The Sidewalks of New York

Back when I was footloose and fancy free, bohemian in both outlook and practice, reading a lot of existentialist philosophy and Beat poetry, dating girls who wore berets and making them wear those berets in bed when we made love, I dreamed of living in New York City.

I used to dream of this while I was actually in New York City doing all of the above.  I was down there on a visit.  Many visits, actually.  At that time I had friends who lived in the East Village and they used to invite me down once a month for long weekends.  They lived on the same street as the New York City chapter of the Hell's Angels and every morning when I was visiting I would sit out on their fire escape with my coffee and watch the Angels down in the street working on their bikes.  "Safest neighborhood in Manhattan," my friends liked to boast.

Anyway, after finishing my coffee and waving to any of the Angels who happened to look up---I'd raise my mug in a good-natured toast, they'd give me a flick of the wrench in return---I'd go inside and sit down on the floor in front of a typewriter I had set up on a milk crate and write.  My friends were theater people---he was a director, and she was a composer and choreographer---and they stayed out late and slept late so most mornings I had the living room to myself.

Living room.  It was a wide hallway between the bedroom and the kitchen where my friends kept their TV, their bikes, and a narrow mattress they used for a sofa when I wasn't there and which was my bed when I came to crash.  Those mornings were some of the best mornings of my life.

Someday, I'd tell myself, or whichever of my friends' cats happened to wander by---for a guy who hates cats, I sure have spent a lot of time in their company---someday, I will live here and do this for real.  I will be a writer living and working in New York City!

There were days where I had myself half-convinced that I was.  I just happened to have to spend 24 or 25 days out of the month going to school out of town.

Home, if home is where the heart is, was the East Village.

That idyll lasted about two years and then somehow I wound up in Boston, then Iowa, then Fort Wayne, then Syracuse, and now here.

I never got to be a real New York writer.

That was a long time ago, and even while it was going on, my New York was a pretty small town.  I didn't get to know much more of the city than the Villages, Chelsea, Soho, a few blocks around Grand Central Station and the Public Library, and Shea Stadium.

So when I went into the City the week before last, to go to the Museum of Natural History with the 9 year old's third grade class, I might as well have been a hick from French Lick making my first visit to the big, bad city.

And that's why I have a question that will probably strike those of you who live in the City or who get into town regularly as a hick's question.

Where was I?

I don't mean when I was at the museum.  I know all about Central Park.  When the bus crossed the GW onto Manhattan and turned onto Broadway there, where were we?

Most of the businesses for the first ten or twelve blocks along Broadway had signs in Spanish and a lot of the people on the street looked Hispanic.  Was I in Spanish Harlem?  I thought that was down a bit and more to the east.  Many of the signs along the way made reference to the Dominican Republic.  Is there a Little Dominica?  And what are envios and llamadas and why are there so many stores offering them?  How stupid am I for asking these questions?

I have other and, I think, more intelligent questions.  How did all those business along the way get started?  Most of them appeared to be independently owned and many of them looked, if not new, then recently renovated with brand-new signage.  But considering the start up costs and the rent in New York, I'd have thought it would be next to impossible to get a little business up and running.

Also, despite the apparently thriving businesses in shiny new store fronts, the neighborhood did not look particularly prosperous.  The apartment buildings looked dingy and haphazardly maintained.  There weren't many signs of renovations going on (down by Central Park almost every other building had scaffolding around it and the streets were full of trucks and vans belonging to plumbers, carpenters, furniture stores, masons, glaziers, rug companies) and the FOR RENT signs on the sides of many of the buildings were faded and their messages a little too urgent.   Here's my question.  Why didn't I see more symptoms of gentrification?

In a heartening and grumpily gloating post on the dashing of Mayor Bloomberg's hopes for getting a new stadium for the Jets built in Manhattan, Roy Edroso describes New York as becoming: 

a City increasingly populated by transients: rootless careerists, and immigrants who do not plan to stick around

This jives with what I've heard and read elsewhere.  But I've been hearing it and reading it for years.  A lot of poor people barely scraping by, a lot of rich people with more money than they know what to do with throwing it around willy-nilly, and a real estate market that's completely insane.

So I'm wondering then, why hasn't gentrification pushed its way farther north?

Or am I being naive?

I know that a lot of former New Yorkers have been moving up this way, burdening themselves with hour and a half and two hour commutes, each way, in order to give their families houses to live in and lawns to play on.  The local paper had a story about a bus driver who lives in Middletown now.  If you live anywhere where Snapple is sold you probably know the guy.

He's the star of a new ad.

His name is Steve Mack.  He's been driving a city bus for 19 years, working out of the Brooklyn bus depot where Ralph Kramden supposedly clocked in and out.  He has the B43 route through Bedford-Stuyvesant where he grew up.  His mother still lives there.  Sometimes she comes out to a stop to wait for him and when he pulls up she hops on board to give him a kiss.

A casting director for the ad agency that has the Snapple account plucked him off a commuter train.

As Dianna Cahn of the Times Herald-Record tells the story:

It was late April, and Mack was waiting on the train from Hoboken, N.J., for his wife, Ramona. He was still in uniform. When she arrived, he stood up to give her the window seat and gave her a big kiss and a hug.

Mack didn't know it, but he'd just passed his first audition.

Sitting behind him was a scout from the Cliff Freeman ad agency. She asked him if he liked Snapple and wanted to be in a commercial.

"I thought she was pulling my leg," he said.

Snapple picked Mack for their ad because they decided he's "the quintessential New Yorker," even though he doesn't live there anymore.

Yeah, well, you can take the boy out of the City...

Mack told the paper, "Being a New Yorker is something that never leaves you. I was born and raised here. Most of my character was formed here."

He loves New York, loves his job, because:

...he gets to fulfill his grandfather's recipe for success: "to make your life better and make your neighbor's life better."

Part of his job, he says, is to get people to smile.

"It's almost like being a performer, being a bus driver," Mack said. "You get to be onstage. You are the focal point."

Besides, it keeps him coming back every day to his city, his old neighborhood.

"I mean, where else could a guy be minding his own business, waiting for the train home and the next thing you know, be in a national commercial?"

One of Mack's regulars stars in the ad with him.  The ad is part of Snapple's "Return the favor" series. People in the ads say nice things about Snapple, so Snapple finds someone to say nice things about them.  Charlene Threewits, a security guard at a methodone clinic whose daughter is also a bus driver, appears at the end of the ad to tell the world about why she likes riding Mack's bus.

"He's a sweetie. What can I say about him?  He got it. He got it. He's a little bit short, but he got it."

Couple of his other riders aren't so sure they like having a celebrity bus driver though.  Cahn overheard them talking:

"He thinks he's famous," said one female passenger sitting within earshot.

"His wife's not going to be able to get him to do anything," said another.

Anyway, Mack has been living in Orange County for the past 11 years.  His sons are in high school now.  And I understand why family guys like him aren't moving to whatever neighborhood it was I was spying on from the bus that day.

But where are the artists and the gays and the younger working people?

My friends left New York a long time ago.  They're no longer together.  He's in computing.  But she's still composing.  Their old neighborhood, they tell me, is way beyond their price range now, even with the jobs they have.  If they were young and starting out they wouldn't be living in that tiny apartment next door to the Hell's Angels.

Where would they be living?

I'm not pushing for gentrification.  Working people need to be able to afford to live in a city.  Without them and a thriving middle class, cities die.  The ones that hold on turn into large office parks and open air malls.  That's what I've been thinking has been happening to Manhattan.

I'm just asking because as were driving through the neighborhood I was looking around longingly and thinking---well, a part of me was thinking, the part that doesn't always remember he's stuck inside a middle-aged father of two---"I could live here!"

So that's my next question.  Could I?

Or am I dreaming?

(On a related note:  While Roy Edroso was enjoying the sight of Bloomberg's stadium deal crashing and burning, Tom Watson was cheering for the coming of a new ballpark for the New York Mets.  Tom's a fan so maybe his heart's guiding his head, but I'm with him when he writes:

Imagine the value of the New York Mets franchise in 2009, when a new stadium opens in Queens, and the Mets invoke their team option on aging but still-stellar ace Pedro Martinez, well over 3,000 strikeouts, pitching for a perennial contender, and owning much of the baseball-speaking population of Nueva York.

I can imagine it.  Or maybe I'm still dreaming.

And Scott Lemieux had some thoughts on the whole If We Build It, They Will Come and Build Hotels and Restuarants mentality behind the push for new stadiums.)

Comments

[Tom W.]

Lance, you were in Washington Heights and believe it or not, there is gentrification going on there full-square, same as in Harlem. Apartments are selling for record numbers up on the Heights overlooking the Hudson (indeed, some realtors now refer to it as the more fashionable "Hudson Heights"). Down in Harlem, it's condo-mania.

Now, the main drags in those nabes have a little ways to go - some of the commercial strips are stillpretty run down. The other night, I walked across 125th Stree from 7th Ave to the Metro-North tracks and the storefronts can ssome help. Butyou go a block or two north or south of 125th, and the housing stock is rapidly rising.

As for gentrification - well, I'm for a nicer, safer nabe - but I would also like those areas to maintain some flavor - don't need White Plains south.

[Anne Laurie]

Even 30 years ago, if you went a block too far from the museums anchoring opposite sides of Central Park (the AMNH & the Metropolitan), you ended up in Spanish-language territory. And in those days, there were two ways new small businesses got started in run-down, immigrant neighborhoods: New owners subleased (probably illegally) business space, equipment, etc. from previous owners who'd either done well enough to move to a better neighborhood or given up the fight and gone bankrupt. Or, the local gangsters opened "new" storefronts as a way to make themselves available to their customers. In my day they were candy or cigar stores fronting bookies for off-track betting & "the numbers". My dad said that, when he was growing up, similar stores sold smuggled booze during & after Prohibition. And by the time I left NYC in the early 70s, half the bodegas in the North Bronx made their profits on heroin and cocaine -- along with "the numbers". These days I'd guess it would be phone-card & money-wiring stores that served as front operations, because the stock is portable & doesn't expire like groceries. Whatever the new stores are selling, I'd bet a chunk of their base profits still comes from "the numbers"...

[El Loco]

Anne Laurie makes a valid point; unfortunately she's also stereotyping the Latino community... the "Broadway" phenomenon is not new to America. Irish, Italians and Eastern Europeans were subject to these calumnious claims, and proved their critics wrong.

[bitchphd]

As recently as two years ago, my best friend and her husband and their son lived in a very nice co-op in Enwood (the northern end of Washington Heights). The building was great: a mix of single moms, working-class families, gay folks ("the shock troops of gentrification," as a gay friend of mine says), professionals like my friend (who by the way is Puerto Rican), very family friendly, and yes, affordable. My sister-in-law had a one-bedroom apartment with her boyfriend in Washington Heights (until they broke up and she moved to Brooklyn). It's a good neighborhood, I like it a lot--'twas always my "home" in Manhattan.

[Anne Laurie]

Whoops. Must've phrased my comment badly, El Loco. The "front shops" my dad knew, growing up in what would become Spanish Harlem, were run by Jewish immigrants, and the ones in my Bronx childhood were run by Irish immigrants fronting for Italian gangsters. Many of these had been turned into bodegas by the early 1970s as their former owners "gentrified" and moved to Yonkers or the outer boroughs. I am second to nobody in my admiration for the hard work each new generation of strivers put into choosing their path to a better life through the jungle of impossible choices that is NYC, its streets & its bureaucracies. However, 30 years ago, the "ungentrified" areas outside the Central Park bubble were Spanish-language, with the Cubans moving out & complaining about the low standards of the incoming Puerto Ricans, who were moving in & complaining about the low standards of the Dominicans taking over the "Fort Apache" area of the Bronx. I'm sure the Puerto Rican middle class has moved to nicer areas (cf RESCUE ME, which show is a nice capsule of the people I grew up among), but Lance said that the storefront signs are still in Spanish. I did not intend my observations to be "calumnious" & apologize if it sounded like I considered Spanish-speaking immigrants any less honest than my own immigrant Irish ancestors (who were never more honest than they could afford to be, frankly).

[DPS]

Yep, that's Washington Heights. And yes, gentrification IS pushing its way north, but slowly. My girlfriend and I are both dirty theater people working in the off-off scene and we share an apartment with another roommate in the 160's and Riverside Drive because it's affordable. We have a heavy latino/dominican population, and a lot of families living in the neighborhood (which is one of the things I like most about the area.) Really the only reason I can tell you there's any gentrification going on is that I've seen a steady increase in the caucasian population over the last two years. It doesn't hurt to be so close to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, either. But the rent is steadily rising from year-to-year, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time . . . oh, and "llamadas" have to do with phone calls -- I'm assuming it's phone cards being sold, as that's a big business in the bodegas.

[BSD]

Envios are basically money sent home (home being the Mother Country). Llamadas are, as I understand it, not phone cards, but phones-for hire onsite.

[El Loco]

Annie babe:
Your words not mine: "Whatever the new stores are selling, I'd bet a chunk of their base profits still comes from "the numbers"..."
Unfortunately, you seem to be offended, but you are unable to prove your claim. Show me the money ..!

[Elayne Riggs]

I wouldn't hold my breath for gentrification in Washington Heights. We looked for apartments there a half dozen years ago and were assured repeatedly by the real estate agent that "the neighborhood is on its way up." I haven't seen any evidence of that yet. I'm glad we ended up in Riverdale.