The cities we need, p.11
The Cities We Need, page 11
In 2019, thirty-eight-year resident of the neighborhood Cleone—a neighborhood elder—had told me how much she loved her neighborhood, its scale, its trees, “the landmark homes. I didn't appreciate that at first but now I understand—all the high rises are just horrible. People who come to visit appreciate the block and the tree-lined parts; I'm so happy the landmarking protected that.” But then she went on to explain that while the familiar physical forms were protected, the feeling of the place had changed, especially as real estate prices rose astronomically: “Some of the neighbors are not as nice—they see you're a person of color and assume you don't belong here. But I've had really great conversations with people who don't look like me, too—who treat people based not on the color of their skin but the content of their character.”
Just after I talked with Cleone, local business owner Myriam told me her story. She too had experienced being a long-term resident of color who had had her right to be at home in Prospect Heights challenged by new white residents: “I have been harassed from a new neighbor about my/our patrons because we have a safe space for POC and LGBTQ people and unfortunately this may sometimes create discomfort in a particular population. We are there! And will always be a piece of the neighborhood's fiber.” 20 At this, I'm brought right back to Julia's story of Prospect Heights as a place to run and to land someplace safe, and how much that's changed. While no one is legally excluded from the park, or from owning a bar, for example, the casual racism of gentrification excludes and undermines the possibilities for creating coherent social life in excruciating ways. The experiences of Paulette, Tanya, Cleone, Rocky, and Myriam—and the places that they've lost that once fostered their belonging—make visible the true violence of urban renewal, gentrification, and so many other things so often passed off as progress.
PORTFOLIO FIVE:
MOSSWOOD
The pink and the motel are one.
Telegraph Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard, 2005.
Laundromat, 2006.
Holding hands, Telegraph Avenue, 2007.
On the bus up Telegraph, 2007.
Teddy's, Thirty-Fourth Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, 2006.
People from the old neighborhood
Thirty-Fourth and Martin Luther King Jr. Way
Oh! Teddy's! This was Teddy's Market when I was a kid. We loved it there. You know, this guy, an Asian guy, came into the store the other day, and he said he'd lived in the neighborhood growing up.
And I said, “Oh did you know Teddy's market?” And he said, “Yes!” And we just laughed and talked about how great it was—you know it was always better then—before was so much better. I love meeting people from the old neighborhood. It makes me so happy.
—Lois, 2006
Blue Bird Liquors, 2007.
RIP Marcial, gone January 2006, W. MacArthur Boulevard, 2007.
You sometimes get to say hello to your neighbors.
Thirty-Sixth Street between Webster and Telegraph
Nobody walks anywhere in LA. You walk from your kitchen table to the garage, you get in your car, and then you drive. . . . And that's not true here, because most of the houses don't have attached garages! So at least you have to walk from where you parked your car to get to your house. And in that walking, you sometimes get to say hello to your neighbors.
—Cynthia, 2006
Cynthia's block, Thirty-Sixth Street, 2006.
BECOMING COMMUNITY
6
ENDURING TALK AND CASUAL TALK
When Rocky recorded her oral history for Intersection | Prospect Heights in 2015, she was thinking back on the public walking tour we'd just been on, all the places we'd heard neighbors talking about, and she told me a story about what was bothering her lately in this neighborhood she'd lived in for years. She told me:
One of my great distresses right now in terms of the neighborhood is that new people come in . . . they have no idea how to be neighborly. . . . So I'm sitting on the stoop one afternoon, and this lady comes out, and she's like, “Can I help you?” “No, I'm just sitting here.” “Do you live here?’ “You know I don't live here. It's Brooklyn. It's a stoop. I'm your neighbor.” I said, “This is something that will happen. This is how you get to know people. Some evening, just come out here, sit down, smile at all the people walking by. Wave to them.” Everybody, even if they don't know your name, or remember your name, they will know there is this neighbor that's there, and we form this community.
Places can help us become ourselves, to feel we belong, to shape our values, but they can also do important work helping us be together with others, maybe even to become a community, fostering social capital and emotional support. Places that do this work—like a stoop might—are part of how we understand who our people are, who we identify with. Telling stories and shooting the breeze help us navigate time and place as deeply connected. As the novelist Javier Marías writes, “Space is the only true repository of time, of past time. . . . When you go back to a familiar city, time undergoes a brief, sudden compression.” 1 Walking the spaces of a familiar place immediately brings stories that are important to us into the present, even if those things happened many years in the past.
Beyond the power of moving through places for individual memory, moving through places is a kind of practice of culture. In Cibacue, Arizona, the Western Apache people use places as mnemonic devices, compiling their stories, values, and cultural heritage in the landscape; and in Australia's Western Desert, people's individual sense of self as Pintupi is linked with a cultural and spiritual history and belief structure told through, and of, the land of the Pintupi people.2 These landscapes are not just intertwined with stories but themselves tell stories that can be felt. These connect the living and the dead, and connect us over time in natural places as well as in urban places. In Minneapolis, the inimitable bookseller Tookie in Louise Erdrich's novel The Sentence wonders if “perhaps before the Dakota War, her ancestors were connected to this spot of earth, or to the ground beneath the bookstore itself.” 3 And grounding us in Oakland, Tommy Orange's characters in There There, his “urban Indians,” are deeply connected to place, and in their connection, they describe the place itself:
We came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the Oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest. We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread. . . . Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.4
Who we identify with in a cultural sense, writes social theorist Stuart Hall, is continually “becoming,” pushed and pulled between similarity and difference, inclusivity and exclusivity, working at a personal and a structural level.5 This is about “feeling yourself through the contingent, antagonistic, and conflicting sentiments of which human beings are made up. Identification means that you are called in a certain way, interpolated in a certain way: ‘you, this time, in this space, for this purpose, by this barricade with these folks.’” 6
Places help us be together, help us make culture together, and are where we are called to “this barricade” when they foster two kinds of talk: the enduring talk that comes from long-term relationships, and the casual talk that is fleeting and sometimes lets us take small risks with less commitment. This talk, and the negotiation inherent in it, is essential in a city, which by its nature is what political theorist Iris Young called “the being together of strangers”—strangers who need to navigate place together.7 I think about this kind of work that places do as the work of helping us be together: not even necessarily to become a community. Just being together, acknowledging each other's humanity can be hard enough without the reciprocal care community implies. I also take the word community very seriously, and often use it with trepidation. Its potency is compelling, and the coming together of people who share a place or experience can be powerful and sustaining. Yet, as a word community can be dangerous because it can be used too simplistically, can mean entirely different things for different people, and, most dangerous of all, easily lends itself to being exclusionary, rather than what cultural theorist Raymond Williams has called the “warmly persuasive” way the word is often thought of.8 It's too easy for a group of people, in defining what draws them together as a “community,” to simultaneously define who is outside of it, who is different and hence not welcome.9 Hence, here I'm working with a notion of a neighborhood—made up of many overlapping, intersecting, and sometimes oppositional communities—and the possibilities of city life, in what Young elaborates as not just strangers being together, but being together “in openness to group difference.” 10
Yet this vital openness while being in the same place at the same time does not just happen; it requires acknowledgement of each other, talk as negotiation, and places in which that acknowledgment and that talk can be enacted. As I began to notice the amount of talk on the tours people took me on, I wondered if some of it could even be called dialogue. The work of radical educator Paulo Freire has most informed my thinking on how interpersonal dialogue engages with, and is part of, the larger community. Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and later works imagine a liberatory potential for praxis-based dialogue, “the encounter between [people], mediated by the world, in order to name the world.” 11 This kind of talk has power to awaken consciousness and enable resistance to structures of oppression, and it can be of particular power for people who have connections to multiple places and cultures, who critical theorist and linguist Donaldo Macedo calls “forced cultural jugglers.” 12 On a modest scale, we can see the need for a similar kind of dialogue in those heterogeneous neighborhoods like Prospect Heights and Mosswood that struggle with the legacies of American segregation, class structures, and discriminatory history. Places that enable the kind of talk that allows individual realities to negotiate with each other, and with the larger neighborhood, are vital, in whatever form they take.
At the Valois Cafeteria in Chicago, a place that evoked the social life of an old neighborhood now mostly gone, one of sociologist Mitchell Duneier's interviewees explained it this way: “Lots of people—even though they don't live in the neighborhood—make a point of coming to Valois to eat. It's sort of like a meeting place. You suddenly run into someone you haven't seen for a while.” 13 When I read this, I can hear Tewolde's voice in my ears, telling me about the Oakland donut shop where his diaspora community came to “just smoke and sit” and, most importantly, “just got to be friends.” Places that foster these kinds of talk are special, and the people who facilitate them (or, to be clearer, run them) are often what make them what they are.
To reap real benefits from this talk, for conversation to rise to the level of dialogue, there needs to be trust, respect, a willingness to listen, a bravery to risk one's own opinions, and an inclination for people to work together in a cooperative process.14 It is this kind of talk that builds social capital, that builds networks that allow us, in social scientist Xavier de Souza Briggs's words, to get ahead and to get by. These places make space for this kind of trust and risk-taking, the engagement and conversation with friends, acquaintances, and strangers that validate a sense of self-worth and relationship to community.
These kinds of interactions between place and people are essential for a functioning community, functioning neighborhood, or, we can imagine, even a functioning nation—shared by strangers together. A wide range of sites can do this placework, as long as residents feel they are safe and they are heard. In the following chapters, we'll look at the work places can do to support the kind of enduring talk that happens regularly over a long period of time—in Neville's words, “we still meet every Thursday”—and the kind of talk that is more casual but no less potent—in Tanya's inimitable words, “where are you able to connect?”
PORTFOLIO SIX:
PROSPECT HEIGHTS
“The store hasn't been touched.”
Vanderbilt Avenue, 2001.
The store hasn't been touched.
641 Vanderbilt Avenue
My friend, who was in the same electronics business like me, died. And they closed the store with all his stuff inside. . . . He was a cricketer in the West Indies, and his friends, who were his old cricketers, they always used to meet every Thursday, around that table—have their drink. Two years ago, he passed away—they still meet every Thursday afternoon—still the same way.
He went to the hospital for a checkup and they found something, and they operated—and when they operated, he died.
See, everything's still here. The store hasn't been touched. If I need anything, I'm short of anything, instead of buying it, I get it from him.
—Neville, 2001
Brotherhood Baptist Church, Saint Marks Avenue, 2004.
Candy store, Vanderbilt Avenue, 2002.
Street fair setup, Vanderbilt Avenue, 2001.
Dixon's Bike Shop, Union Street, 2001.
Neville with Lester and David Dixon, Union Street, 2001.
We used to have a club upstairs.
Dixon's Bike Shop, 792 Union Street
Dixon's Bike Shop is one of the only places in New York you can buy a big-wheel bicycle. Still working. And he rides it too!
David: Remember, you had one like this! Oh! The green Dawes! Them guys joking all the while talking about all you guys used to ride back in the day, and Neville and him Dawes bicycle!
Lester: That's the sprinter! With the Dawes! No one could mess with Neville's Dawes! Nobody could touch it!
Neville: Yes. Yes. I still have it! I still got it! And I won't part with it. I used to store it away, and then I went to the supermarket, and somebody steal it! And a couple of days afterward, it appeared at the supermarket, and I got it back—it had a flat!
We used to have a club upstairs, and we all formed a band! We used to play together. [I played] percussions. And bass guitar. We had a bass guitar, missing the strings, and we strung it with wire, and we still used to play it like that—missing a couple of strings.
Oh, yes, we used to go to the park, and ride. I was on my Dawes, and these guys all wanted to beat me, but . . . never!
—Neville, 2001
7
WE STILL MEET EVERY THURSDAY
As David K. is bringing me into his apartment building, the key sticks in the front door lock, and no amount of shaking or jiggling will get it open. “Oh man, stuck again? This be happening,” he sighs. “Hold on, I'm going to get somebody to buzz us.” When he pushes a neighbor's intercom button, they immediately let us in. It's these kinds of long-term (though not always particularly close) relationships built on trust that help us succeed in an imperfect environment and that also sometimes let us change that environment thorough collective action. To build these kinds of relationships, places that allow us enduring conversations are critical; these conversations happen within our ordinary spaces but also transcend them—and transform the way we think of a donut shop or the back room of an electronics store.
Neville's Brooklyn neighborhood tour was made up of men's friendships and the sites of men's rituals that have sustained him over time; yet when we walked, these places and what they fostered were beginning to fade. Tewolde's long-term relationships helped him build a stable Eritrean community in Oakland—a community that formed the basis for his long-term political organizing for Eritrean independence as well as the customer base for the restaurant his sister and he later opened. Enduring talk in places where people met over time fostered a rich social capital for many of my tour guides, offering both a social support that allows them to get by and sometimes also the social leverage that helps them get ahead—such as when Mike offers a local kid a job and starts training him how to cook.
The enduring talk not only serves the creation of community trying to grow in a new place but also can be particularly potent for navigating a diaspora, and creating something new. It's a way to acknowledge that place is never simple, no matter what pseudohistories of homogeneity people like to invent; as geographer Doreen Massey writes, a global sense is central to the essence of place.1 Almost every place has at some point had a global migration story that has shaped it.
Migration changes place and changes the people and cultures that migrate to a place, creating something new, culturally distinct. As Stuart Hall writes, “The diaspora is a place where traditions operate but are not closed, where the Black experience is historically and culturally distinctive but not the same as it was before.” 2 Marty, who'd grown up in Mosswood in the 1940s and 1950s, remembered that Oakland's Thirty-Third Street was once called “Shreveport” because, as he said, “there was a lot of Shreveport northern Louisiana Black folks there”—echoing historian of the Great Migration Isabel Wilkerson, who describes Oakland of the early 1950s as “a satellite of colored Louisiana.” 3
