Saturday – besides the wonderful time we had after we left the house – started off with irritation.  We were awakened by the sound of hammering, and discovered a large platform being built almost entirely across the street a few doors down from our house.  According to the fellow building it, the Fellowship House was putting on a gospel music concert for the residents (it’s a limited-care nursing facility) and they’d gotten all the permits, and the police were going to barricade the street.  I was not the only one complaining to this guy (not blaming him, of course, it wasn’t his fault) that no notice had been given to anyone on the block that the street was going to be barricaded, that the street would be taken over by this concert, and that people were supposed to move their cars.  We have a couple of apartment buildings on the street, so on-street parking is essential to the people who live there.  And since we’re accessible on one side by a one-way street with turning restrictions, getting in and out was going to be a problem for them (and the rest of us) too.  For me, personally, I had realtors coming by with clients to see the house, so there was a last-minute scramble to find their phone numbers and tell them that they’d have to park a block away and walk to the house.  Needless to say, nobody except the Fellowship House people was happy.

So, as in other matters town-related, I took my gripe to the Bloomfield Forum on nj.com.  By the next day, I was being villified right and left by people who seemed to think that I was being selfish and uncharitable – ignoring completely that the specific problem I cited was that no notice had been given to any of the hundreds of people on my block who were inconvenienced (or worse, in the case of three driveways that were blocked off by stage and seating, and at least one car that was towed) so on a Saturday morning, people had to make alternate plans for parking, move cars, and couldn’t get into or out of their street.  Not even “No Parking” paper signs.  Nada.  I even had one genius tell me that I should read my bible so I could be more charitable, like the gospel singers.  Duh.

Now it seems that the reason this happened is that the Fellowship House applied for a Block Party permit.  Of course, the assumption with something like that is that there is some block association planning it and taking care of the notices, so the police dept. can be forgiven – a little – but clearly there’s a hole in the system that FH took advantage of, which needs to be patched.