Paradise bronx, p.53
Paradise Bronx, page 53
To see more of mutual aid in practice, I went to the toy distribution. It was in the basement of the Calvary United Methodist Church, on University Avenue a few blocks from the Burnside Avenue stop of the number 4 train. When I made my way in—it was crowded—and took stock, I estimated the number of gifts awaiting distribution to be in the high three figures. Piles and piles of them, each wrapped in Christmas paper, were stacked high on folding tables along the walls and on the room’s small stage. Some teenage boys played with a basketball in the middle of the floor and a lot of younger kids were running around. All were refugees just arrived in the United States, Marco Saavedra had told me. Yajaira Saavedra was dressed like a Christmas tree. At more folding tables (how did churches exist before folding tables?) La Morada volunteers served rice and beans and tortillas. In the children’s faces you could see how new this whole experience was. The parents watched with the joy you feel when your kids are happy.
Yajaira Saavedra told me afterward that they had planned to give away a thousand presents, and almost did; at the end of the afternoon, only sixty were left. The families had kept coming. Volunteers took the leftover gifts to kids in homeless shelters. All the presents were mutual aid donations. The ones I looked at had been wrapped in the best style—not perfectly, like in a store, but personally and skillfully. How did La Morada’s folks ever wrap them all? Yajaira said a lot of people helped, at different locations. Gift wrappers had been up late in the restaurant the night before. On her phone she showed me a list of the mutual aid people who had pitched in. She scrolled through name after name.
Mutual aid is a revival that began in Covid times. It had always existed, but it became a thing during the pandemic, with neighbors making sure that neighbors had enough to eat. In the Bronx, mutual aid coalitions set up food pantries and distribution centers, sometimes outside community gardens, a few with mutual aid refrigerators available 24/7 on the sidewalks.
La Morada helped hundreds of people register for vaccinations and served as a place to get the shots. Contacts made through mutual aid inspired residents to form tenants’ associations. I’ve heard former housing activists say that the kinds of civic bonds that once helped to bring about the Bronx revival no longer exist. If you’re working two jobs to pay rent that takes 60 percent of your income, you don’t have time to go to tenants’ meetings, or even to get to know your neighbors. But the rise of mutual aid coalitions argues against the inevitability of that.
Rents in the Bronx went up 26 percent between 2010 and 2020. I asked someone who worked in affordable housing whether that meant the renters had somehow upped their incomes by that amount in the decade. He said people were more likely to adjust their home lives—for example, to double up and triple up in an apartment illegally and divide the rent. (“How many of you cannot afford to live in the home you are in now?”) Sometimes when he went into buildings, he saw that more people were living in an apartment than were supposed to be there. “I never said anything,” he told me.
When I asked Fernando Ferrer, the former borough president, about people carrying heavy rent burdens today, he talked about the affordable housing he built, back when, and how sometimes he was called a gentrifier for building it. He added, “But, look—rent was always a tough thing to scrape up in the Bronx—you know?”
* * *
A story of gentrification as value extraction:
In the first chapter, I said that I began walking in the Bronx to find out how far the smell of baking cookies drifted from the Stella D’oro bakery at 237th Street and Broadway. At the time, a private equity fund had bought the factory and reduced pay and benefits, and the workers had gone on strike.
Stella D’oro was founded in about 1930 by Joseph and Angela Kresevich, immigrants from Italy. The company made Italian-style breadsticks, biscotti, and cookies that had a subtler, less-sweet taste. In the land of milk-and-cookies, the Kreseviches thought in terms of snacks for coffee or tea. Their recipes did not use any dairy, so the products could be labeled “pareve,” i.e., kosher. This made business sense because the Bronx was 50 percent Jewish in 1930.
Angela’s son (Joseph’s stepson), Felice Zambetti, known as Phil, took over the company when Joseph died in 1965. The years when Phil Zambetti ran Stella D’oro were prosperous. The neighborhood enjoyed the sight of the company’s red, green, and white vans coming and going, delivering directly from factory to store. The workers received good wages and benefits and put their children through college. On their birthdays, each employee was given a paid day off. (Later that became a factory-wide celebration of everybody’s birthday on the same day.) Thousands of immigrants entered the middle class by way of Stella D’oro.
Phil Zambetti had four children—two boys and two girls. Stella D’oro expanded into other city markets and built factories in Illinois and California. The first child, Marc, moved to San Francisco after college so he could get experience in the factory in San Leandro; the family planned for him and his brother to take over the entire company someday. On October 17, 1989, as he was driving home from work, the major earthquake on that date caused the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct in Oakland. He and forty-six other people died in the collapse; the death toll there was the most at any single place during the quake.
A family never completely recovers from a disaster like that. Jonathan, the younger son, did not want to take over the company, nor did his sisters. Three years later, the Zambettis sold Stella D’oro to RJR Nabisco for a reported $105 million. Nabisco was then bought by Philip Morris and subsumed into Kraft Foods, which had no idea what to do with Stella D’oro. The former mom-and-pop company had been bringing in a dependable $65 million a year—excellent money in the Bronx. Nabisco’s leading earner, Oreos, the most popular cookie in the United States, makes a billion dollars a year. Stella D’oro got lost at Kraft/Nabisco, which began to use less-expensive ingredients in the products and removed the “pareve” label. This change caused an uproar; consumers complained, rabbis wrote letters. Nabisco restored the pareve recipe, but Stella D’oro had begun an inexorable decline, with sales figures slipping from $65 million a year to $30 million a year.
In 2006, Brynwood Partners, a private equity firm in Greenwich, bought Stella D’oro for $17.5 million. Its value had been reduced by nearly $90 million in fourteen years. Brynwood told the workers it must cut wages and benefits. Hendrik J. Hartong II, known as “Henk,” the head of Brynwood, later said that the workers reacted foolishly, objecting to cuts as “draconian” that really weren’t, such as losing their annual birthday holiday. The schedule of cuts called for reductions in pay every year. These jobs would no longer be middle-class. To get perspective, the workers took a glance at Brynwood’s website; they saw that the private equity fund bragged of providing its investors with returns of 28.8 percent.
The strike began in August 2008 and lasted for eleven months. Mike Filippou, a top mechanic at the factory, led it. In his youth Filippou had come to the Bronx from Kasos, one of the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. The strikers picketed at the factory gates by 237th Street under the el tracks of the number 1 Broadway Local, and one could always spot Filippou among the picketers because of his height, sloping shoulders, and large, Zorba-like mustache. I admired his ability to rally his side and engage straight-up with Hartong, the wealthy Harvard MBA. I once asked Filippou if Kasos, his native island, had any connection to classical mythology. In his Bronx accent, he replied, “Oh, yeah—we sent two ships to the Trojan War.”
Later I looked it up. Kasos is mentioned in the Iliad, in the famous “Catalogue of Ships.” Now I understood him better: What’s an everyday private equity financier compared to a leader whose home island sent two ships to the Trojan War?
In July 2009, the complaint that the union had filed with the National Labor Relations Board was decided in the strikers’ favor, and the NLRB made Brynwood give them back their jobs. It did, and promptly sold the company to Lance, the North Carolina snack-food giant, which announced it would close the Bronx factory—by then the only remaining Stella D’oro factory, the others having already shut down—and move production to a plant that Lance had recently bought in Ohio. This happened to be about a year after the financial collapse of 2008. The Stella D’oro workers learned that Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment firm, owned equity in Lance. One afternoon they held a rally downtown to ask Goldman to put pressure on Lance to keep Stella D’oro in the Bronx. The strikers’ very reasonable position was that taxpayers like them had saved the bankers’ jobs when the government bailed out Goldman Sachs. Now Goldman Sachs should return the favor and save the Stella D’oro workers’ jobs.
On the afternoon of the demonstration, the security force that Goldman Sachs massed at the street level of its Manhattan skyscraper— the rent-a-cops, the attack dogs—would have intimidated anybody. Goldman Sachs owns the sidewalk up to the curb, and the police would not let the protesters stand in the street, so Filippou and about three dozen other workers stood precariously crowded together on the curbstone. In his mechanic’s coveralls he leaned back and shouted up at the steel and glass, “Goldman Sachs, can you hear us upstairs? Lloyd Blankfein, can you hear us?” Beyond implicitly threatening the workers with violence if they came any closer, neither Goldman Sachs nor Blankfein (its CEO at the time) made any response. I can never forget the sight of the rent-a-cops and dogs on one side, the NYPD on the other, as the protesters with their homemade signs and their reasonable request stood teetering on the curb.
The workers also appealed to Mayor Michael Bloomberg to intervene. On another afternoon, they demonstrated with signs and chanting on the steps of City Hall. I saw men in suits coming down the steps and laughing and making remarks out of the sides of their mouths. Unsurprisingly, Bloomberg did nothing. He has said that the crash of 2008 was caused by the end of redlining, because it brought a lot of borrowers without money into the pool of mortgage holders, thus injuring the lenders—in other words, he could never be a sympathetic audience. At the height of the demonstration, Filippou received a call saying that Lance had decided to close the factory that afternoon. The Stella D’oro workers, all 134 of them, ended the day finally and officially unemployed. None were offered jobs at the new plant in Ohio, which is a nonunion shop. Personal tragedy, big-business stupidity, and suck-it-all-dry greed had destroyed a Bronx enterprise that made cookies and sent good smells into the air.
Not long after the plant’s closing, Goldman Sachs announced it was giving its bankers and staff holiday bonuses that amounted to $23 billion. This was the largest bonus total in the history of the company. At the highest salary that Brynwood had offered the Stella D’oro employees—about $780 a week—all of them put together would have had to work forty-hour weeks for about 4,200 years to earn $23 billion.
Gouverneur Morris, the proto-Bronxite, explained a lot when he wrote, two hundred and some years ago, “The Rich will strive to establish their dominion & enslave the rest. They always did. They always will.” That is the truth at the heart of gentrification, and of the modern rise of capital. If we emulate the originalists on the Supreme Court, and look again at what Morris declared in the Preamble to the Constitution—especially the line about establishing justice and ensuring the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity—can we say that he imagined a future in which “We the People” spent more than 50 percent of their incomes on rent? Or one in which residents of Greenwich receive a 28.8 percent return on their investments, and pay a tax of 15 percent on that money, while the residents of the Bronx whom they maneuvered out of their jobs pay a higher rate on what they earn by their physical labor? Or that $23 billion should be an amount of money that any small group of human beings receives as a “bonus” for anything? To me it all sounds like the enslavement on the part of the rich that Gouverneur Morris was talking about. Judging by my own originalist interpretation of his intent as revealed by his writings, I believe he would agree.
43
I DID A LOT of walking in the Bronx with my friend Edwin Velasquez, a person as restless as I am. Mostly I walked by myself, but when I had a companion, most often it was he. I don’t ride bicycles—I’m too clumsy—but Velasquez loves them, and a forty-five-mile spin through the Bronx and onward into neighboring regions on a summer afternoon is nothing to him. That’s how his own restlessness usually comes out. He is a trim, compact, undemonstrative young man, with dark hair and eyes, and the efficient build of a Tour de France racer. I had a grandfather named Edwin who was an engineer, like he is. That’s probably another reason I like him. Velasquez was born in 1991, in Roosevelt Hospital, in Manhattan. My son was born in NYU Hospital, ditto, in 1992.
Velasquez and I met nine years ago when he worked for Bronx Pro, a company that builds and manages affordable housing. I was doing an article about DreamYard, a nonprofit Bronx arts organization for kids from elementary school through high school. He had been a participant in it, then an instructor; then he moved up to a job with Bronx Pro, which is DreamYard’s landlord. He also draws and paints, and I had sought him out because of a mural he did. It’s part of a large wall installation in the DreamYard parking lot and it takes up the center of a flower that’s about seven feet across including the petals.
Within that circular space he combined the Harlem River (eggshell blue), the sky (a darker blue), the Manhattan skyline (silhouette black, with white highlights at the top of the Empire State Building), the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge (blue-gray), and the number 5 subway train (darker gray), riding on elevated tracks in the form of an arrow pointing to the lower left. He stitched the whole composition together with a jagged pink EKG heartbeat line across the center. The painting is a landscape and cityscape combined—to my mind, a true paradise Bronx, without sentiment or flourish. Velasquez signed it “E V” in the lower right. He also superintended the construction and weatherization and installation of this flower and eight others like it—“That was my first big engineering project,” he told me. The flower panels are still there, and mostly in good condition.
His father (now retired) worked for the MTA, managing the supply of electricity to the subway trains, which meant he oversaw the third rail. In emergencies he was the one who turned it off. Velasquez’s mother ran the Supercuts Hair Salon at East 82nd Street and Lexington; it’s now closed, and she works at a hair salon in Scarsdale. He has an older brother, who’s in the army, and a younger sister. Until he was nine, the family lived in Soundview, in the South Bronx, and then they moved north, to the Baychester area. When he was eleven, a video game changed his life. While visiting a friend in his neighborhood, he watched the friend play a game Velasquez had never seen called SimCity 2000. The “Sim” stands for simulated. The object of the game is to build a city, from the subway system to the top of the skyscrapers, and all structures and systems in between.
At the annual bookfair put on by Scholastic Books at his school, MS 144, he saw that along with the Harry Potter and Captain Underpants series, Scholastic was offering the latest SimCity iteration—SimCity 3000. Velasquez ordered the CD-ROM, installed it in his computer, and spent hours, entire days playing it. The game starts with a tutorial showing you the tools you need. Then you’re given a map that’s an open grid and you begin zoning your city for residential, commercial, and industrial. You click on and drag in roads and subway lines, you construct buildings appropriate to the zoning and supporting infrastructure, and so on. You levy taxes, set a budget, fund civic services such as the schools and police and fire departments, and everything is interconnected. If you defund the fire department your city starts getting fires.
MS 144 had enough kids who played the game that the school was able to enter three teams of three in the Super SimCity Competition, a national contest put on by Brooklyn Polytechnic College. The prize for the winners was scholarships to Brooklyn Polytechnic. If you won, you and your teammates each had a college scholarship waiting up ahead—and you were still only in the sixth grade! Each team also had to build a physical model of the city it designed, and the players were encouraged to use all recycled materials. Velasquez’s team worked for months on their city plan and their model. They submitted everything as instructed, and they were disappointed not to win. He thinks the winner was a private school from New Jersey. The end of the competition didn’t mean he stopped playing SimCity. He continued with the game for another eight years, through high school and after. The makers released a more sophisticated version, SimCity 4 Simtropolis, that allows players to devise new elements that can be added onto the game for other people to play.
After MS 144, he attended Bronx Engineering and Technology Academy (called Engineering and Tech), a smaller high school on the JFK High School Campus in the western Bronx. He describes JFK as a “dysfunctional hotspot of bad activity.” Armed NYPD officers patrolled the hallways. Unlike the other kids on the campus, Engineering and Tech students had to wear uniforms, which made them conspicuous. Sometimes they got beaten up. One afternoon, as he was waiting for the Bx10 bus on his way home, a guy came walking by with a baseball bat in his hand and a blue Crips flag hanging out of his back pocket. A guy by the stop asked the guy with the bat where he was going. The guy with the bat said he was picking up his little brother. The other guy made a whistling call and suddenly a bunch of Bloods jumped out of nearby storefronts and began to chase the guy with the bat. Velasquez got on his bus—“I’m like, ‘Get me out of here!’” The guy with the bat ran in the same direction the bus was going, and the pursuers caught up with him just as it reached the next stop. From the window, Velasquez saw from close up as one of them grabbed the guy’s bat and beat him with it. Then the assailant dropped the bat, jumped on the bus, and sat down next to Velasquez.
