In 2000, I wrote copy at a dot com startup called Fashion500.com,
which was either ahead of its time, a dumb idea, or both. It folded about eight
months after I got there, and for a few months I got unemployment (what my wife
called a ‘Department Of Labor Fellowship’) between freelance gigs.
I was trying to write short stories, as well as monologues. Some
afternoons, when I didn’t know what else to do, I picked a neighborhood I’d
never spent time in, took a train there, and walked there for several hours. One
of my stories, which eventually became a monologue, was about a guy who walks
and walks until he knows every street in the city intimately. (I also made a
show called Desk about the Fashion500.com,
which you can see a few minutes of here.)
During this period, I lived in Williamsburg, near McCarren
Park, pre-swimming pool, pre fancy loft developments. I took walks in Jackson
Heights and Corona, Sunset Park and Flatbush; I walked in a
neighborhood whose name I can’t remember, or which has been renamed, in The
Bronx, and even took the Staten Island commuter train to a few far flung
suburban plots out there.
I luxuriated in these walks – no talking, no purpose except
to see and go. I especially liked being somewhere unfamiliar at the close of a
workday, when everyone was returning to their homes. Some people, you could see
them letting the workday tension slough off their backs; some people you’d
watch steel themselves for what must have been another rough night ahead. Some
people delayed the inevitable at a bar. I love imagining what strangers are going
through.
I thought of my walks as a way to understand the city more
broadly, to take comfort in anonymity, and to calm myself from the uncertain
time I was going through, work-wise.
9-11 happened within this period. I walked more, further,
than ever in the weeks right afterward. In addition to the grief and horror, the
love I felt for the city and my friends, I remember a few specific moments on
walks that stand out: the first panhandler to integrate September 11 into his
ask (“the attacks left me stranded down here, man, and I need $46 to get up to
Albany”); the group of men that gathered quietly to protect a Lebanese
barbershop that had been receiving anonymous, threatening calls.
I remembered this time as I tried to figure out just why
this New York Times Real Estate article was so infuriating to me and other
people like me – especially white artists who’d been in the city more than a
few years.
Maybe it was the assumptive tone – starting with the title –
the idea the city was made to be gentrified, that anyone reading would, and
ought to, prefer or need high-end boutiques, fancy coffee or organic produce
over a dollar store, a bodega, or a big supermarket where the food was
affordable and people had union jobs. Maybe it was that you could have read
this same article, though maybe a little less brazenly written, 15 years ago,
just substituting different neighborhood names. Maybe it was the article’s inherent
racism and classism, which didn’t deal at all with the complexity of the
changing city – the fact that many have people lived in the neighborhoods
detailed here, happily, for many years, without the benefits of hipsters, $5
lattes or skinny jeans. Maybe I just feel less alienated by aesthetics of a
dollar store than I do by the pretense of farm-to-table, and waxed mustaches,
although I do love the food.
What it comes down to most for me is that this article, like
so much that is unspoken within our politics right now, assumed that our
current relationship between economics and politics is unquestionable and
inevitable. That, when wealthier people move in the streets get cleaned up and
the place becomes more desirable, and
that is okay, or at the very least, it’s just how it is.
I read the article and I thought, not only has The Times
Real Estate section remained unaware of, or complicit in, the gradual
dismantling of New York, it seems to do so proudly. Is that journalism?
In the past, New York was more dangerous, financially
cracked, and in some ways harder to raise a kid. It was dirtier. The city still
ignored its poor. There are many things about the place that are better now. There
were just more neighborhoods where more kinds of people could live. I just read
and thought, the rich have always had
their places. Do they really need the whole thing?
Last summer I saw a talk about New York City’s sustainability plan, called PlaNYC, which is actually a pretty awesome document.
It addresses things like green spaces, food deserts, and other issues that
actually apply to everyone here, or ought to. But as more of the city becomes
prohibitively expensive to all but the most desperate to live here, or those
with the most means, my question remains: at what cost, and for whom? If our
city is not for everyone then what does sustainability
mean?
To come back to those walks. I saw them then as an
introduction to the larger world of New York, as an affirmation of my
citizenship here. Now I worry that it was actually the city I knew, or thought
I knew, bidding itself farewell; that promise that you could find your people,
your neighborhood, your barber, your created family away from where you grew
up, and still be a train ride away from work.
I know that there will likely always be areas that are more
welcoming, and surely this nostalgia of mine, like all nostalgia, is leaving
out something important. But when I think of those walks now, seeing people I’d
never know come out of the train, awakening to what was about to face them when
they walked through their doors, I worry I was watching our city become a
shadow. Just one that wears designer flannel and serves better coffee in
compostable cups.
