This audacious duo stopped by a Make the Road NY BBQ (which they call a gay organization) demanding entry and food — and were denied. They charge racial discrimination. I think it’s because they’re CREEPY. The Russian stopped my friend in front of his house a few weeks ago and asked him for free clothing. Also denied.
The one consolation is that this is labeled as “comedy.” Maybe cultural differences have me wincing instead of laughing.
One often sees odd things in Bushwick. Live chickens in someone’s driveway might top my list of all-time neighborhood quirks. But right below Bushwick free-range chicken has to be the playground on Jefferson St. between Knickerbocker and Irving. The playground, which sits on a lot between two apartment buildings, wouldn’t be so bizarre was it not for the space’s strange motif: the red and blue playground is strewn with the insignia of the storied NHL franchise, the New York Rangers.
I believe I can say with 99% certainty that not one child on this predominantly Hispanic block plays hockey (here’s the extensive Wikipedia list of Latino Ice Hockey Players). So why is there a New York Rangers playground on Jefferson Street?
Sunday afternoon was the Bushwick Arts and Neighborhood Sustainability Forum, followed by the Bushwick IMPACT Garden Party. Despite the heat and general exhaustion at the end of a jam-packed weekend, both events were well attended by a variety of stake-holders: Arts in Bushwick volunteers, neighborhood residents, local artists, IMPACT parents and staff, and representatives from Bushwick schools and United Way.
Moderated by Laura Braslow, the discussion wound up centering around Arts in Bushwick’s current and continuing role in the community, and the best ways for various populations in Bushwick to find points of intersection and common language.
The garden party shifted the atmosphere from serious to silly, as everyone moved outside to admire the recently complete Bushwick IMPACT mural (pictured above), sniff flowers in the newly planted garden, and sip lemonade. IMPACT will need volunteers to help tend the garden all summer! If you are interested in participating, please email Chloë Bass.
Anna and I stopped by Bushwick Impact on Central Avenue last Sunday, to check out the collaborative efforts of Arts in Bushwick volunteers, The United Way of New York City, local children and families, BI staff and parent advocates, to create a community mural and safe garden play space for visitors to the center. The unveiling of the mural and garden party will take place on Sunday, June 8, as part of the Bushwick Open Studios & Arts Festival.
I have been hard on Bushwick community organization Make the Road NY, and we do disagree on many important points. I think their point of view on certain economic issues is more characteristic of the beginning of last century than this one. That said, I appreciate their immigrant advocacy services — the idea of a person’s very existence in a particular place on earth being “illegal” offends me on a fundamental level. The other day I realized we have something else in common: opposition to the anti-child hate crime that is our heavily armed and armored public school system.
I went on the latest BCUEwalking tour of Bushwick, this time focusing on the southern tip of the neighborhood. Bushwick Specialist Adam Schwartz (of Up From Flames fame) led some 20-odd folks around, getting down to the Trinity Cemetery and up to Irving Square Park, going through the side streets along the way. I’m not sure if the route was selected for this purpose directly, but we went by some lovely homes, and not the kind of thing I would have expected.
The Bushwick Housing Independence Project — another brainchild of Father Powis, former chief of St. Barbara’s Catholic Church — is an organization that helps people fight eviction from, and get repairs made to, their rent-regulated Bushwick apartments. NYT’s David Gonzalez makes much sap of a serendipitously (for the reporter) placed portrait of MLK in a particularly stinky building being targeted by Bushwick Housing Independence: “Bushwick Tenants’ Dreams Are Mired in the Stench.” The landlord has offered buyouts to the tenants: two years of rent and help finding another regulated apartment somewhere else. It seems to me if Bushwick Housing Independence cared even about the near-term well-being of its clients, it would tell them to take the money and run. Are we to believe that existing another 30 years in a crummy railroad is what passes for “dreams” in Bushwick?
What mostly bothers me is BHIP’s Orwellian name: nothing about an organization that demands landlords become the de facto guardians of their customers evokes “independence.” Being independent means taking responsibility for one’s own life. Demanding that your rental apartment be considered, for all intents and purposes, your property with NONE of the duties ownership generally entails is the opposite of taking responsibility. It’s to demand to be taken care of like a child and simultaneously be allowed all the freedoms that come with adulthood. Unfortunately for the “children” this situation is unsustainable long-term and when it ends, they find themselves with few skills for coping with life as the adults they are. This then somehow is the fault of everyone else in the world who didn’t save them from their own personal failings.
Priorities are truly skewed in this city. Even if the situation were sustainable, even if it were just, it is not in any way “independence.”
Residents finally moved into the gut-renovated Bushwick Initiative buildings across the street from me this weekend, four months after they were completed. Oh, the Bushwick Initiative? That’s where the City uses your tax money to fix up someone else’s private property for them, with a guarantee that all the people who lived there before can move back in afterward — with the same rent, of course. Where these families have been warehoused for the past two years, I can’t imagine, I mean — what are they, cattle? Don’t they have plans and dreams? They just live wherever the City plops them? What is the point of this?
Well, whatever, it seems like a great deal for everyone involved: the landlord gets his building overhauled for cheap and doesn’t even have to hire his own contractors; the tenants get fancy new apartments for the same rent which they can somehow — isn’t the point of regulated rent to help the poor? — then afford to fill with a truckfull of new furniture (see photo above); and the political bosses get to keep their subjects in Bushwick, while appearing far-sighted and magnanimous. Who am I missing? Oh yeah, the taxpayers who fund all of this, especially the losers who were unsavvy enough use their own damn money to invest in this neighborhood only to be spit in the face by this whole crooked, corrupt “Urban Renewal, Fourth Time’s a Charm!”
Is it even necessary to mention that Bushwick is exactly as rundown as its proportion of rent-regulated apartments would suggest? The Bushwick Initiative is just the City putting a sad little band-aid on the giant ax wound it created in New York’s housing situation.
The bright side is that ultimately, none of this matters. The desperate fight against the natural order of the market, though backed by practically unlimited pools of cash looted from middle class pockets, is failing on the most important front: the big picture. For all the City and “private” organization RBSCC’s idiotic talk of “revitalizing commercial corridors” though this or that program, it’s happening without them as entrepreneurs take their own initiative. So they renovated a handful of crappy apartments here and there in an arbitrary bit of Bushwick? Well, sorry, no medal for them — developers and landlords have rehabbed and built thousands of units in Bushwick in the same time. Bureaucracy is so dumb and lumbering it doesn’t even realize its much-touted grand efforts are but a drop in the bucket compared to what ordinary people, working mostly in their own interest and of their own direction, have done for Bushwick.
The net effect of making a big deal of consensual and peaceful but illegal business transactions is that such transactions are made more difficult to carry out and even those perfectly content to have entered into them are prevented from doing so in the future.
It’s my first thought when I see that, yet again, Make the Road by Walking has organized a march down Knickerbocker to “shame” and point out businesses who do not pay at least minimum wage to all employees, or overtime pay. They pay special attention to the Associated supermarket on Knickerbocker and Starr, where, to quote the Brooklyn Eagle, “some employees are not paid any wages at all.”
Think about that last bit. Why would anyone work for free? How could a business compel people to do something that seems so unprofitable at face value? They can’t, but no questioning or critical thinking from the likes of our local media — they just repeat whatever a random activist type tells them. According to a friend who is a very close neighbor of the Associated, as he understands it, undocumented immigrants ask to bag groceries for tips. Baggers are not a job for which the store would otherwise hire — the cashiers do it. Obviously, an undocumented person cannot be on the books. So they are allowed to take their own initiative and bag groceries for customers who may or may not tip them. This is not exploitation — it’s practically charity.
In a neighborhood full of immigrant families (I don’t mean immigrants from Iowa), goods have to be cheap, which means cutting costs. If that means paying below minimum wage to keep your store running and profitable, then if the risks of punishment are low, that’s what you do. If the authorities catch wind, the risk goes up, as well as prices. Opportunities for immigrant workers lessen. When you pay $7.15/hr for a job that used to cost $3.50, you are eliminating a job — and of course, the guy making twice as much will now have to do as much as two people. The person who loses their job — the undocumented one, if the management is going to choose — starves.
I hardly see a gain, here, except to another major sponsor of the Despierta, Bushwick! campaign: the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, whose competition is eviscerated if the campaign has its desired effect.
Congratulations, Make the Road, in removing opportunities for Bushwick’s struggling undocumented families.
José is at it again: bombast with little substance and scaremongery spluttering of downright lies. He’s getting quite repetitious, too: “We rebuilt up on our backs, and now it’s being sold to developers. We built this neighborhood, and now we have to fight for it.”
He’s conflating “neighborhood” and “community” — while the community may have been severely challenged and damaged in the wake of the fires and looting, and may indeed have been “rebuilt” in the decades since, the physical neighborhood is whatever was built up until the 1920s and then what was built by the city — almost no private development took place in Bushwick after the 70s until now. So if you’re gonna say anything physical was “rebuilt,” fine, but it wasn’t rebuilt on your backs — it was rebuilt on the wallets of the middle class, in places people from your “community” burned down.
“A lot of the delis, Spanish restaurants, and panaderías are being replaced by fancy shops, organic shops, and Internet cafés,” said Lopez. “A lot of shops are shutting down, and the ones that are opening in their place don’t serve the current community, but the new one.”
and
“Where we used to have bodegas and rice and beans restaurants, we’re now seeing wine bars and luxury condos.”
One word sums up my reaction: no. Nowhere in Bushwick has a panadería gone out of business to reopen as an “organic shop.” Nowhere in Bushwick has a bodega closed to reopen as a “fancy shop.” Nowhere in Bushwick has a “Spanish [sic] restaurant” gone out of business to reopen as an “Internet café.” Every panadería with hot pink sugared pastries [sic, again], 99-cent store, and shitbag bodega I have ever seen is still in business, including the one that menaces and rips off the corner near my house, crowd of gangbangers and crackheads intact.
And trust me, if anyone would know about such things, it would be me or someone I know, and nobody can produce any evidence of such a trend thus far. There are simply too many storefronts that have been vacant for years that entrepreneurs are busy filling with still-too-few new amenities. Not to mention all the “old community”-serving shops that the “new community” patronizes. I see little market pressure upon older businesses to completely abandon their old customer base in favor of a few thousand people who don’t know what to do with a plantain — a variety of items can fit on store shelves, after all. In addition, I routinely see Puerto Ricans in the handful of nicer places in Bushwick — the word “organic” clearly doesn’t send shivers down their spines. Maybe this “community” of which José speaks isn’t as monolithic as he’d like us to believe, or at least isn’t willing to obey marching orders from official class-baiting organizations that claim to speak for it.
I do not deny that the trend José fears will happen in the near future, and it’s a distinct likelihood that he’s just gearing up his troops to, I don’t know, protest and picket a few of these “new community”-serving shops when they do show up. But right now, it’s all lies. And frankly, it just makes Bushwick look even more attractive to possible future residents. Hmm…just whom are you working for, José?
Bushwick IMPACT mural, by 
