The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  This was a precinct commander, his name was Gerald McNamara. The man might have been a good cop, as far as cops go—I don’t know—but he was a totally incompetent precinct commander.

  They turned out all the lights, totally dark, and we were marching though the park, riling the people right and left. Someone brought these M-80s and they would light one and toss it and all the sudden you’d hear a big flash followed by boom!

  Things started to get a little hairy.

  Our plan was that at midnight we were going to leave the cops, we were going to go liberate Washington Square. Just leave the cops going—in a dopy voice—“Which way did they go?”

  He laughs.

  By eleven thirty we had a couple hundred people, we had had our drums and we had all the M-80s and lots of noise makers and we were attracting people and we’re building up some tension, and one guy started taking a group of people up St. Mark’s Place toward Washington Square too early. So I ran up and stopped them. “Whoa go back, you’re going to blow it.” So we all start turning around to go back into the park. These four cops stood across the entrance and they wouldn’t let us into the park, never mind the fact that there were already a couple hundred people directly inside. So everybody started climbing over the fence and going around these cops. And these four cops started shoving people with their nightsticks.

  McNamara is sitting back over here by the band shell, and he gets on his radio and calls a “10:85 forthwith, Tompkins Square.” This is part of the old police ten code, “10-4” and all of that—okay?—“10:85 forthwith” means anybody who hears this, get here now. So cops in the surrounding area, they’re showing up on the avenue, but there’s nobody in charge because McNamara has completely cut himself off from everyone at the entrance to the park—us, the cops, everything. He doesn’t realize cops are responding to his call. They’re coming in, they’re seeing the excitement, and they’re just wading in like thugs, swinging. And McNamara is still over here by the band shell, “Ten eighty-five forthwith!” Cops had stopped coming in from the surrounding area because they’re all here now. Cops are coming across the bridge from Brooklyn. They’re coming from downtown because it’s late and nothing’s happening on Wall Street—they’re coming from all over. And there is nobody in charge. “Ten eighty-five forthwith! Ten eighty-five forthwith!” Car 54, where are you?

  He laughs.

  Most of the activists didn’t get hurt that night. We were all experienced. Most of the people who got hurt were coming out of bars to see what was going on. It was a hot summer night. There was a helicopter fifty feet from the buildings. People coming out of the apartments to see what the commotion was, people coming home from Broadway, restaurants, movies—those are the people that got hurt that night. People went to the hospital. The least I’ve heard was 55 people; the most I’ve heard was 111. We fought the cops all up and down Avenue A, all night long. Six o’clock in the morning they finally let us back in the park. We marched straight through to the door of the Christodora, went into the lobby, totally trashed the lobby, took a police barricade and rammed it through the glass doors. And then, well, went home and went to sleep.

  Jerry laughs and raises the unlit cigarette to his mouth. It hangs for a moment, rising then falling against his lips with one slow, deep breath. He jerks the cigarette away without lighting it and says he’s tired.

  The reporting from The New York Times shortly after the first riot on July 31, 1988, described the scene like this:

  Frustration with a daily life of poverty and oppression help explain why someone—who, [neighborhood residents] say, they do not know—began tossing beer bottles at the police during each of the two protests, starting violent street battles. [They] believe in this oppression with a passion altogether foreign to the vast, comfortable enclaves beyond the Avenue B border of Loisada. It transcends their political philosophies, which vary from eco-anarchism to communism to milder forms of socialism. And it is reinforced by the conviction, equally foreign to outsiders, that the plight of the homeless and the poor and the tragedy of AIDS are part of a Federal conspiracy to depopulate the cities for repopulation by the wealthy.

  The “vast, comfortable enclaves” mentioned in the article are now fully embedded in Jerry’s neighborhood and have been for years. By the mid ’90s, in fact, one building along the northern edge of the park, not far from where Jerry and I stand, jumped in value from $5,706 to $202,600 in a five-year span.

  I generally put post-squat at ’95, but technically it’s ’01. That’s when we made the deal with the city. Just as Giuliani was leaving and Bloomberg was coming in, we made a deal where we walked out with eleven buildings. One group was responsible for getting the bank loans and then we brought them up to code. Originally we had a total of about thirty buildings, over the course of twenty years. Thirty buildings, two different bookstores, our own newspaper, and at one point we even had a radio station that broadcast from a different building every night. Could be heard from river to river, from Twenty-Third Street to Canal Street.

  Twenty-five years later, it’s hard to make sense of it. If nothing else, we helped a lot of homeless people, we fed a lot of people, we helped a lot of people stay in their homes. I like to think the Lower East Side squatters were the ones who put the word gentrification on America’s lips. Nobody knew about that word before we started talking about it. Those riots and those confrontations with the cops are what brought that to the foreground. We took a problem that they had turned a blind eye to and we shoved a light in their face.

  And with that, he sparks a match to light the half-smoked cigarette wedged in the corner of his mouth. Jerry lets his eyes close for a moment. He takes a deep breath and the ember at the end of the cigarette glows brighter.

  28.

  Dylan Gauthier is sitting at a booth in a shuttered luncheonette in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It is night and the place is dark; the only light that hits his face is the ambient glow from the streetlamps, finding its way through the windows.

  Personally I’m a little bit leery of creating enclaves. If you create what happened in the Lower East Side with the squats that are still remaining, you create this enclave where there’s the right politics, the right relationships within the walls, but meanwhile the neighborhood’s changing and you’re still powerless. Those spaces were really inspiring and part of New York even when I came to the city. But I do wonder about that question: If the neighborhood changes will the space still mean the same thing?

  I also wonder about what Bea would want to do.

  Bea is in her apartment behind the luncheonette, presumably, but Dylan can’t get her on the phone. Bea is seventy-nine, so there’s a good chance she doesn’t hear the ring. Eventually there is some rustling near the bathrooms at the back of the restaurant. Bea emerges, short and stout, mostly obscured by the lack of light in the space where she stands. We see enough to know she’s waving us on so we follow after her. She is talking from the start, first something about how she left the door to the luncheonette open for us so that we wouldn’t be cold outside but then most of what she says is hard to track as she speeds along in her thick Greek accent, her unsteady voice, swerving from one topic to another. I catch pieces:

  Bea (to Dylan): On the corner, why do they put the tree?

  Dylan: A million trees. Bloomberg. Purify the neighborhood.

  Bea: It’s a bathroom for the dogs.

  Dylan: You’re probably the only person that doesn’t like the tree.

  Bea: And the leaves—I have enough from the park.

  As we near the door to her apartment, Dylan manages to interrupt Bea long enough to introduce me. She sort of turns around to look at me, nods, and smiles—a limited investment from someone who has already memorized enough names in a lifetime. I pick back up with what she is saying when we arrive in her living room, where she offers seats and beers. Dylan and I take the seats. She presses on the beers, and we promise that we’ll get to them soon.

  A single table lamp illumi
nates a room that has not seen fresh paint in years, or new furniture for decades. The plush, brown chairs are lumpy from innumerable naps and books and conversations. Oil paintings hang from the picture rail, and a selection of family photos—or, more precisely, a shrine to her grandchildren—is crowded onto a few shelves. Bea’s last name is Koutros but:

  Bea: You know if you’re married your name is gone. You have to have your husband’s name. You know the story. My name is actually Katrualis. I’m from Sparta. I was born 1934. February 14, Valentine’s Day. Years ago, if you were my age, you’d be famous. Now people live longer. You know, the Greek people, they don’t celebrate birthdays like you do over here. They are smart, after they are forty years old they don’t want to know.

  Bea and her husband, Louie, ran the luncheonette from 1963 to 2008. Even until the end the hamburgers were $1.25 and the cheeseburgers were $1.50—and the dusty menu posted behind the counter still proves it. Much of the place seems unchanged from its earliest days—the antique silver coffee samovars, the wooden icebox, the red linoleum countertops.

  Dylan, thirty-five, is originally from Los Angeles and teaches at Hunter College, where he received an MFA in integrated media arts. He maintains an office in the former home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, which the city university system, CUNY, bought in the 1940s and reopened in 2010 as the Public Policy Institute at Hunter College.

  He likes to be on the water, exploring the rivers and beaches and bays of New York. Dylan belongs to Mare Liberum, or The Free Seas, a collective that describes itself as an organization that has been “hacking the free seas since 2007” with roots in “centuries-old stories of urban water squatters and haphazard water craft builders.” The group engages in a range of activism and work including building small seaworthy vessels; some are made of craft paper and wood glue, which ends up looking like a varnished papier-mâché canoe. One of the paper boats is stashed in the hall outside of Bea’s apartment. Though Dylan has a place of his own down the street, which he shares with his wife, he is at home in this building with Bea. He became a regular at the luncheonette shortly after arriving in the neighborhood:

  Dylan: I moved here in 2002, and Louie didn’t come out that much but he was really the engine of this place. Thinking about the way they ran this for fifty years was, to me, an eye-opener when I first moved to the city. It was more than just a restaurant, it was a community space. And it wasn’t that they weren’t in it for the money, but they did enjoy communing with people and supporting the neighborhood. And so there was that: meeting them through that sort of initial exchange. Bea was like anyone’s grandmother. She’d make a peanut butter sandwich if something was taking too long. Really sweet.

  The room where we sit is cold and drafty. Bea wears a hooded sweatshirt, black sweat pants, and tennis shoes. She leans forward in her chair, like a boss giving orders.

  Bea: I got married in 1955. My husband used to have an uncle who sent for him to come over. We couldn’t come together. I can come after a few years, 1958, by a boat. Ten days, I think. A beautiful time. I was young. I’m an American citizen but not my husband because he was in the Greek army and he don’t want to be American citizen. For me, I think if you’re here long you’re supposed to be an American citizen, no? My husband he say, “Naw.”

  Louie worked at a beer factory in Williamsburg, the neighborhood directly to the south of Greenpoint. After five years of saving up they bought this three-story building across from Monsignor McGolrick Park. They opened the luncheonette on the ground floor, taking the apartment behind it while renting out the remaining four apartments on the two floors above.

  We opened in 1963. June 19, I think it was. We never closed a day. Only close early on the holidays. No vacations. It was nice all the time, people was nice, friends come all the time. It was fun. I had some Greek friends, they used to drink a little bit. For years, I was busy in the restaurant and everything was beautiful. I was young, easy at the grill.

  The young people used to come, a lot of young people because I used to have good stuff and cheap prices. And they used to give me more tips than the prices for the food to help me pay the rent.

  The health inspectors used to come all the time. And most time, no problem, good, perfect. They found everything alright. Maybe they write something down but no money or anything. If they say fix the floor, we do it—all those years. And now you see what’s going on? If they find something—anything small: $200, $300.

  Dylan: Sort of right around 2008, there was this market crash and Bloomberg was bringing in letter grades for restaurants, and it was making it even harder to be a small business in the city. So if you were running a scrappy diner, as they were here, the fridge wasn’t the right temperature or you didn’t have the right kind of lights, you were shut down.

  Bea: I tell you everything is money now. Nothing else. Forty-four years and after they find something wrong—no gloves, no hat—they make it a violation. I say those plastic gloves they give you more trouble! Go to the sink next to you every time—you wash hands!

  But everything’s money. You don’t believe? You know how many people they close because it costs too much? The health department closed us. Seven years ago. Even now, everybody think it was wrong. Everybody come into the restaurant and they say, “See the place is beautiful.”

  The day we closed, I tell you I was so upset with it. Very upset. My son say, “Ma, forget it. Don’t bother.”

  But I stayed very, very depressed. All I dream is cheeseburgers and coffee.

  Dylan: Louie was getting pretty sick at the time, too, pretty frail.

  Bea: After the restaurant closed he laid down and he get stroke. The store closed in ’07 and my husband died in ’09. I say if they didn’t do this maybe my husband still alive. Not because he loved to work.

  She laughs.

  But he never sit down. He always had something to do. He woke up at five o’clock in the morning, six o’clock downstairs. People come talk. He’s not a hundred percent but at least he used to do something.

  Old people, I tell you, they lay down all day, but I don’t know if it’s good. For me—I can’t.

  Dylan: When they closed down the space sat empty and dark and I think also at that time it became something it hadn’t been before: there were makeshift memorials erected outside and people didn’t know what had happened. Online there were all kinds of posts, hoping the place would reopen. So kind of this absence when it closed.

  I also thought, living in the neighborhood, that it was this sort of generative absence. It was this dark space that people could project their dreams and plans and ideas onto. You could walk and wonder what’s going on in there.

  Then one day I saw her coming out and I hadn’t seen her in years. It seemed like she was making more appearances out during the daytime and going around the neighborhood. And once I’d seen her that one time I started seeing her everywhere. So I was continuously talking about things going on in her life.

  I came into the luncheonette one day, and she read all the letters she was given and had me give her advice, going over these offers.

  Bea gets up and retrieves a stack of business cards from her mirrored coffee table.

  Bea: Every day, they call me to sell the house. People, they want it.

  They bother me all the time.

  She points at one of the cards:

  She’s Greek, I think—or she’s married to a Greek guy.

  She hands the cards to me, one at a time.

  I got a lot. I throw away.

  As evidenced by the cards in my hand, she doesn’t throw them all away.

  Dylan: She was also getting offers from young entrepreneurial couples from the neighborhood who wanted to start a dream business in the space.

  Bea: A Polish guy, he owns in Greenpoint—I don’t know how many houses—he stops by every week. I say, “I don’t want to move.”

  He say, “You can stay upstairs.”

  I have an old lady like me upstairs; she lived
here since twenty years. I never raised the rent. I have four families in the apartments upstairs, above the restaurant. They pay $700, $800. No rent control, no lease. If I wanted to, I could raise the rent and make them to go. But you feel sorry for the people. How are you going to pay?

  If somebody buys this place, what they do? They take everything down and they build.

  I don’t want to move from here. But the building needs a lot of work. I have damage from the hurricane. We try with the insurance, and they don’t pay. If I showed you the bills from the house—forget about it. I’m scared to look at them.

  She glares with distain at the pile of bills on the coffee table.

  Six, seven thousand dollars a year—maybe more. The water bills, almost $800, $900.

  The only new thing in the house is the boiler and the roof.

  Dylan: The two most important things. Eleven thousand for the new roof two years ago. The boiler is six or seven years ago.

  Bea: But you don’t believe it for an old house, all the money they want to give you. A lot of people moved into the area. Now they say people move from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Young people now, like you are, I don’t know how you can afford it. I think years ago it was easier. Now it’s hard to find jobs. Too many people. New York has almost nine million, I think they say. It’s what’s in the papers.

  Dylan: I don’t want to live in Greenpoint in ten years if it changes to a certain extent. I am in a rent-stabilized apartment, so my rent won’t go up too much, which means I might even be able to stay. But talking to people around the neighborhood who have rent-stabilized apartments, it’s this feeling of golden handcuffs because you know that if you move, you’ll be moving to Yonkers or East New York. And you’ll be trapped there. Gentrification means all these different things in all these different cities but you can’t really disconnect it from place.