Bed-Stuy Is Burning Read online

  “Come on,” Aaron said.

  “It’ll be good for folks to see us two out together,” Jupiter had said.

  But they’d left it at that, and today Aaron didn’t run into Jupiter. He’d seen Daniel, actually, who’d been sitting by his open front window, reading—or, rather, not reading, just looking, waiting for Aaron, it seemed. With a book on his lap.

  “Good morning, Daniel,” Aaron said.

  “Good morning, landlord,” Daniel said.

  “Good morning, tenant,” Aaron said.

  Daniel laughed, but just kept sitting there, in his chair by his window, watching people walk down the street. Daniel was creepy. Could you imagine being married to him? Thela. She was kind of creepy, too.

  But Aaron had smiled and waved, and realized that Daniel didn’t know anything about him except that he owned a house and had a wife and baby, and he left to go to work in the morning. And one of those things wasn’t even true.

  Aaron walked the rest of the block and a half to the subway, sauntered down the steps at the Utica station, but slowed at an uneasy silence punctuated by what sounded like an out-of-control substitute teacher yelling at misbehaving children. When Aaron had run Hebrew school as a young rabbi, the subs could never control the kids. The kids misbehaved and the subs ended up shouting.

  In the subway station, the workday crowd slowed to watch. Aaron’s assessment of the scene was that two kids had already been arrested for jumping the turnstile, another one was in the process of getting arrested for talking back to the cops for arresting his friends, and two more were being stopped and frisked for reasons the cops would say had nothing to do with the first three. Kids were often lined up like this in the morning. This morning, eight cops—the usual six (a mix of white, Asian, black, Hispanic, male, female, fat, thin) plus two Aaron didn’t recognize—were holding seven black boys between the ages of thirteen and eighteen in front of the neighborhood on its way to work. But today, the kids didn’t seem to be fighting or arguing. And then another boy jumped the turnstile right in front of the handcuffed kids.

  “Come here,” the Asian police officer said, cuffing the offender.

  “I don’t accept this—your authority,” the kid said.

  “Can I help you with something?” a thin white police officer asked Aaron, or maybe he was talking to a fifty-year-old black man in a muscle shirt and suit pants who was just to Aaron’s left.

  “This shit is fucked up,” the man said.

  “You want to get closer?” the police officer said.

  “What did I do?” the man said. The arrested kids were playfully trying to kick one another. A female cop got between them and was accidentally kicked. She said, “That’s assaulting an officer.”

  The kid said, “Assault these,” and turning around, stuck up both middle fingers behind his back. “You going to kill me now, too?”

  The kid had skinny arms and was being pushed up against the grated wall that separated the stairs leading down to the trains from the stairs leading up to the street.

  “You want to get locked up?” an Asian police officer said to the black man in the muscle shirt.

  “Come on, man, I’m going to work,” the man said. “But that kid got killed on Saturday, and now this?”

  “Then let me do my job, too,” the police officer said. “These kids are daring us to lock them up. Jumped the turnstile while looking me in the eye. You’re trying to go to work, well this is my work.”

  The youngest of the kids in handcuffs was listening to the Asian police officer. “Safer to be arrested,” the kid said, “than shot up on the streets. Passive motherfucking resistance.”

  “You don’t even know what that means,” a black police officer said.

  “Fuck this,” another one of the kids said. A group of commuters stopped to take pictures and heckle the police.

  “Keep walking,” the female police officer told everyone.

  “Can I help you?” the black police officer said, this time definitely to Aaron.

  “Do you need to be doing this?” Aaron shouted back. “Treating them like this?”

  “Do I need to be keeping your streets safe?”

  “Like this?” Aaron said. “I’m a rabbi.”

  He eyed Aaron’s eight-thousand-dollar suit. “I don’t care what you do,” the officer said. “Keep walking. This lot should be in school. They are purposefully disobeying.”

  “I have a baby and a wife at home. Almost every day I’ve got to see this on my way to work. It’s not good for the community.”

  “You hear this guy?” the black police officer said to the skinny police officer. A train was arriving, and most of the onlookers hustled downstairs to meet it. “He’s got a baby at home? Policing the streets isn’t good for his community? These kids tried to get arrested. What do you want me to do? Keep walking or I’ll place you under arrest with your friends here.”

  “Arrest me for what?” Aaron said.

  “Fuck you, man,” a kid in cuffs said.

  “Yeah, that’s right. Keep walking, bitch,” a different kid taunted Aaron.

  “Sit your fucking ass down,” the female police officer said.

  “Bitch,” the kid replied. It turned out, Aaron thought, that this kid was actually a girl.

  “Go to work,” the female police officer told Aaron.

  “Yeah, you go to work,” the girl in handcuffs said in Aaron’s direction to laughter from the boys in handcuffs. “You go to work, bitch. I’ll take care of that wife of yours.”

  Chapter 9

  Amelia should have been profiling Jonah Hill, but she received a Google alert informing her that her piece on Bed-Stuy had just gone live a week earlier than expected, and she was combing over it, terrified she’d written something that might offend her neighbors. She hadn’t really been working anyway. She’d been scanning Twitter: tweets like I wonder what #JasonBlau would have grown up to be if those cops hadn’t shot him dead #12yearsold10shots and Bereaved black families seem pressured to forgive instantly, or be accused of complicity in civil unrest. #JasonBlau #12yearsold10shots

  She’d read and edited her article a dozen times, but it was always different once it was live, and the shooting compounded her unease. Between celebrity assignments, she’d researched the neighborhood. This was her first attempt at something more significant. It was about her home and where she was raising Simon. She wanted to fit in, and the way she fit in was to understand a place, and she was a journalist, so the way she understood a place was by research and writing. With this article, she was hoping to build a reputation, do more serious work, be taken more seriously. She wanted to earn a voice—a calming voice, one of understanding. She wanted to help put her neighbors’ anger in perspective. But Amelia also wanted to represent her own point of view. When she’d been with Kevin, her writing had been weightless. Meaningless. She’d only written on assignment. There had been a time in her life for Jessica Alba and Adam Sandler, but now she wanted to take the next step. With Kevin, life—and writing—had been about assembling a collection of experiences and clips. Now, with Aaron and Simon, she was establishing something solid. And after years of writing on command, she felt herself in the process of discovering a subject she was truly passionate about. Maybe it was the neighborhood, or maybe it was something about how real people lived. But either way, this article was a step in the right direction.

  The New Yorker had been nice enough to respond to her email telling her she’d need to develop a larger portfolio of long-form essays first, which hadn’t been a surprise, but New York magazine brushed her off with a form rejection. Finally, just to get the two months of work read, she’d sold it for a hundred dollars to Brownstoner.com, a Brooklyn real estate blog.

  THE PARADOX OF BED-STUY

  By Amelia Lehmann 9 comments

  Bedford-Stuyvesant—popularly known as Bed-Stuy—is the largest neighborhood in the most populated borough in New York City. The name is a product of two neighboring, historic commu
nities: Stuyvesant Heights, named for Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor of New Amsterdam; and Bedford, possibly a translation of the Dutch “Bestevaar,” meaning “the place where old men meet.” The combined neighborhood didn’t exist until the 1930s.

  Depending on where you were five years ago, you’d have heard Bed-Stuy either touted as the home of Chris Rock, The Notorious B.I.G., and Jay Z, or pitied as ground zero of police ineptitude. But these days, Bed-Stuy more likely will have been described as the latest in a series of territories claimed—subway station by subway station—by an army of gentrifiers invading from mission control in Manhattan. First it was Park Slope’s turn; then Cobble Hill; then Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Fort Greene, and Clinton Hill. Now Bed-Stuy is facing the point of the spear.

  Unlike Williamsburg, which boasts a five-minute subway ride to Manhattan, what Bed-Stuy offers is, according to the New York Times, “Perhaps the largest collection of intact and largely untouched Victorian architecture in the country,” with roughly 8,800 buildings built before 1900. The availability of brownstones at relatively affordable prices in a neighborhood that most people I interviewed consider “just safe enough” is driving what new residents are happy to call “the return of a once glamorous neighborhood,” a return that has brought upscale Italian restaurants and hip new bars.

  Newcomers to the neighborhood take comfort in the drop in its crime rate as well as the new amenities. One recent purchaser (and president-elect of his block association), David Lipkins, who recently moved to western Bed-Stuy with his wife and daughter, had the figures memorized. “I was just telling my parents,” he said. “They always ask me why I paid $1.6 million to live in the ghetto, so I’m always ready to tell them. Murders in Bed-Stuy are down 80 percent in the last ten years. Robberies are down 80 percent.” And Mr. Lipkins is correct. However, his precinct’s rates of violent and nonviolent crime are still among New York City’s worst, with fifteen rapes in the last six months alone, versus only one rape during that time in Park Slope. This is the paradox of Bed-Stuy: that a booming real estate market exists among housing projects.

  So how did we get to this New Bed-Stuy—this mixture of gentrification, pride, and lingering crime? The seeds were sown in its unique history.

  In 1889, one of New York City’s most talented architects, Montrose Morris, designed Brooklyn’s first-ever apartment building, The Alhambra. Morris sparked a building bonanza that produced block after block of elegant brownstones for wealthy industrialists and business owners, primarily of northern European decent. These homes were ornamented with intricate and glamorous detail: terra-cotta tiles, carved mahogany doors, parquet flooring, Byzantine columns, Queen Anne embellishments and gables, and grotesqueries of animals and human faces. With all this elegance, these members of the new American bourgeoisie could live like European aristocracy.

  But this aristocratic dream was deferred by the racial drama that began to unfold in the first two decades of the twentieth century. African Americans, who’d begun migrating from the South in large numbers, started arriving in Harlem in the 1920s, and rode the famous A Train into Bed-Stuy soon thereafter. The houses were beautiful, the population less dense, and as Harlem filled up and the Great Depression incentivized whites to sell, Bed-Stuy quickly became the next stop for African Americans, earning the nickname “Little Harlem” as early as 1961.

  Not surprisingly, once the neighborhood transitioned from northern European to African American, financial institutions stopped approving loans. Real estate agents wanted to scare off the remaining white residents and chop up the single-family brownstones into three- and four-family units to maximize profits and sell high to African Americans, who were willing to live under less glamorous conditions. Housing projects followed.

  In 1950, Bed-Stuy was already half African American, but by 1960, African Americans made up 85 percent of the population. It was already denser than Harlem had been in the 1920s when people were leaving it for Bed-Stuy. Half a million residents occupied just over six hundred blocks, making it the second-largest African American community in the country. Bed-Stuy schools had a 70 percent dropout rate, and underemployment was at 30 percent, high for today, but especially hideous back when New York City’s overall unemployment rate was under 4 percent. Infant-mortality and delinquency rates were also more than double New York’s average.

  Then, in 1964, a black teenager was shot by a white policeman in Harlem, and a race riot spread all the way into Bed-Stuy, resulting in the destruction of many African American and Jewish businesses. City government responded with apathy: garbage pickup ceased, the schools stopped attracting top teachers, crime rose. Redlining and the city’s misappropriation of tax resources aggravated the problems. Bed-Stuy became such a nightmare that the muckraker Jack Newfield, after visiting with Senator Robert Kennedy, referred to Bed-Stuy in The Village Voice as “filled with the surreal imagery of a bad LSD trip.”

  But from the lowest point in Bed-Stuy history emerged the culture that revived and redefined it. Beyond Biggie Smalls and Chris Rock, many of the children and grandchildren of the very migrants who came up north in the first half of the 20th century were the teachers, dental hygienists, and city workers who owned these buildings and presided over the community. They have now passed the buildings to their children, who have sold to the gentrifiers or held on and become a new successful class of doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers.

  In dozens of conversations with middle-aged and elderly men and women who grew up and spent their whole lives on these blocks, I hear the same sentiments time and again: “There’s a community here.” “We look after each other.” “We all raise each other’s kids.” “We make sure to get into each other’s business and keep up on what’s going on.”

  And this pride extends to the buildings. As the Times reported, it is exactly because, “In the 20th century, Bedford-Stuyvesant was not an affluent neighborhood, many of its homes were never renovated,” so these homes have retained a level of original detail not found even in the city’s most well-known brownstone neighborhoods. “Comparing a Bedford-Stuyvesant townhouse to one in, say, the West Village can be like comparing an original piece of art with a print.”

  However, this positive outlook belies the resentment beneath the surface, and the fact that Bed-Stuy is still a difficult place for most of its inhabitants. Nearly a third of the population was below the poverty line in 2010. And, as one longtime resident who prefers to remain anonymous tells me, “The new folk—they don’t care. They don’t say anything to us. They drive rents up, make it so people who have lived here forever can’t afford to live here no more. They keep the houses nice, which is nice to walk by, I guess. But that’s all I get out of it. I don’t get anything except my friends have to move out of the neighborhood.”

  The legacy owners make $1.6 million, while the longtime renters have to move out of the neighborhood where they have spent their entire lives.

  That’s Bed-Stuy today.

  What a pompous ending. No wonder The New Yorker, even its website, wouldn’t take it. For The New Yorker, she would have needed to find a person who embodied the good and bad of gentrification. A real personality. The article would have needed to go beyond the statistics and make the neighborhood make sense.

  Or maybe she had explained everything clearly. The neighborhood had started elegant and for wealthy Europeans. Then with the Great Depression, it was abandoned to any African American who would move in. Now, whites were coming back. Money followed, along with the city services that had been absent for decades. So her neighbors were angry. Amelia had implied their anger, she told herself, even if she hadn’t stated it directly. She wasn’t writing an op-ed here. Still, she had made it pretty clear that it was unfair that it took white people and money to come in for outsiders to notice the problems. Her article might bring some additional attention. And Amelia was proud of it. It was smart. Well researched. By far the best piece she’d ever written. And it was always possible that it would get notic
ed by someone. Lead to something different. Bigger or better. (Though, even if she couldn’t have anticipated Jason Blau, she should have included stop and frisk and broken windows, and how these tactics divided the community.) But either way, it was something for Simon to read in ten or fifteen years, when the neighborhood was mentioned in the same breath as Fort Greene and Park Slope. Something other than what Jonah Hill ate for lunch.

  There were already comments:

  amandakin Sept 8, 2014 at 7:06 a.m.

  This article has a distinct outside, White Gaze feel to it. Rather unsettling.

  And then:

  tnt2 Sept 8, 2014 at 7:16 a.m.

  Thanks for telling us shit we already know. No mention of Stop and Frisk. No mention of black boys murdered by the police. No mention of our children going to jail.

  And then:

  SewardWasRight Sept 8, 2014 at 7:19 a.m.

  TODAYS THE DAY BITCHES! POLICE V OUR COMMINUTY. POLICY GOING DOWN!

  But then:

  transworld Sept 8, 2014 at 7:21 a.m.

  Lovely piece. Captured the tensions of the neighborhood excellently. The type of piece we need more of.

  And:

  bhinsider Sept 8, 2014 at 7:29 a.m.

  Most of Bed-Stuy is still a terrible neighborhood. Sorry, but that is just true. Dont get the hype at all.

  brooklyn72 Sept 8, 2014 at 7:32 a.m.

  . . . a terrible neighborhood where you can’t find a brownstone below $2M

  It’s beautiful here; people that think like you do haven’t been there since the ’70s. People used to say Fort Greene was a terrible place only 5 yrs ago and look at it now; homes are selling upward of $4M.

  DH July 8, 2014 at 8:44 a.m.

  Bed-Stuy’s great, but, trotting out home sale prices—especially when many of those are bought by investment firms to flip—is, forgive me, dumb.

  brooklyn72 Sept 8, 2014 at 9:12 a.m.

  Dixon is buying at $2M to flip . . . I don’t disagree. Investors see value in these brownstones and in the community and they will most likely flip these homes for $3M+ in the next year or so.