Churches gone for apartment building

For some time, I don't know how long, there have been two shuttered churches on Rogers Avenue between Crown and Carroll Streets. Just the other day, construction fencing went up and the brick church with the scalloped roof, my favorite of the two, started to be torn down. Research reveals that a 5-story, 165 unit building by Think!Architecture is on the way. Think! has done some good work aesthetically. The height of the building to come is a relief, given the 23 story tower slated for Flatbush and Fenimore, focus of an increasingly pitched battle between the neighborhood and developers. How "affordable" the apartments will be is yet to be known.

It's Over!

In the past several weeks, gentrification has been the subject of a story in New York Magazine, asking whether the inflow of white money into to a neighborhood with too many liquor stores and not enough wine shops can possibly be "all bad," while failing to note that said white money fled these neighborhoods as soon as people of color moved in. White people don't share the largesse; look it up. They (we) gave up these beautiful houses for the homogeneous suburbs. Now we want them back and we don't care who we have to run out of town. Some huge percentage of the housing stock is being bought by foreign investors; they do not have a multi-cultural model in mind because there is none. Then Spike Lee went on a much-publicized rant about Ft. Greene and Clinton Hill, while speaking at Pratt Institute. Much outrage followed: vandals tagged "Do the Right Thing" on his childhood home in Ft. Greene (appending the Anarchy symbol and causing the homeowner to lament that such things "do not happen in this neighborhood"); some actor named Anthony Mackie was very upset, FOX Noise had a party, every newspaper, cable news channel, blogger and his brother and sista had something to say. Use of the word "motherfucker" appears to be clear evidence of racism. That was news to me. As for Spike's equation that "hipster is the new honky," no one has pointed out the leading role Spike played in the development of the hipster uniform of small brimmed hat and large eyeglasses. No one except my boyfriend, that is, who until recently was the one and only white man living in this part of black Crown Heights for 20+ years. He is not happy with the demographic shift, or the now-daily phone calls and letters from realtors promising to "pay cash" for his house, preying upon those who might not understand that cash is paid for all houses. This just in from the New York Observer: Brooklyn is OVER. The need of the "underserved" of Bed-Stuy, heretofore unable to "find a craft beer for under $7," have been met. Look out, Cleveland!

CRED

My credentials to undertake this chronicle are: 1. I am a writer. I may even be as good a writer as I am a singer, which is very, very good, unusually good.

2. I am the published "as told to" author of a book FAR outside my own experience – high performance sales – a motivational business memoir of extreme rags to riches tale from Italian East Harlem starting in the 50s, The Street-Smart Salesman: How Growing Up Poor Helped Make Me Rich. A European reviewer called it as close to a Da Vinci Code page-turner as a business book could be; it's published by John C. Wiley & Co., the reigning business publisher; it's being translated into Mandarin.

3. I'm from Brooklyn, born in Park Slope Irish-Italian Roman Catholic, then to Flatbush with my mother's adored second husband, my father, who was Jewish. I moved back to Park Slope in 1984, bought a place in 1995, very lucky, and raised a child there. As of June, 2013, I live in Crown Heights with my beaufriend, the architect Tim Seggerman. I rented out my beautiful apartment in Park Slope for money to live on, let's leave it there. Gentrification there, however, is working FOR me in Park Slope as a long-time resident. The same is hardly true in Crown Heights. No black Brooklyn neighborhood is safe from Whitey at this point. That's what we're here to talk about, whether we are going to be allowed to have the "post-racial" New York we all want as opposed to the investment condos for foreign billionaires.

4. I am a drop-out from the Columbia University School of Architecture master's program in Historic Preservation. Knocking down Pennsylvania Station blew my mind. They went after Rockefeller Center! Grand Central! The entire international art scene that centers in NYC was nurtured in abandoned manufacturing buildings south of Houston condemned for highways connecting Long Island and New Jersey - Manhattan as crossover! My ambitions were idealistic and entirely aesthetic and I certainly had little appreciation and no practical experience of the pervasive racism in American society, much as I ranted about it based on what I read. I dropped out of Columbia to work on a new TV show, Saturday Night Live. Lucky!

5. I really love living in Crown Heights. As a single woman, even as a married woman, I would not have moved into a black neighborhood with or without a child. Sometime in the early 2000s another single mother and I talked about getting a Bed-Stuy brownstone for ourselves and combined 3 kids, but we weren't brave enough – no other word – to take it really seriously. But Tim Seggerman came to what used to be called Ebbets Field nearly 30 years ago because it reminded him of someplace he'd lived in New Orleans, among black people, a happy time.

6. I hope we can agree it's long past time for Whitey to take a look at his and her racism, especially anyone who insists s/he is not racist at all. Trust me, you're tainted. LOU REED explains.

1986: Bought The House

My beaufriend bought his house in Crown Heights, where I now live with him, at city auction in 1986. It had no roof, and hadn’t for awhile. Jackie Robinson might have hit a homer onto that roof.

The house had belonged to a schoolteacher who'd descended into dementia. The City took the house and put her in a home elsewhere in Brooklyn, where she died. Despite the eyesore condition, some eyed him suspiciously: Maybe he was the guy who threw her out. Additionally, he and his then-wife were the only white people in the neighborhood and what were they doing there exactly?

Tim Seggerman, is an artist-architect, a builder and craftsman, an alchemist of minimalist design and peasant materials. He had $14,000 in the bank on that day 27 years ago and he wasn't expecting to spend it all. He liked the neighborhood because it reminded him of where he'd lived in in New Orleans. He found himself bidding against a pair of Korean businessmen who finally drove the price to to $140,000. In those days, you could still get a house with 10% down. “Somehow,” Tim says, “my hand went up in the air.”

He rented a dumpster and started clearing the house out. On maybe the first day a squad car pulled up in front and the cop motioned him over. "What are you doing here?" he wanted to know. "These people are animals." Tim said he didn't agree and was looking forward to living here. He knew from long experience that he would be made to feel welcome in a black community. He is, other than Tony Heilbut, perhaps the most knowledgeable white man on the subject of gospel music in the land, not that he writes about it. He's a deep listener to all African-American music, indeed all the musics of the Americas, but I digress.

The cop drove away and a short time later Dot came out of her house across the street. She is the soul of kindness and I'm told that though she has a very beautiful face, the rest of her body is badly scarred from the time she ran into a burning building to save some children, back home in Edenton, NC. "We're not animals," she said to him, gently. "I know," he said.

I would like to add here that our recent experiences with the local police has been entirely positive, to our surprise. We had occasion to call 911 on a domestic dispute between a troubled pair across the street. Another night we came home to find a lovely, but distraught woman on our street looking for someone to call 911. She'd also had a domestic dispute and was deeply depressed. Now I'm no fan of the NYPD, but the officers who responded to our calls were professional, understanding, well-spoken. Go figure. But not in 1986.