on Grand Army Plaza, they had sandbagged the revolving doors, but that turned out to be overkill too.

So, nothing at all? Well, these unlucky motorists did have something on their hands - a tree, in fact, the only downed tree I could see in the neighborhood. “Waiting for the Fire Department?” I innocently asked one of them. “No way, baby! I’m gonna back up out of it!” he said, and promptly went back to ripping the smaller branches away with his hands. Don’t know if he succeeded, but he made me smile: This is New York, where hurricanes just scratch our paint and people move downed trees with their bare hands. Dumb, but so like the spirit of the city. “Whaddaya think I am, some kind of lumberjack?”, he seemed to say - and see you in 75 years, for the next statistically occurring hurricane.