April 25, 2005
Gun shots in the dark of night scare me, I admit it.
As the air begins to warm up and the leaves emerge from their many month hibernation, so does the sounds and shouts of spring and summer. Just after drifting off to sleep last night I awoke to shots, shouts, screams, and sirens. I looked at the clock and it was around 12:48 am. I must have been asleep all of two minutes, so it scared me even more than it normally would. It was like a falling dream where you wake up before you hit the ground, but this time the scary part was the awake time.
We live on a block in between Fulton St. and Atlantic Ave. nearly atop the Franklin Ave. C subway station. Our bedroom wall and backyard is on the Fulton side of the block, so as summer nears so do the sounds and chaos of Fulton/Franklin and Fulton/Classon corners. The distance between Classon and Franklin is like a 1/2 city block. Both corners look out onto a calamity of transients, unemployed, and generally unhappy people throughout the days and nights. The Franklin Ave. subway stop, according to a guy I overheard coming up the south exit stairs one day is "...the stinkiest mother f*%#!@$ subway stop in all of New York City!"
We are new to the neighborhood, in that we moved here at the end of June and this is our first spring here. Sadly, maybe someday we'll get used to all the chaos and scary sounds, or hopefully things will get better. This morning, I have to admit, I was a bit scared and worried about what had just happened, and today...today I can't find any evidence suggesting what happened.
We awoke to rapid gunfire, screams, and then within the fastest and at the same time, longest couple of minutes, police sirens. Then screams and sounds of large crowds gathering, yelling, running. What the hell happened? I don't know. I probably won't find out.
But I still am fascinated by this area, and would rather live here for quite a while more and get to know the place. I am just getting to know the area geographically and sociologically, but events and nights like these make me wonder.
I have been doing a cooking extenship (unpaid) at a local restaurant in Ft. Greene and I have about a 20-30 minute walk there a few days a week. I see the neighborhood at all hours. However, 12am-3am is still the sketchy hours. The hours when those who have not had their days go the ways they thought they would, decide to take out their aggression and take excise on our neighbors, neighborhood and passerby.
The funny thing is, this morning, when I woke up this morning the Brian Lehrer show's segment was on the effects of gentrification in Bed-Sty. A lot of the call ins worried about a "de-culturization" that comes with gentrification. I couldn't help but think of last night's events and the general calamitous tension of the Fulton-Franklin intersection and the bed-sty I've grown to know. This area could use a bit of de-culturalization if the culture they are talking about is reflected in the sounds I heard last night many other nights since we moved here. It does not feel culturally vibrant now, at least in a coherent positive way.
While the wave of gentrification may be ebbing at the neighborhood door. And folks like and unlike me may be fearing the steep property values and whitification that comes on its coattails, the neighborhood of bed-sty I know is primarily african, west indian, and african-american and it seems to me that a majority of the business owners are not really interested in providing a culturally diverse and positive influence or experience in this neighborhood. They provide the lowest quality goods and services for the highest possible prices. As far as the evidence of big businesses, developers and gentrification is seen in only a handful of new buildings and select remodeling of brownstones. Perhaps one could count the Popeye's chain as evidence of corporate dominace and gentrification on our block, but I count that as more of a parasite than corporate takeover.
Don't get me wrong... I have seen the new Yoga studio, walked by some new businesses that look like they belong in "Boerum Hill", and wondered where all the hipsters are coming from, but calling Bed-Sty gentrified is like calling Bloomberg country-fried.
Meanwhile I still go to bed to the smells of Popeye's and Crown's day old fried chicken and the sounds of screams, sirens and shots of their well-fed patrons.
