What’s on Steve Buscemi’s stoop? Park Slope residents say it’s nobody’s business!
A local blogger has shut down his site documenting the quirky actor’s castoffs after the star’s son asked him to stop snooping — and outraged neighbors threatened to clobber him.
But Robert Schnakenberg said he’s baffled that cranky locals didn’t see the humor of his blog.
“If someone were taking pictures of the crap I put out on my stoop, I couldn’t care less,” said Schnakenberg. “Rooting through someone’s garbage or peeping in someone’s windows, that’s totally different. But that’s not what was going on here.”
For two years, the pop-culture scribe walked his dog past the home of the “Reservoir Dogs” star and published photographs of discarded doll heads, old cassettes and ratty hats on his little-known site, “What’s on Steve Buscemi’s Stoop?”
It wasn’t until last month that local bloggers found Schnackenberg’s project and mused whether it was “cool or not cool.”
Riled-up residents gave more than just one- or two-word answers.
“He’s lucky I don’t know him!” said 37-year-old Slope resident Kurt Schamann, who said he would have no qualms about beating up Schnakenberg. “Steve is a regular guy who grew up in Brooklyn and then you get people like this who don’t respect that!”
Susan Desocio, who lives in the Slope, said people should rummage through the blogger’s garbage in return.
“He was psychoanalyzing Steve Buscemi’s stuff,” Desocio said. This guy needs some medical attention.”
Schnakenberg, who has penned such celebrity titles as “Christopher Walken A-to-Z,” said his blog was never meant for the wider world — just a small community of Buscemi fans.
He started the site in 2009, after he walked his dog past the actor’s home, saw a disembodied doll’s head on a fence post and took a photo with his phone.
Schnakenberg said that in the weeks that followed, more junk appeared and gave him “a lot of little mysteries to solve.”
For instance, why did Buscemi have a hat from the Philadelphia Department of Corrections? It turns out that the actor once narrated the audio tour guide at the Eastern State Penitentiary Museum in Philadelphia.
“A couple of my followers pointed that out to me,” Schnakenberg said. “I never would have figured that one out on my own. It’s a testament to the power of crowdsourcing.”
Erica Reitman, whose blog, F—ked in Park Slope, tipped people to the short-lived Buscemi trove, praised Schnakenberg for respecting the actor’s family’s wishes to shut down the site.
“I just wish Steve had had some fun with him first,” Reitman said. “He could have started leaving naked Barbies with shaved heads, pig knuckles … at least that’s what I would have done.”
Schnakenberg said that Buscemi’s son sent “the nicest cease-and-desist letter I could ever hope to receive” — but that also ruined some of the mystery.
Buscemi’s wife, who is an artist, was the one who had been setting out most of the junk, he said.
“I should have called it ‘What’s Steve Buscemi’s Old Lady Throwing Out?’ ” Schnakenberg said. “I am glad the blog ended without any acrimony between me and the Buscemi family. I am all about living at peace with my neighbors.”
