GREENPOINT, Brooklyn — Marie Antoinette, move over.
There are eight million stories in the naked city and this one has a sharp edge.
There’s a guillotine on a rooftop in Greenpoint and this PIX11 reporter stuck her neck out to find out why.
Hannah Silk Champagne was the first to spot the guillotine. She sitting at her desk at work across the street, daydreaming, looking out the window when she noticed the beheading device first made famous during the French Revolution and used in so many bloody movies scenes.
“I’d see this guillotine from my roof,” Champagne, who works on Guernsey Street, told PIX11. “And I went to nearby businesses and I thought someone would know.”
Hannah walked up and down her block looking for answers, but her neighbors were as befuddled as she was.
“Oh lovely, what else can they bring to Greenpoint,” Eileen Marjave, a long time Greenpoint resident, told PIX11.
“I thought it was a celebratory Halloween piece,” Derek Kaneko, who works across the street, told PIX11. “Or something terrifying.”
“I think it’s pretty cool, I would like to have that guillotine, Joe Cohen, a Williamsburg resident, told PIX11. “I wonder if it’s for sale.”
Hannah’s tweets went viral and eventually the artist, James Schieberl stepped up to explain his creation as he hammered in a title to the top.
PIX11 asked Schieberl, the guillotine’s creator, why use a guillotine to promote free health care? His succinct answer: “it’s just kind of the extreme opposite of health care. If you are dead you don’t have any health problems.”
And now alas this guillotine’s on the chopping block because the landlord doesn’t want it up on the roof any longer.
If you have any interest in buying the guillotine, you can contact the artist by email at schieberlphoto@gmail.com.
