Ain't Nothing New to Some of Us
So a very close friend of mine, who also grew up in Jersey, and whom I met during götterdämmerung of Hoboken in it's gentrification days of the 1980s and early 1990s (it was a bloodbath) was visiting from Los Angeles, where he moved five years ago. He got caught off-guard by the changing landscape here on Manhattan Island and wrote a truly gloomy poem about it. He was closely followed by another dear friend, who has lived in Chelsea for the past 15 years, who sent me an article in The New York Times about the death of Bohemia, which I will not even bother to link to, because I'm tired of all of the weeping and moaning and gnashing of teeth. Not because it isn't warranted, but because I think we should be capable of something else. Anything else. Even fiddling while Rome burns is a more attractive alternative than bemoaning our fates and the fate of our beloved city and doing nothing.
That said, I think what galls me most is that people only really get involved when it's personal. This sort of thing has been going on since forever but people only wake up when it starts to effect them. What I'm trying to say is that black folks in Manhattan have been gentrified to within an inch of their lives from the time the Dutch brought slaves over in the seventeenth century. So excuse me if I can't get as upset any more about things like the death of Bohemia, and being pushed out of Manhattan in modern times. Our burial grounds were built over, and slowly but surely we were forced up the island to Harlem, which was empty at the dawn of the twentieth century because of overspeculation by greedy landlords. They charged black people double and triple what they would have charged whites, and black people paid it because they had nowhere else to go. And as we have for the past 300 or more years here in this part of North America,
we made something out of nothing.
It ain't nothing new to some of us.
In this vein, I'm going to be writing some entries on some of the long ago black people on the island. The New-York Historical Society did a brilliant job with its series of "Slavery in New York" exhibits, but I think some things bear repeating.
I'm also going to try to gather together some information on how we, the little people, can fight some of this gentrification insanity. Ultimately, this is just such a tiny problem compared to what's going on on this Earth and in the world, I know. I just thought we'd start here and work our way out.
That said, I think what galls me most is that people only really get involved when it's personal. This sort of thing has been going on since forever but people only wake up when it starts to effect them. What I'm trying to say is that black folks in Manhattan have been gentrified to within an inch of their lives from the time the Dutch brought slaves over in the seventeenth century. So excuse me if I can't get as upset any more about things like the death of Bohemia, and being pushed out of Manhattan in modern times. Our burial grounds were built over, and slowly but surely we were forced up the island to Harlem, which was empty at the dawn of the twentieth century because of overspeculation by greedy landlords. They charged black people double and triple what they would have charged whites, and black people paid it because they had nowhere else to go. And as we have for the past 300 or more years here in this part of North America,
we made something out of nothing.It ain't nothing new to some of us.
In this vein, I'm going to be writing some entries on some of the long ago black people on the island. The New-York Historical Society did a brilliant job with its series of "Slavery in New York" exhibits, but I think some things bear repeating.
I'm also going to try to gather together some information on how we, the little people, can fight some of this gentrification insanity. Ultimately, this is just such a tiny problem compared to what's going on on this Earth and in the world, I know. I just thought we'd start here and work our way out.
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