Lucy and the Ashes, Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone, #NoGowanusRezone #NoDeveloperGiveaways

According to Voice of the Gowanus:

"Mayor Bill de Blasio and Councilmember Brad Lander are

trying to push through a massive rezoning proposal that is a

danger to our community. Specifically, they want to:

- BRING 20,000+ NEW RESIDENTS TO A FEMA FLOOD ZONE;

- USHER IN 2 DECADES OF DRILLING AND HEAVY CONSTRUCTION (JUST LIKE

ATLANTIC YARDS);

- BUILD 15 LUXURY CONDO TOWERS 20+ STORIES TALL IN A TOXIC EPA

SUPERFUND SITE PRIOR TO ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDIATION;

- ALLOW THE CITY TO CONTINUE DUMPING 363 MILLION GALLONS OF RAW

SEWAGE INTO THE GOWANUS CANAL EVERY YEAR;

- CUT-OUT NYCHA COMMUNITY MEMBERS FROM RECEIVING EQUITABLE

INFRASTRUCTURE AND REPAIRS;

- DELIVER 4 SPECIAL TAX BREAKS TO REAL ESTATE DEVELOPERS WHILE

GENERATING ZERO QUALITY LOCAL JOBS FOR OUR COMMUNITY.

JOIN US & HELP STOP THIS REZONE PROPOSAL "

Dragonfly says "Brooklyn is not a sacrifice zone!"

28 years ago members of ACT UP threw the ashes of loved ones, who’d perished, on the White House Lawn. Eric Sawyer writes: “we called for loved ones who lost their family members to AIDS to join us in dumping the ashes of people who died of AIDS because of Presidential Neglect, on the White House Law.” 

Plans are in the works to reprise this for those lost to COVID 19.

The specter of loss is everywhere.

210,000 regular people are gone. 

RGB is gone. 
The policies she supported, that we've worked on for decades, are under threat, the Affordable Care Act, reproductive autonomy. 

We meet in front of Representative Hakeem Jeffries's office in Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn, New York 10/9, calling him to stand up and oppose the nomination of Amy Barrett.

"Get Our House in Order: Save SCOTUS" declare activists.

"Amy Barrett is not the person you want deciding what you can do with your body," writes Ken Schles. "Or if your vote counts. Or the status of your marriage. She’s not the person you want deciding your healthcare. Don’t let her decide your fate. Or the fate of the planet. It’s a sorry state of affairs when the balance of the Democracy rides on so few. Fight. Call your senators. Call your congressional leaders. Come to DC Monday to protest. Throw a wrench in it. Demand your representatives use all the tools to stop this nomination. We can do it. You got this.With CoVid paralyzing the Administration, we can stop this nomination in its tracks.

So much is at steak much its hard to fathom.

We feel it in the middle of the night, when we wake early, when we look at the city, and the vast gaps among what used to be here.

“I want you always to remember me,” writes Haruki Murakami in Norwegian Wood, the novel I’m reading.   “Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?” 

Loss grasps at us.

As storytelling on Friday night, a few of us sit outside in a circle outside of the Grace Gallery on Ave C and 11^th Street in the East Village.

An elder woman is talking about a loneliness she feels.

She reads from Truman Capote’s Lucy, a 1941 story about an Black woman in New York, missing her roots in the South.

“Lucy would gaze of the spectacle of the dying day,” writes Capote. “When she read poems with a southern theme, I realized how homesick she was. New York was a vast loneliness."

Says Capote: “Lucy was really the outgrowth of my mother’s love for Southern cooking.”

I read from my poem about Sylvie, a dream I had last fall, thinking people we meet, not unlike Lucy.

“This was Perfect for phase 5 (of 6) in our Journey from microbes to metropolis,” notes Dee Dee at the Gallery.

“October we are in Fantastical Futures. We are pushing the limits of imagination To doodle the future. Using the roots of the past on which to build the fantastical.  So fitting. Allowing the note to write a story.”

“Here comes my neighbor,” says JK, looking about.

“What were you scared of” JK asks her friend Joan.

"The old Twilight Zone," she says, telling a story of watching with her brothers when she was a kid, hiding behind the couch during the show.

“We all feel fear today. There is a lot to feel, especially if we are connected to each other and the plant,” I reply. "That can be an agonizing feeling."

“I think we are 4.5 billion years old,” says JK. “My thoughts go back and forth."

“We’re stopping pipelines and deforestation,” says JK. “All these things are happening.”

Back home, we all catch up, watching the Derry Girls, set in Derry, Northern Ireland, recalling the optimism of the days of the Good Friday Accord, of 10 April 1998 that ended the political conflict in Northern Ireland, wondering if we can get back to that feeling.

“We are all Derry Girls.”

The city is closing the Tombs, I read, scrolling through my facebook feed, pictures and memories flashing across my mind. 

I think about years of afternoons there, year after year, a mini history of civil disobedience in New York. 

Saturday, I zip from Gowanus to Sunset Park, to the Lower East Side, the fall full of colors, feelings, the park full of people.

A violinist if performing in Tompkins Square Park.

Another band if playing “Here comes the Sun.” 

Musicians on stoops, a jug band, a man with xylophone.

Friends meeting on the benches, watching the kids, the squatters, the neighbors taking in the afternoon.  

“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in

one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the

smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet

where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within

itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”
says Rainer Maria Rilke,  in Letters on Cézanne.

“Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves,
We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!”
says Humbert Wolfe 

All week, my friends were organizing around the Gowanus Rezone, publishing an article in City Limits:

"A recent opinion piece co-authored by

Councilmember Brad Lander in City

Limits entitled “How the Gowanus

Rezoning Could Push NYC Forward on

Racial Equity” attempted to hold up this

Mayor Bill de Blasio-led rezoning

proposal as an answer to systemic

racism. Unfortunately, this planned

rezoning is part of the all-too-familiar de

Blasio approach of targeting working

class neighborhoods, industrial hubs, and

communities of color for luxury condo

development (see: Inwood, East Harlem,

East New York). The arguments put

forward by Lander and his co-authors

Michelle de la Uz and Barika Williams

mislead and distract from current racial

and environmental justice issues in Gowanus.

I drafted a quick comment in City Limits:

 

“To call the Gowanus a “wealthy, white” neighborhood is disingenuous at best. Like many of us, I attended multiple community meetings and hearings about the Gowanus Rezoning.   Majorities of those attending the meetings expressed disapproval of the plans.  Mr Lander and the others involved failed to engage in that most simple of tasks for a community organizer, listening.  They charged ahead with their plans.  The debate between open space and housing creates a false divide.  Healthy cities require both green space and affordable housing; they require non-polluting transportation and attendant infrastructure needs. There is already plenty of housing stock.   Writing about SOHO, Sarah Schulman asks: "Why build 3,000 units to get 800 "low income" units? There should be no more luxury housing built in New York City, and certainly no more towers. Expand Rent Control and create low income housing in pre-existing housing stock. Or construct 100 percent low income housing. And empty ,already existing luxury towers should be transformed into low-income housing. No more luxury construction!

Leaving the Gowanus, I join Monica, Dragonfly and company for the performance in Herbert Von King Park in Bed Stuy, for Brooklyn is not a sacrifice zone:

"Back to Bed-Stuy with a segment of their five part performance action series along the route of the North Brooklyn Pipeline! Join us for a 20 minute commedia-style history lesson on energy politics and the domination of utilities companies in North East and then Jeo-Party! (inspired by Jeopardy of course), and Who Wants to Win $5 (We don't have a cool mil to give but we got laundry quarters!) to learn about the proud Do or Die history of Bed-Stuy and the communities fighting back against National Grid's fracked gas pipeline running through Black and Brown neighborhoods without our consent! It's a teach-in, it's a protest, it's theater, it's community-building, it's in the streets and we need you!"

"Ladies, Gentleman, and the rest of us, welcome to Brooklyn is not a sacrifice zone," says Dragonfly, welcoming everyone. 

"I love the trees in Bed Stuy," says Jarrott. 

Dragonfly and company tell the story fracked gas pipeline from superfund sites, through neighborhoods once redlined, along a pipelines destroying the environment. 

Activists are connecting the dots between superfund sites and developer giveaways. 

Brooklyn is not a Sacrifice Zone. 

Tomorrow,  "No Confirmation Until Inauguration Day of Action

Supreme Court of the United States."