The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  Barbara: Money is a huge part of it. But did you hear what my husband was saying: They. “They don’t want anything.” But this is my view of that: I hear that they and I’m like, wait a minute you live here, too. When they say they, they’re talking about you, too!

  Arty: No I didn’t say everybody, I said the majority of everybody.

  Arty rises from his chair, sliding it back under the kitchen table.

  Arty: That’s all I got to say. I had to throw something in there when I heard y’all talking.

  Arty goes back to the bedroom—no television this time—and Barbara continues:

  Barbara: I don’t like the “they” thing. That is very dangerous to say that somebody don’t want to read or write. I went to business school, I went to college. He went to business school and he went to college. We have a schoolteacher who lives across the hall and she taught right here in the school. We have another lady who’s raising foster kids. We have people over here who work in business. So yeah, I got a bad neighbor next door but I don’t like they because when people refer to me as they, who’s they? Do not paint me with a brush. I am an individual and I deal with you as an individual. Don’t suffer me because you have a problem with someone else. That’s unfair. I never met you. I might have some negative feelings about whites—she indicates in my direction with her open hand—but guess what? I never met you!

  Why am I going to feel that way about you when I had an experience dealing with somebody else? We’ve got to learn how to stop grouping people good or bad, and start learning how to deal with people individualistically. Hey, I’ve got black people I don’t like.

  She laughs.

  When I came up as a girl, we weren’t taught certain things because with our parents and grandparents there were certain subjects that you just did not talk about. So when you got information, you got information from somebody your age who didn’t know nothing just like you. So we were all walking around blind thinking we all know something! And using that analogy, I say, go out and get the information so that when you’re talking to your friends you will know what you’re talking about. When you’re saying something you have a reference point: “Go over here and check it out, man. See what I’m saying is right.”

  My mother stopped me from saying they. Sometimes even now I start talking and I’ll catch myself and I won’t say it. Or if I do say it I’ll give some kind of description so you know who I’m talking about because it could be anyone.

  You hear people say, “They said this …” And, “They said that …”

  And I say, “Where did you learn that from?”

  “Well, they say it.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  I often ask that question.

  And I do make people a little frustrated.

  13.

  Recently, Barbara was frustrating her state senator, Bill Perkins, prodding him about the lack of development along the waterfront across from the Polo Grounds. Over the last decade, work has been completed up and down the East River. But Harlem River Park ends ten blocks south of Barbara’s building and the waterfront to the north is blocked by six lanes of traffic speeding in both directions on Harlem River Drive, another one of Robert Moses’s creations, which gives the water’s edge to drivers instead of pedestrians.

  Barbara pays tax dollars just like the residents of the Lower East Side who now enjoy that neighborhood’s East River Esplanade. She pays tax dollars just like the residents of Murray Hill and Tudor City who will soon enjoy the East Midtown Waterfront project. Barbara wants her tax dollars to work in the place where she lives. She wants to ride her bike along the water in her neighborhood. She’s been working on the issue with Tom Lunke at the Harlem Community Development Corporation. They’ve collaborated for over three years, long enough for trust to replace honorifics: she is Barbara to him and she freely calls him Tom.

  Tom’s office is a subsidiary of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, which is doing business as Empire State Development, which is, in governmental parlance, a New York State public benefit corporation, which, in practical terms, refers to a public-private corporate mash up. The entity is governed by a board of directors appointed by an elected official. Throughout his career, Tom has worked at various offices in the labyrinth that is New York City bureaucracy. He did a stint at City Planning; he worked in the Koch administration. Barbara says she clicked with him because they both like to talk. I can confirm this. Hours can zip by when either of them gets going.

  Tom wears a tie and carries a notepad and pen on the day we meet in a conference room at his offices on 125th Street, half a block east of the Apollo Theater. He shares the address with the likes of US Representative Charles Rangel and State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. Upon entering the building and passing through a metal detector, my camera is confiscated by security. Building management nixes all cameras. Police cameras capture all activity on most of the streets that surround the building but nothing will be so freely captured by a member of the public inside the high-rise. I ask the men working the metal detectors why there’s a policy of no cameras and they both look at me like they have a headache.

  Originally from California’s Bay Area, Tom has a wiry frame and is fifty-five years old. He has worked at the Harlem Community Development Corporation, or HCDC, for fourteen years.

  I remember the first time I came to Harlem was in 1983, and I was jogging through the neighborhood, up Seventh Avenue, and I see building after building abandoned. And then there was this one woman with a little kid in tow and she said to me, “Keep running!”

  He laughs.

  In ’89 when I was getting my masters at Columbia in urban planning, we were told about this underground meeting, sort of like the socialist movement in Harlem. I think we were the only white guys in the room—one of my colleagues and I went down. It was supposed to be 153rd and 8th Avenue, and so we took the train up to 155th and walked through Jackie Robinson Park at night—we didn’t know any better. And when we got down to the bottom of Bradhurst Ave, there were these two guys hanging out and they looked at us and they said something like, “Are you guys cops?”

  He laughs.

  And we went to this meeting in this basement space. We were talking with all these people who had gathered and it was all about socioeconomics and the dynamics of the economy and how African Americans are not getting their fair shake. And so one of the guys tried to start a fight with us. “Oh, what do you know?” That kind of stuff. And so, you know, we were talking about how race is a construct created to divide and how we’re all in the same boat and we’re all trying to make our lives better and build an economic base that works for everybody. So I think we ended the meeting on a good note. But there was some tension there at the time. And then they said, “How did you get here?”

  And we said, “We walked through Jackie Robinson Park.”

  And they said, “Are you insane?”

  He laughs.

  The way Harlem is structured and zoned, its place in the city is more as a bedroom community. So as the prices of Lower Manhattan escalate, people, primarily Caucasians, are moving up to Harlem. It’s interesting because when I first started working here in ’99, I remember getting off at the 2/3 train stop at 125th. I was the only Caucasian coming into Harlem in those days. Over the years I saw how each station, first it was 110th and Lenox, then 116th, then 125th, each station started getting more and more Caucasians. I remember counting—there’s one, there’s one. Now I don’t even bother counting because there are so many.

  There was a discussion about ten years ago that in Greenwich Village the population was decreasing but the income base was increasing. So as the bohemian culture and the lower-income people were moved out their spaces were filled by fewer and fewer people. And I believe the same thing is happening in Harlem on the townhouse blocks now.

  I remember in the ’80s when I had a friend who lived in Harlem he lived in a single room occupancy hotel, an SRO. And he could actuall
y leave that hotel after a month and move to another brownstone SRO and live there for a month—he was just moving all around because it was maybe one hundred dollars a month to rent these rooms and he was a low-paid staffer at City Planning and he needed a place to live and these were opportunities for him. A lot of those SROs have been converted to one, two, three-family homes; ten units become two or three units. So the housing stock is thinning because of the wealthier people.

  I was friendly with Jane Jacobs when she was alive and I asked her what she thought of gentrification and she pretty much said that gentrification is a good thing, it’s displacement that’s the problem: How do you engage the community in the gentrification process so that they’re not displaced?

  One of the things that we’ve noticed over the years is that not enough African Americans or Latinos are engaged in the urban planning process. In our capacity here, we’re trying our best to get people to create a stake for themselves in the community, to get people educated, understanding there’s more to life than just being isolated in one corner of Manhattan. You involve the kids and the adults in the planning process so they understand what’s going on and can contribute, so they have a stake in the future and then they will watch out for it because they feel it’s theirs.

  First you have to understand how the city gets shaped. Because people often think, “Oh, isn’t this always this way? Hasn’t it always been?” They don’t understand that people shape their own environment. We end up doing a lot of public space development. We want that public space to reflect the community, so that when people come in they feel like it’s their space. If you’re not given a lot of encouragement about thinking creatively, you get very shut down. This whole process of engaging the community in the planning process, it scares a lot of people but it’s also thrilling to a lot of other people.

  When Tom arrived in New York, in the early ’80s, the city was shrinking. Public services were being cut, and there was talk—he remembers it—of tearing down swathes of Brooklyn and the Bronx; some plans, he recalls, proposed letting those areas revert to farmland. The city that Tom has experienced since then has evolved in the opposite direction—Harlem, in particular. One of the biggest landowners in the neighborhood, Columbia University, has expanded throughout northern Manhattan. Tom has been involved in talks between his alma mater and the community for a decade:

  In 2004, Columbia came to the community board and said basically we want to expand. The president of Columbia had this attitude that Columbia was doing a favor to the community. That somehow all this development would trickle down to jobs for the community. The idea that, instead of giving money directly to the people, you give subsidized development dollars and free land to a development entity then that money will be translated back to the people—it doesn’t ever seem to work out but people keep pushing it.

  So in 2004 Columbia came to the community, and the community held back in terms of their anger but you could tell by the words they were using, the anger was just seething through their teeth. And they were basically saying, “How can you speak to us like this? Do you think we’re morons?”

  Then Columbia got their backs up.

  So what we did was we sat down with Columbia and said okay this is what the community says it wants: meaningful jobs at decent wages. The jobs people will be losing are middle income manufacturing type jobs. You’re proposing a campus. So the jobs will be student advisors, or professors, things that require a certain level of skill sets that many in the community would not have. They would not be able to transfer their manufacturing skills into becoming a professor, for example. And then they had these grand notions of interdisciplinary discussions. Like if you brought in all these engineers with artists working in the new arts center that they would somehow cross-pollinate ideas and miraculously come up with new inventions. And our argument was you could do that now. If you had the auto body shop and the Alexander Doll Company next to an engineering building you could cross-pollinate much more interestingly because you’d have people making things and people could bring ideas to them and they could create a prototype in their workshop and give it to you and that could lead to all kinds of inventions. And they were like, “Oh, no, that’s not the type of cross-pollination they want.”

  So then we got into this discussion: I had just finished this 1960s movie The Time Machine; it’s an H. G. Wells science fiction story about how this guy in the 1900s creates this time machine and he goes to, I don’t know, the year 2500 or something like that, and the world has changed so much you have these very white, blond-haired people populating the ground and you have these monsters underneath the ground, doing all the hard labor so the blond, white people up above could live comfortably. And so Columbia wanted—and they still want—to have all of the infrastructure below ground, where all the people are doing all the hard labor so that the students can lollygag up top. And so I posed that parallel to the architects and they were sort of stunned by the comparison.

  He laughs.

  But their rationale for doing condemnation of the whole four blocks was that they needed the land underneath to put this infrastructure, because they didn’t want trucks or normal things that happen in cities to invade their campus-like setting. So that was their justification for grabbing all the land.

  At the end of the day, the Columbia campus was approved in 2008. If you look back and say did we benefit from all these years of work, I could probably say the one thing we benefitted from was to educate the community in urban planning. The community was then poised to have serious and meaningful discussion about what benefits it. The community became more knowledgeable about how it can affect change—but also mindful that there are times when you come up against a power structure that is so large you can’t infiltrate it in the ways you want to. You can in small ways but the power structure vision ends up getting pushed forward.

  City Planning Commission is thinking more in terms of urban design—you know, having a skyline that has crystalline towers rather than focusing on the ground-level impact of all this.

  Manufacturing zones end up suppressing the value of the land because manufacturers’ whole business is set up to put their capital back into their business, not into real estate. The real estate industry pushes city planning to rezone all these manufacturing areas for residential because it’s a higher rate of return for them.

  The problem is that as the economy moves forward it becomes more and more geared toward the service sector because you don’t have production going on in the city. The whole period from the 1930s to the 1970s, where we saw a growth in the middle class, that was because we were producing things. So if you get rid of production all we have is paper pushers at the top and service workers at the bottom. We don’t have that middle class anymore. And that’s what you’re seeing in New York City, this stratification, because we don’t have this middle class. Or we’re losing it. And government workers such as myself, we’re holding on to that middle class but aside from government workers, where is the middle class?

  I live in Chelsea and I used to be on my community board, from ’96 to 2003. That was during the period where the Chelsea Plan was implemented and the rezoning took place.

  The centerpiece of the Chelsea Plan became the High Line project. A mile and a half of elevated train tracks had fallen out of use in 1980, after the final three cars—loaded with frozen turkeys—passed overhead. Developers initially tried to have the tracks taken down to make way for new buildings but a coalition of residents, activists, and railroad enthusiasts challenged the demolition. The unused elevation remained structurally sound but covered over in wild grass and rugged trees that grew up in the gravel along the tracks. In 1999, an organization was created by Chelsea residents, Friends of the High Line, and soon proposals began to circulate for converting the elevated tracks into a space that would be useful and appealing for the neighborhood.

  The High Line started out as a grassroots effort and then the major developers got on board and t
hat shifted the focus. The City Planning Department was listening to the major developers while still trying to be community friendly. So the designer that was selected put the native grasses in and things like that but it wasn’t made for the community. It was made for the investment opportunities adjoining the High Line. There was an economic development analysis that determined you could invest in the High Line and make it a park without changing any land use along the corridor. The naturally occurring rate of return would be enough to justify the investment. But City Planning wanted to put that area on steroids and really capitalize on rapid large-scale development and that’s what they’ve done.

  Needless to say, I was in the minority when we were trying to protect the manufacturing base in the community. Part of the whole discussion was saving the Meatpacking District, so we came up with this plan for the High Line where the adjoining properties would remain manufacturing up to the third level, and then above that you could build residential housing and other service-type businesses. But we wanted the base of the buildings to remain manufacturing because we felt that would keep the neighborhood at least somewhat dynamic in terms of income characteristics and people who lived in the lower-income buildings would still be able to walk to work and things of that nature. We even asked that the High Line be connected to the new buildings with a commercial first level. So you could go into the building and down to the street and you would have this connection in the neighborhood. And City Planning said, “No, we want the High Line to be a floating park.” So, disconnected from the neighborhood. And that’s what it is today.

  When you go over there you see tourists from all over the world but you don’t see local residents because it’s not really a place for us. It’s an iconic structure for people to point at and look at and walk through. So that, to me, is probably the bad side of gentrification because a lot of the rich people that have bought these lofts or luxury apartments over there, they’re not going to hang out on the High Line, they’re going to jet-set to wherever points in the world and this is their pied-à-terre. That doesn’t really do anything to build up a sense of community.