"This Place Used To Be The Hood" (Vacation day two, Fort Greene, Brooklyn)

So my New York portion of my vacation continues.

I spent the morning with my niece in the gym.  My sister had gotten there after work, and had been there earlier than us.  She was on the way out as we were on the way in (sidebar: working out agrees with her.  She looks great!).  An hour and a half later, my niece and I navigated public transit back to Canarsie.  I missed the subway, I have to say.

The two of them had events in their schedule to do, so I made myself busy for a few hours (read: slept) until it was time to visit good friends of mine, Jesse and Stephanie.

I have known these two for a the better part of a decade. They're one of the most perfectly matched couples I've ever met.  Their daughter is an incredibly cute child who has an addiction to a children's show I've never heard of before today, and whose theme song I will never be able to get out of my head.  I haven't seen them since Stephanie came to my father's funeral. I've always enjoyed their company as they are funny, smart, opinionated and fun-loving.  They play games, enjoy a beer, and love life and each other.  It's quite awesome, actually.

Last year they moved from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn, as many couples of a certain age tend to do these days.  They moved to Fort Greene, which in my youth was very much the 'hood.  My, how that has changed.

After a couple of hours bs'ing on their patio (and that time went QUICK) we went to a little restaurant on Greene Avenue called Prospect.  They had recommended it highly and as I said to Jesse, for the first time ever, I deferred to someone's superior knowledge of Brooklyn.  Food was phenomenal, and we sat and ate on the patio seating area..

As we ate we chatted more.  It had been two years since I had seen either of them, there was catching up to do, there was exchange of humor, there was the expression of hope that Bernie Sanders would win the presidency, and the plan for seeking political asylum in Canada if Donald Trump won.  I told them about my girlfriend who was at that moment, probably, doing something incredibly cool on a camel and how strange it was for me to be with the same woman for as long as I have.

After dinner we had dessert (I won't bore you with the details as to what, but just know that it was fantastic and awesome) and more conversation, talking about Marvel movies and Star Wars.  It was food and drink and the rambling old friends make when they haven't been in each other's company in far too long.

Six hours and 2800 calories after I arrived, we said our goodbyes and made a plan to hang out again before I went back to Bellingham.

Two takeaways: first, good friends are an awesome thing, and one should absolutely never take them for granted.  Secondly, Fort Greene has really changed from what I remember.  Putting aside the fact that I very likely couldn't afford to live there anymore, the change is profoundly positive.

The Home I Knew Is Gone

Required listening: Spike Lee's "rant" on gentrification in Brooklyn, NY

I grew up in Flatbush and my teen years were spent during the early to mid '90s witnessing firsthand the effects of the crack epidemic and the drug war on a neighborhood.  Shootouts were common and gunfire echoed through the night like a snare drum.  The apartment I grew up in, which my family to some degree still lives in, was cheap for New York, even at the time.  The unfortunate part about New York being built on a series of islands is that there's no space to expand, and the housing market gets competitive and expensive. Years ago, before the war on the lower and middle classes, city planners had the foresight to install rent control and stabilization laws to prevent the laws of supply and demand from cannibalizing the populace.  After all, what's the point of having a good job if you can't afford to live there.  Rudy Giuliani, who won his first term as mayor with the not insubstantial financial backing of the real estate lobby, ended those laws which set in motion the runaway increase in rent in Manhattan, and eventually throughout the city.

Looking back, it's effect has been multi-tiered.  Drive the prices up in Manhattan.  The middle class who were able to live there before are forced to move to the outer boroughs.  But wait, some of those neighborhoods are sketchy and filled with drug addicts and minorities.  That's okay.  Arrest the drug addicts and minorities (in New York in the mid 90's, the NYPD's zero-tolerance policy and propensity for racial profiling made the terms interchangeable), rebrand the neighborhood by changing it's makeup (building more Manhattan-style dwellings and inviting more displaced Manhattanites) and/or by changing it's name to eliminate it's negative connotation (Spanish Harlem becomes SpaHa, the South Bronx becomes SoBro, Bushwick becomes East Williamsburg, and parts of East Flatbush and Flatbush become extensions of Park Slope and Prospect park South).  The rising rents eventually price existing tenants out, and if that doesn't work, the landlords were empowered to let buildings fall into decay until the undesirables moved out, then repair them and rent for full market value.  And slowly, over 20, 30 years, people of color and/or less than extraordinary means are pushed further and further away from the city proper, or shunted into overpriced public housing.

Spike Lee has said some less than brilliant things in the past about race relations that you likely haven't heard if you're not from New York.  His views on gentrification are spot on.  I was priced out of my hometown.  I agree that it shouldn't have taken an influx of wealthier residents to have the city services (Police, Parks, Sanitation, Education) do their jobs in certain neighborhoods.  Trash would pile high and linger on the sidewalk for days (and in the summer, stink like hell) due to once a week trash collection.  Those same neighborhoods are now getting daily collection.  They're getting increased police protection, which is a marked difference from the "contain" mentality of my youth.  And while I don't begrudge anyone the increased service they get, I can't help but feel a little cheated.

Maybe it shouldn't matter to me so much what's going on in New York.  I'm not there anymore, not subject to anything Spike Lee was talking about.  But, I've always had a problem with injustice though, and what we're seeing there is the last bits of a systematic injustice become revealed.  And it saddens me.

UPDATE:  This is purely anecdotal.  I'm going on my own experiences plus what I've observed while I lived in New York and since I left.

RIP Heavy D...

Heavy D died today.

That's a weird thing to say.  He's one of those acts that no one missed or until he was dead.  I mean, if you mentioned him, a certain group of people would be screaming "Ohhh, shit, that was my jam back in the day."  He had his fans, not like Joe Frazier, who died yesterday, and I counted myself among the number.  In the early 90's hip-hop was a different beast on the East Coast.  Instead of violent, crime laden stories, it was a much peppier, lighter fare.  This is the time of my life where "inside-out was wiggedy-wiggedy-wiggedy wack."

Heavy D was a direct connection to my youth, a micro-phenomenon that was contained entirely withing my pre teen years.  Not like Biggie, who will still get airplay to this day, who is still broad-based relevant.  Heavy D's influence is and was felt by a very specific demographic at a very specific time.  No disrespect intended, but a lot of the white kids who know who Biggie or Tupac is, have no idea who Heavy D is, and that's shameful in its own right.

Heavy D was one of the few examples of hip-hop that didn't necessarily glorify denigration or destruction.  It's evident in how he was found.  As of this blog post, the cause of death is still unknown, but there's a very good chance it wasn't violent.  In Old West parlance, he probably didn't die with his boots on.

I remember junior high school very vividly.  I remember we had a teacher, Mr. Gordon, who was a dead ringer for big Heav.  I wonder if he's still teaching.  Or teaching there.

Instead, You Get This

Just as an FYI, this week's blog was going to be a humorous look at my long-standing crush on Gloria Estefan.

Vancouver has become, by proxy, my adopted home. True, I'm an American. True, I live in Washington State. But considering the closest big city to me is Vancouver, it's what I identify with.

I rooted against the Canucks, as a joke mostly, because of the passion of my Canadian friends for hockey. The truth is, I don't follow hockey all that much. I just liked seeing Canadians get pissed off. Until tonight.

I've seen two riots played out in the news in my lifetime. The first was in LA around 1990, when the cops beat the snot out of one Rodney King on video and were subsequently acquitted, and the public outrage led to several days of senseless violence, senseless looting, pointless destruction, and stuff being set on fire. In 1992, a young Caribbean child was accidentally hit by a driven by a Hasidic Jew, bringing long-simmering (and utterly pointless) racial tension in Crown Heights, Brooklyn to a flashpoint, and leading to senseless violence, senseless looting, and inexplicably, things being set on fire. Both Los Angeles and New York had to bear the stigma of being cities filled with barbarians for more than a decade following. People to this day ask me how I managed to survive New York without getting shot.

What i'm seeing on the news is even more appalling. This isn't public outrage at a great wrong being done. This is violence for the sake of violence; sore losers and bullies taking their drunken frustration out on a hapless city, and a cruel misrepresentation of one of the most beautiful cities on the continent to the rest of the world, and all so soon after being so well-behaved during a much bigger Olympic deal. I do understand the passion for the game, the disappointment. To compare, I always say the closest thing I ever get to religion is being a Yankee fan. But in the end, it's just a G*d damn game. These players who represent your city, your actions do NOT honor them.

I was going to talk about a Latina woman who has remained beautiful under the radar for my entire adult life. Instead you get this.