The Edge Becomes the Center

by DW Gibson

  Bea: Greenpoint was always nice. I never had problems. Only once I remember there was a man in the store. He was at the table and then he went in all the registers, took the money and run. Another time, another guy from inside the store went upstairs into the apartment. I used to have this beautiful stuff from Greece, always I used to hide them, and he run in and take and run away.

  Twenty-five years ago, some Greek friends from Astoria, they try to take taxi to come over here. The driver said, “Greenpoint?” They don’t even know where is Greenpoint. Maybe he don’t want to come, I don’t know. But now they say it’s third best neighborhood. Park Slope is the first. Everything here is old. Every house is one hundred years old and up.

  Always Polish people here. But now it’s a mix. You can see every people here now. Everybody loves to come to New York, right? Everybody dream to come to New York, from all over—this is true. I don’t know why. They think you could find easier job over here. But it’s so hard. A month ago in Long Island City in Queens, they have some kind of job. They say $17.50 per hour and they sleep for two nights in the streets to see who is going to go first for the application. It’s hard now to get good jobs.

  The only good thing I tell you now is that the young people coming to the area. That’s nice. But some old people like me they don’t like it. They say, “Oh, it was better before.” They don’t like the noise. They complain. But it don’t bother me. I say, “What’s better? It’s not better to see young people?” They make you feel better! If you go with the old people always we complain. They don’t feel good, all these problems. The young people they feel better. It’s nice to be young! I wish to be young like you!

  She points at Dylan and me.

  Enjoy your age!

  Most young people, their parents pay. One girl she comes from Manhattan and I say, “How you pay the rent?”

  And she say, “My mom and daddy help.”

  Bea shrugs.

  If you have money, you do for your kids. I mean, what are you going to do, take the money with you? But how many have that kind of money? Now they say New York has the most rich people of the whole country. Everything is money now.

  Dylan: I think since even before they were closed—Bea, you started getting notes under your door from speculators and developers and it hasn’t stopped. If anything the offers have become more and more lucrative.

  She has several notes from people who find her on the street and offer her $2 million cash to buy the building so they could ostensibly kick the tenants out and turn it into condos. We are right on the park here and it’s really desirable real estate. Meanwhile parts of Greenpoint have been rezoned along the waterfront, the Newtown Creek, and there’s the feeling that that’s the new Greenpoint, and it’s going to slide back this way and developers and real estate types are preparing for that flow of people. The Bloomberg model has been a very particular beast and it’s driven by ideas of capital accumulation as this sort of panacea for fixing the ills of the city.

  I’ve only lived here since Bloomberg’s administration but reading about so many other administrations—you know, certainly Bloomberg and Giuliani instituted these paternalistic—I think it’s beyond paternalistic: they didn’t want to listen to the people in the community. They demonstrated this time and again. Their efforts to defund the community boards, or dismantle the community boards. At a certain point Bloomberg just said I don’t think we can afford them, so we should just get rid of them. Excuse me? Who are you building the city for?

  At a certain point you start to hear them speak what you’ve been imagining behind closed doors, only they’re saying it in public and you say, “Wait, you’re not supposed to be saying that in public.” It’s no accident, it’s planned. Motivations? I don’t know. There’s capital. Their friends are involved. They’re involved. It’s this vision of taking back New York City. Bloomberg says my daughters now live in Bushwick or Bed-Stuy and fifteen years ago you couldn’t live there. Really? You couldn’t live there? Who the hell is “you”?

  Bea: I’m here all those years. I never move from here.

  My son says “Why? Just sell this and buy a condo something, a little house.” But I don’t want to move. If something happens to me, what are my sons going to do? They’re going to have to sell.

  My son, he lives in New Jersey, in a beautiful house. He says come over here. But sometimes it’s not good to live with your kids. You get in an argument or something and you worry. And if you go to New Jersey you don’t see nobody. Here you see people and talk. You get a few drinks and you see everything beautiful.

  I like the noise. I don’t like it quiet. Everybody knows me. And they give cans and bottles and I bring bottles to Key Foods. My son, he got mad at me. He don’t want me to do that. But I don’t want to throw them away. Bring it to Key Foods and make a few dollars.

  My social security check is not even $300. And now I get my husband’s check and it’s still not high, $850 something.

  Dylan: She recently said she would take $10 million.

  He laughs.

  I thought that was good. Why not? It’s good to have your price.

  What is gentrification? It is Bea in this moment, wrestling with herself, shaking her head. She does not deny what Dylan says about the $10 million but she does not like it either. Capitalism, by its own design, does not care who participates in free-market competition—only that there is competition; democracy, by its own design, cares deeply that everyone participates. So it would stand to reason that democracy might exert power over capitalism and enforce the inclusion of all neighbors when it comes to the development of their neighborhood. But enforcement is limited at best, so Bea must maintain this principle on her own. She does it by keeping her tenants, who are in good standing, in their homes at rents well below market rates. She does it by opening the luncheonette for neighbors to share meals. She gives Dylan a report on last night’s dinner.

  Bea: That was good but the night before was delicious—all the kind of vegetables.

  Dylan: We were having informal dinners here and other people in the neighborhood were using it, too. It sort of became this community resource where you could say I want to have a dinner party, I want to have a birthday party—can we rent the space? She would always be happy to have people. And we had this one dinner and she seemed really happy, really glad to have people. We cooked this pasta she loved and talked about for weeks and she started saying, “Do you guys want to come back and do some more things like that?”

  She proposed that if we want to keep doing stuff we could give her a little bit of money and figure it out. To me it seemed like without necessarily having the vocabulary for it, she was talking about having a form of mutual aid or assistance. She does own the building but her tenants pay just enough to cover the property taxes, water, electric—all this stuff that’s been continually going up every year. Like she said, she hasn’t raised their rent in over twenty years, so the top apartment is paying $700 a month for a two bedroom and two blocks away, new two bedrooms are going for $3,000, $3,400, which is insane.

  So she needs some kind of money and it was kind of like, “Okay, we have this space. What should we do with it?”

  I sent an email out to five or six people I knew who I’d been involved with in different projects throughout the city and invited them to think of what we could do with the luncheonette. And we formed into this collective that runs the space, tries to keep the walls and roof from caving in, putting time and energy into it, upgrading the electric and plumbing and all these things that we need to actually use the space and get it through the winter. Always with Bea there.

  The model we’ve kind of hit upon is—it’s in the federal tax code, the 501(c)(7)—is a member-based social club. We haven’t formalized and there’s talk about whether we will formalize but it seems like a good model to have a member-based club where members pay dues and that’s what pays our rent and keeps the lights on.

  Having been involved in some event spaces—
the scramble to get the public to come in, not treat you like shit, not destroy anything—was something that I’d tried for too many years in New York and was sick of it. And I didn’t think this was really the right place for it anyway. It’s small. You get thirty people in here and it’s pretty crowded. So rather than base it around programming, we’re involving more members who shape the space, add to the space, plan events, invite friends over.

  There are about thirty members. Certainly a lot of the people who would describe themselves as artists. There’s a fair mix of educators, art history professors, urban planners, activists, a couple designers. I guess there are carpenters, who don’t necessarily see themselves as artists, but builders. Couple of poets. Couple of musicians.

  I think there was a pretty strong sense that we didn’t want to get bogged down too much in talking before things started happening. I think that maybe there’s a resistance to having too many meetings or formal kinds of concoctions, and that means you have to leave a lot of leeway for people to do what they want to do. We don’t have any formal rule structure, or leadership structure. We try to have a meeting every month so that we can all be together and see each other’s faces. And then we try to get the neighborhood involved in some way.

  For me, a lot of the work I do as an artist, activist, or educator is all about different forms of collaboration. And here it’s collaboration with the members of this collective and then there’s this other collaboration with Bea and it’s hard to describe. We never sat down and had the art theory talk about collaboration but she expresses what direction she wants things to take in the space and what’s inside her comfort zone and what isn’t, and it really is a full collaboration.

  One of the things she told me was you can have things in here but it’s got to be on the DL. She doesn’t want inspectors. She doesn’t want paperwork. She doesn’t want the city involved at all. Which makes for a good collaborator in this scenario.

  They both smile.

  Bea: Dylan, you know, he’s good all the time. I don’t know if he wants to show only that. But it’s no good to be perfect. If somebody’s perfect there’s something wrong. This is the truth, you know.

  Dylan laughs.

  Dylan: She’s happy with us being under the radar and her preference would be to keep the space as it is for as long as she can. Hard to say what that means in the long run.

  In terms of the long-term plan, it’s dependent on Bea. Initially there are a few ways that you might be able to create something sustainable, and the 501(c)(7) might be one of them. It won’t keep her from selling the building if, by some misfortune, she becomes sick, or decides to sell the building and move in with her kids. I think it’s probably in the back of a lot of people’s minds that we could try to fundraise and buy the building, but realistically it’s a ton of money. It’s nice to imagine that would have been possible at some point in New York City’s history.

  Our relationship with the neighborhood has been very multi-textured and multilayered and the old-time residents can’t wait for us to reopen it as an ice cream parlor or a luncheonette. A lot of the kids want ice cream. A lot of the young, urban—not to put them in a group—but the younger small-business owners that move in here think, oh, there’s no cafe here—bam—open a cafe. Or there’s no bakery for pies, open that. There’s no Korean restaurant, open that. I’ve had funny encounters with them and heard funny mumblings from them of, “Oh, you won’t be there long, it won’t last.” Also criticism that we are somehow depriving Bea of the market value of the space. This is something we hear a lot: You’re not giving her the market value of the space. You’re not paying her market value rent. You’re cheating her etc., etc. Not that people say this directly to us but you hear things. I think that’s when you get into, “Why wouldn’t she get the two million dollars?” Or, “Why wouldn’t she take the six thousand dollars a month that an ice cream parlor was offering?”

  You know what? Money: in the end, people better fucking realize it isn’t everything.

  The one thing I’ll say as a caveat to the whole sort of experiment is I don’t come at it with the feeling that just because you will it to be different, it’s going to be different. You know, the rents go up or the neighborhood changes so much it’s unrecognizable. So just by coming here and saying that we’d like to freeze development in this neighborhood: A) Is that even feasible? And: B) So you’ll have this rarified patch?

  For me this is an opportunity to make this model for using space that isn’t necessarily quite destructive and doesn’t quite lead to displacement. That’s kind of a privilege that comes with this very copacetic relationship with the owner, which is something that you don’t usually have or usually takes years and years to work out. Usually the building owners are the enemies. It’s a weird thing.

  Recently we’ve added a few new members who are urban planners who are involved in community groups. There’s this whole other language of policy. I don’t always know if it’s the most generative or the most fruitful; it’s definitely not something I had any contact with.

  Urban planners and certainly the mayor’s office try to “increase density” in these neighborhoods. There’s all kinds of reasons like increasing the tax base and planning to compete with these megacities that are cropping up in China or wherever. But I don’t know why you’d be trying to turn New York into Hong Kong or something. You’re really going to add twenty million people to New York intentionally?

  People who argue for density point to Paris, where development is extremely limited within the city so the world’s elites are the only people that can afford to live there. They say if you freeze development in one zone then you get these historic quarters like Fort Greene or Brooklyn Heights, and they’re brownstone districts. They’ve become these little jewelry box places.

  So on one hand we need to build more buildings so that there’s more affordable housing, so that it doesn’t just become this little jewel for whoever the worlds’ rich are at the time—Koreans, Emiratis, whatever. Which is a compelling argument. But you also have people saying we need to bring in as many millionaires as possible, they’ll help float the bottom. So it is complicated and confusing thinking, well, what’s the alternative to this? You get to thinking, well, maybe we’re talking in extremes. It’s not Paris vs. Shanghai. It’s not Paris vs. Rio. That’s a lack of imagination. Why not think of how you can keep the people that are already in this place and they’re happy and doing what they’re doing. I don’t know, consult with them? Invite them to live in new spaces that you’re building. I think these things could be really easy and wouldn’t create the same level of displacement.

  We’ve also thought about not overburdening this space with meaning. You could come in here and turn it into a nonprofit and have things going on every night. But the opposition to that idea is that if you have some nights where nothing is happening some people walking by will peek in and it’s just this kind of mystery. Why is there this dark storefront in this neighborhood?

  If you leave the space dark then you create this sort of dream space, which I think encourages people to be productive actors in the city and not just accept the city as a built environment we move through.

  Bea: “Maybe what will happen in life will happen,” my grandma used to say that. My grandma say, “The time we are born, it’s lying next to us, what’s going to happen to us.” As little kids she used to tell us that. But it’s no good to believe that because then you wait to see. It’s not good to believe that because then you’re not going to do nothing.

  Dylan: If you project yourself into the city and think of how you’re able to change it then you’re better capable of answering questions about what belongs there and what doesn’t. The worst thing I think are these developments that they’re putting up on the waterfront where literally every inch is completely planned and paved and everything is so orchestrated that you can’t imagine anything other than what’s there when you’re standing there.

  Bea tells me I
should come over for dinner soon. She looks at her watch—it is late, and much colder than when we first sat down. Winter is coming, and her windows need repairs to keep out the wind.

  The three of us walk back out to the luncheonette. The space remains unlit so it feels boundless. Bea is still pushing the beers. Dylan and I decline again—I don’t know why, really. It’s mainly me, I think, rushing to get back to my six-month-old daughter and wife. As I edge my way to the door, Bea reaches into a refrigerator under the counter. She pulls out two Budweisers and a couple of club sodas and insists we take the drinks for the road. I thank her and she apologizes because she’s out of straws. I thank her again—for her time, not just for the beers—and she waves it off as though it was nothing:

  I like the blah, blah.

  She says blah, blah with the coolness of someone who’s been meeting new people for nearly eight decades—and the generosity of someone who’s always open to the idea of one more new face. She tells me to bring my wife and baby when I come back for dinner.

  29.

  The earliest use of the word gentrification comes from the British sociologist Ruth Glass who wrote about several London neighborhoods in 1964:

  One by one, many of the working class neighbourhoods of London have been invaded by the middle-classes—upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences … Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly, until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.