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| Running around New York City with my not so little ones. Bottom three photos by Erik McGregor. |
For almost
two decades we’ve been meeting together, hanging out, telling stories,
gossiping about the world around us. It
began during jail support before Seattle in November of 1999, although the
Lower East Side Collective and Reclaim the Streets had been going for a year or
two before that. We’ve debated, fought
the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, Bush, Ray Kelly, surged during Occupy, and
watched it all coming crumbling down with Trump. And, of course, we’re amping up for more in
the new year, one step up, two steps back in an ever evolving dance of the
dialectic. But for a night, a bit of
conversation and comradary was just what was needed as our city was changing.
I first met most of them in the Lower East Side in the late 1990's. We moved to Smith Street in 2000, to get away from the high rents. There were gardens and quirky bookstores here, odd record stores, etc. Over our 17 years here, we've seen Smith Street rise and fall. They were our respite from a crazy world. For a while there, new restaurants popped up every week. But cold winters and slow foot traffic slowed a lot of them.
Earlier in
the week before the salon, I went to get a bottle of wine on Smith Street on my
way to see my friend Seth
Tobocman giving a talk at Interference Archive. Public spaces are always
shifting.
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| Scenes from the interferencearchive.org politics-in-public-space-in-words-and-pictures talk by Seth Tobocman. |
Lately
everything has been changing here, high rents, local shops and restaurants that made the neighborhood
desirable in the first place, shuttering.
The Jake
Walk and Buschenschank each closed this fall.
Brooklyn Magazine recently featured a piece on the demise of Smith Street,
sighting chains, greedy landlords, and gentrification all suffocating the
delicate ecology of the neighborhood.
I was talking with the Courtney at Smith and
Vine about all the changes.
“The
restaurant business is just too hard now,” she explained.
She told me
their store was moving down the street.
“Well at least the video store is still here.”
“Its moving
too, down to the Fulton Mall.”
After 14
years, these are the spaces that have helped us feel at home here.
And now they
are disappearing, displaced by anonymous market forces, banks, and box stores consuming
community spaces as fast as they can, for rent signs everywhere.
Plans are
underway for a new bookstore. And a locally run guitar store just opened on
our street. But for now, I’m left to remember all the movies I rented at Video
Free Brooklyn, book readings I went to with friends at BookCourt.
“Its one
thing to have a fascist for president,” I groused. “But to lose BookCourt
and Video
Free Brooklyn in a few days, that’s a lot to swallow.”
We had our
first snow Saturday and a party. Sunday,
the girls and I hit the streets for church at Judson, the immigrant rights rally,
and our book group. At the rally, I met
a couple who’ve been going to marches and rallies since 1963 and the March on
Washington, still at it still smiling.
“I hope our
democracy can withstand it,” they wondered.
I guess the message is we need each other more
than ever.
We need our cultural institutions and our networks.
In the years
to come, we’ll start with defending our neighborhoods and each other,
organizing around civil liberties and the environment and expanding out from
there. There’s still a lot of work to
do. But for now, I still believe civil society runs the show. It all begins in our neighborhoods where we
organize to support each other, to make this space livable in the long
term. This is what a healthy
neighborhood and city is all about.
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| Respite from the storm on Smith Street at the Jake Walk, where we hung out for years. Now closed. |
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| Scenes from a video and a book store closing. |
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| A sunny weekend between Brooklyn and the Lower East Side, friends at a salon, a party, a book club meeting, and a final video rental return at Video Free Brooklyn. |
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