Bed-Stuy blues . . .
I left not long after Obama was nominated this summer and there weren’t many Obama posters at all – in fact I wondered if people in Bed-stuy even cared. Since then, Barack Obama has won the election, Wall street took a nosedive, and Barack Obama won the election. My friend CJ had this to say about election night:
“The whole election was really amazing, though. Right up until Election Day none of us really dared to believe it could happen, despite the commanding lead Obama had in the polls. At best we hoped for a squeaker, with counting going on through the night. I must say, too, that the turnout at my polling place was even lower than in 2004. There was no line, no wait: just in and out. I guess all the voting age people are incarcerated or in the country illegally, or perhaps the district is just underpopulated. Then around nine pm I was in the Union Pub with some friends, and Pennsylvania went blue on the big screen, and having spent the last fortnight watching the pundits pore over the electoral map we knew (or at least I knew) that that made it almost mathematically impossible for McCain to win. Then Ohio went not long after, and everyone was screaming and jumping up and down and embracing each other. Then North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida, and the Solid South crumbled.
“In Bed Stuy everyone was honking and firing their guns in the air down in the projects just like New Years Eve. Every public place was a madhouse, and people who have probably never owned an American flag in their lives except perhaps to burn it in protest were waving all these flags like crazy. They even had those enormous ones you usually only see at car dealerships on Long Island.
“Then the next day there was that hung-over feeling. It was grey and drizzly, and Bed-Stuy looked every bit as trash-strewn and derelict as ever, with all the same bums on the same chairs on the same corners. I couldn’t stop crying for days, though, the emotion was so strong–and I’m normally pretty blase about these things. I noticed other people, too, would just start weeping on the subway. It was like we’d woken up one day in exile, and then woken up the next day in our own country, restored to us at last. Of course, about forty percent of the country feels the opposite way, and are busily hanging Obama in effigy, sending boxes of feces to their black neighbors, committing hate crimes, and in the case of a country store in Maine, conducting a betting pool on when Obama will be assassinated. (“Hope someone wins!” reads the sign.) And the messianistic hopes everyone has invested in Obama are just too much for any human being to fulfill. The kindly gentleman from the Community Garden up by Classon told me, as he pressed a bag of collard greens upon me, how now there was going to be peace everywhere in the world”
Three months on, Bed-Stuy doesn’t feel much different than from when I left. On the street, the new apartment houses are finished and ready for tennants – the Verizon telephone people were inside, presumably setting up telephone lines. The building on the corner of Franklin that has been derelict as long as I’ve been around is being fixed up – the windows boarded over, the brick repointed. Along Greene Ave, the hi-rises that had been started this spring or summer are still under construction, so no half-finished hulks, not yet anyway.
CJ says the word is that construction that has already been started will be finished, but there will be no more construction for some time. And the people I know here who work in the field aren’t working much. Some say the construction industry will be dead here for two years or more. What this means for Bed-Stuy, I really don’t know.
City of strangers 
Where is New York At? Pt. II
Posted in Bed-Stuy, Comment, New York, tagged Brooklyn, Election, Inauguration, New York, Obama on January 15, 2009| Leave a Comment »
After one week back, I can’t really say where this city is at. More uncertainty, but a guarded optimism as well. You can feel the optimism in the streets, despite the (for New York) brutally cold weather. People smile at each other, seem more gentle with each other. Black people say hello more often, like they used to do when you went to black neighborhoods when I first started coming to NYC in the 80’s. Walking into Bed-Stuy a young black girl hanging out with her friends said hello. A few years ago, there would have been malice, distrust, her friends glaring back or sniggering if you looked at them, but when I met her eyes the girl was just being open, friendly.
I talked to a friend today who was in Park Slope the night of the election. Down on the lower Slope, where the Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans cling on in the not yet gentrified areas near the warehouses, the projects, huge block parties took over the streets. “You could see it in black people here – usually they’re so hard, they protect themselves so much, but after Obama won, they wore their warmth, their hope on the surface . . . ”
Walking out of the subway into Prospect Heights I noted how relaxed the crowds seemed, streaming down Washington Ave into the cold, cold night. In London a dozen people would be barking into their cell phones, stress and frustration in their voices, written all over their faces – and totally closed off from everyone around them. Here it was just people going home after work. You felt you could sink into the crowd, become a part of it, that people would respond to you – you felt a togetherness that has been absent from New York for some time.
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