On the Sunday afternoon ride back from Alan’s compound in Ghent, the train car is abuzz with overheated mobile devices, their weekender owners desperately emptying clogged inboxes before “beginning” work tomorrow morning. The Hudson River Valley passes in the periphery. We approach Manhattan by way of the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge, a rickety swing bridge built in 1900. It runs parallel to the Henry Hudson Bridge, which pierces a forested bluff at the northernmost tip of the island; the panoramic view on that green perch, once enjoyed by the seventeenth-century Lenape and whoever else might have wandered those heights before them, is now reserved for car traffic.
Northern Manhattan has a complex topography where glaciers left behind caves, ridges, and valleys. Much of this landscape is still preserved, still blanketed with trees that don’t give much notice to the occasional bridge or road weaving through.
The train passes under the George Washington Bridge—the busiest bridge in the world, leading out to New Jersey and, beyond, the continental United States—and rolls down the western bank of the island. We pass several more ridges, including one to the east known as Coogan’s Bluff. For over seventy years the rocky precipice overlooked a baseball stadium, the Polo Grounds, home to the New York Giants until 1957 when they bolted for San Francisco, the same year Alan Fishman’s Dodgers bolted for Los Angeles. On the patch of land where Ebbets Field once stood, shining its lights into Alan’s boyhood bedroom, now stands the Ebbets Field apartment complex, an underfunded, under-maintained cluster of towering brick buildings, which grown-up, banker Alan described as a bad idea with no clear fix. Likewise, nestled below Coogan’s Bluff, the land known as the Polo Grounds retained its name but was otherwise transformed: a sun-splashed green diamond became a series of monolithic brick buildings, apartments stacked on top of each other, casting shadows onto the streets and neighbors below. Approximately four thousand people live in this north Harlem complex and the president of the residents’ association—the RA—is Barbara Williams.
She and her husband, Arty, live on the nineteenth floor. Arty answers the door when I knock. He takes his time—I can hear him just the other side of the door for a few moments before the sound of a series of locks being opened echoes down the empty, dimly lit cinder-block hallway. And when the door does open it happens slowly, cautiously, eventually revealing a man with blue-tinted glasses—sun? prescription? both? neither?—and a perfect two-inch sphere of hair. He asks me to name the person I’m there to see. I say Barbara Williams and he motions for me to enter.
I step into a room with two sofas wrapped around a blaring television. Just as I start to ask where I should sit—Arty seems like the kind of guy who has a usual spot—he points to a place on the couch up against a mirrored wall. He takes a chair on the fringe of the room that is straddling the adjacent kitchen. He clicks his way through a few channels while I try to think of a starting point for a conversation. Barbara enters and I stand to shake her hand. We sit across from each other and once we start talking, Arty flicks off the television. He stands up and announces he’s going back to the bedroom to watch television. Only it’s a short hallway and, as Arty has proven, he likes it loud, so still we hear gunfire and fight sequences playing out in the background approximately every four to five minutes.
Barbara sits at attention, wearing glasses, possessed of calm even with the sounds of violence in the background. Originally from James Island, South Carolina, she prefers to be called Mrs. Williams—Barbara requires some common ground and history and time—and she seems to reciprocate such honorifics for everyone she meets. She came to New York at eighteen, staying with family, looking to enter a work environment where a dark-complected woman like herself might still be allowed to work the reception desk where everyone could see her. She retired five years ago after a career as an office clerk cum office manager at a handful of small businesses.
I’ve been in New York for going on fifty years—this year I will be sixty-six. My husband’s family was the first residents in this apartment. When my mother-in-law passed away we moved in—1988, I think—and we’ve been here ever since.
I worked most of those years so I was out early in the morning and in late. I didn’t really take too much stock in the community because, trying to raise a family, you only have weekends to take care of your personal things. I have four children so it was here and there and all over the place—it was running.
As time went by and the children grew up, it was just the husband and I, and I thought, okay, it’s time to start doing things a little bit differently—give some attention to your community because this is something that I’ve always wanted to do. I didn’t know what talents I had to offer but whatever I have, I can share it. You don’t have to be a family member to be support for someone—just a neighbor. If I’m out in the street and I see one of my neighbors going through some problems, I’m going to step in and say, “Do you need some help?” They’re coming home with too many bags: “Can I help you with your bags?”
Today you don’t walk up on a stranger and say, “Can I help you with your bag,” and think that it’s going to be welcomed.
’Cause they look at you like, “Why do you want to help me?” They know they need the help but, “No thank you,” because they think you’re going to run away with their bags.
She laughs.
People have lost trust in each other. You know when I was coming up I was told when you get lost you go to the police. Today nobody trusts the police. And they’re supposed to be the guys that protect you. The children, they’re like, “Are you kidding?”
I don’t know what the police department is going to do but they need to do something about changing the perception that the public has of them. Like this stop and frisk thing. I never agreed with that. The police department always had the right to stop and frisk—that was a part of their duties to begin with!
She laughs.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do it—that’s a part of your job, to stop and frisk if you think that something is wrong. That’s how you protect me. But don’t write it in the policy so you can just—“Oh, I think …” Naw. There was a message that was not being said. It didn’t happen to everyone. It was happening to a group of people and that was it.
My son, he was twelve, coming home from school, walking the block. He was stopped and frisked. He came home in tears. “Mom! I didn’t do anything. They just stopped me, had me kneel on the ground, put my hands behind my head. Why? I didn’t do anything. I’m not a criminal.”
First of all I said, “Come over here. Let your mom comfort you. Let your father and I talk to you.” And I told him, “It’s not because you did anything, honey.”
I went to the precincts. Yes, I did. It didn’t go well.
She laughs.
I had my say.
They gave the same reason they give everybody else: he fits a profile. A twelve year old and he fits a profile so they had a right to stop him.
So, no, we don’t need that. And now that they’re stopping the policy, I fully agree with Mr. de Blasio. It needs to stop.
Bill de Blasio ran for mayor as one of the most vocal opponents of the stop and frisk policy. Shortly after taking office, he dropped the city’s appeal of a judgment against how the policy was being implemented and announced that law enforcement would no longer rely on profiling for stop and frisk. And to display some ideological balance, or to demonstrate the complexities of the job, or just to contradict himself, de Blasio appointed William Bratton as police commissioner—the same William Bratton who, two decades earlier, worked with Rudy Giuliani to pioneer the “zero-tolerance” policy, which is as aggressive as the branding makes it sound. Bratton describes policing as something that needs constant attention like “weeding a garden.” Small infractions—loitering, tagging—are snuffed out on each stoop to ward off the bigger stuff like gunfights and drug deals.
Reach in deep and get at the root.
Don’t get me wrong: I do trust the police. I think that authority is there for a reason. There are some police officers that abuse that authority just as there are abusers of authority in every other aspect of our lives. But I’ve never lost confidence in our police department because you can’t paint them all with the same brush. One of my sons wants to be a police officer and right now I have a grandson who wants to be an FBI agent—and I push that.
All three of Barbara’s children have moved away—two back to the family’s roots in South Carolina and the third to Texas. When the nest emptied and Barbara looked to support those beyond her immediate family, when she looked to get to know the people with whom she shared parks and sidewalks, markets and elevators, she started small:
I got involved with the senior center, making curtains and whatnot. Soon after that an opening came to run for the president of the resident association. They asked me to consider it but I thought, eh, I just retired, let me socialize, get to know my neighbors who I’ve been living around all these years. Don’t know anybody other than by face, coming into the building. People on my floor, we know each other; but other surrounding neighbors, I knew virtually no one. The second time that they asked me to run it was because, unfortunately, the president that was elected, she passed away and they came back and said maybe you should do it now.
I said, “Okay, I don’t know what I’m doing here, you guys are going to have to train me.”
She laughs.
A lot of people who were on the board had been there for many years, so I’m thinking, okay, these are going to be my teachers. Because I know business but I don’t know this type of business.
I’ve learned that there’s a lot of politics going on so you’ve got to become aware of what’s going on in your community, who’s doing what in your community. So I just got out and shook hands and introduced myself and got to know who’s out there.
And just this year I was reelected as president. Now I have a new board and we’re getting to know one another. Our concern is to raise the quality of life in our community: reaching out, being good neighbors, working together to improve the entire area. We have a community center—we have basketball, tutoring, programs teaching children about being good citizens, we take them on trips.
We also have a garden club where they grow vegetables and flowers. Now I’m looking to combine the young people in the neighborhood with seniors who can teach them about fresh fruits and fresh vegetables.
You know my father used to have a small garden and he always said that the year my brother and I put the seeds in the hill we had the biggest crop ever. And as you can see I am now more than sixty-six and I still remember that. Knowing that you could share that with a child, that they’ll have that kind of memory, it puts a smile on my face every time I think about it. You’ve put the seed in the ground and you watch it grow! How great is that?
It’s another way of socializing, too, getting to know your neighbor. Maybe you saw them coming in or out, but you never stopped to talk to them, you never got to know who they are but now you’re sharing this experience, you’re having a common conversation where you can begin a friendship.
We’re really getting to know one another and we’re getting to be more of a family, working and talking and sharing. There’s more togetherness that’s beginning to happen here. Before it seemed like everyone was growing apart. And I came from a large family so I like people around me talking and laughing, going out in the evening and playing stickball, baseball, but in those times it was a stick—
At this point Arty emerges from the bedroom and enters the kitchen, the swish-swash of his black track pants behind me.
My parents used to say you get more flies with honey than with vinegar. And when you apply this to people it does work. As a manager I learned that technique. And now at my resident association meetings if there’s a resident who has done something that maybe the board would have done and I learn about it, I highlight that person.
And you may say you’re so simplistic, and I say it is simple! We complicate things! Pat a person on the back. We have schoolteachers. We have police officers. We have telephone workers. We have nurses. We have doctors. We have a little of everybody in these developments. Why are we not taking advantage of these skills? You talk to someone, you get to know them. “What type of work do you do?” And, “How can I incorporate your skills into what we’re doing here?” I don’t need your skills five days a week, just a couple of hours a week. A couple of hours a month. Whatever time that you can dedicate, that’s what I’m asking for.
I am not a career residents’ association president. I am here to make changes and once I am done I’ll pass the baton. Let someone else bring in new ideas and do different things. Otherwise you’re going to run out of new ideas. And the resident association board only consists of seven to eight people. They can’t do the job alone. We need everybody partaking in this. The idea is to engage the residents, giving us ideas about what they’d like to see in their community.
I can tell you this: the growth in the neighborhood definitely is not serving us. I see a lot of things growing and changing but I don’t see it here. We have lots of condominiums that’s come up. We have all these new neighbors, all these things going on around us but nothing in our area. And I want to know why, you know? I pay taxes. I’m not just here. I want my taxes to work for me and my community just like everyone else’s tax dollars work for them. That money needs to be distributed evenly. I have the same rights as you do. I live in America. If I’ve got to fight for a right I’m still going to get it.
We have grounds in this development that desperately need to be redone. We have seniors walking these grounds and tripping and falling because of the unevenness.
I can see Arty in the kitchen with a broom and dustpan in hand, vaguely sweeping, clearing his throat every now and again.
And other things that’s needed—things like trash cans all over the place. You want to keep clean but you have nowhere to put your garbage. So guess what? You have to give people the tools to do what you are asking them to do. These are the concerns that I’m raising.
And if I have a bad neighbor we’re going to be talking. A bad neighbor has no color, race, or creed. I don’t want it from anywhere. Has nothing to do with where you came from—you’re just a bad neighbor. You need to refocus, change your ways, and redirect what you’re doing.
And here Arty clears his throat substantially, stopping with the sweeping for the moment.
You can’t destroy your building and not have some type of repercussion. For instance, every floor has an incinerator where you take your garbage. You don’t have to go downstairs, they’re at every corner. But instead of putting their garbage in the incinerator, people will put it in front of the building. Why would you do that? You live here! There’s children here, playing in this. All of this goes against your children and their health and everybody else’s health. And it’s called respecting one another. When you go to another neighborhood, where the residents appear to care about what they have and they don’t do some of the things that you’re doing, you say, “Oh, this is so nice.” Just do what they do. Follow their lead. You can have some nice things, too! Stop making excuses. No one is coming in and destroying this. We are doing this! Your elevator continues to be broken? Somebody in your building is doing it! It’s not because it’s not being cared for. I live on the nineteenth floor and I use that elevator. I don’t want to walk up nineteen flights. So if I see someone on that elevator doing something that they shouldn’t, or allowing their child to do something that they shouldn’t, I’m going to speak out. And I’m asking people just to speak out. All of this ties into accountability: the grounds, the elevators, the hallways, the doors. Everyone should be held accountable and according to your lease you are. But the people that’s in authority need to enforce these rules. If they’re not enforcing the rules, people are going to say, “Oh they don’t care.” And it only takes a few, and everybody gets painted with the same brush. “Oh, they don’t care.” That’s far from the truth.
Arty empties the dustpan into the trash can with an angry trio of thuds.
When you come through the area you see the people who are not working. You don’t see the workers. Those people are at their jobs. When they come home from their jobs they are upstairs doing whatever it is they need to do. The people that they see are doing the things they shouldn’t do, so everyone in the community gets painted with that brush. So what happens is they end up saying, “Oh, we’re not going to send anything over to that neighborhood. They don’t want anything.” Far from the truth. And that’s what I’m saying about this neighborhood. People, speak up! We need to speak up and let it be known that we want.
I’m a voice in the dark crying out. I want more. And I’ve got people saying I don’t know why you’re bothering. And I’m saying I’m bothering because I want it. And I’m going to be that voice.
At this point Arty is standing still, looking out the window. I can’t tell if he wants the conversation to end, which would mean my departure, or if he’s waiting to pounce on the conversation. I try to create an opening for him to indicate one way or another. I ask about succession rights for apartments in public housing—how they work, since Barbara’s already mentioned it was Arty’s parents who first lived in the home. He has no reaction to my inquiry—Barbara steps in and answers while Arty shuffles his feet back and forth, still looking out the kitchen window, still looking impatient about something.
We continue to forge forward to get changes. I don’t know how long it will take. Nothing happens overnight. If we are persistent we’ll get the change. And your agenda and mine might be different. Our fight may not be the same because your wants and needs in certain areas might be different than my wants and needs but because you’re my friend we’re going to fight to make things happen. No one group can do something all by themselves. Even during the civil rights movement, I was a young person when that started, those three boys who got killed in Alabama—two was white! We were talking about civil rights for everybody but most people thought we were just talking about civil rights for blacks. That was for everybody of all races and colors.
You choose what you fight for. If you believe in something then go fight for it. Hopefully it won’t get so bad that everyone starts running away. Areas get a reputation for a certain things. People say, “Oh, I wouldn’t go there.”
“Why not?”
“Because things can happen there to you.”
That’s not always true. But someone may have had a bad experience. Enough of those people have a bad experience and now you have a reputation. Now no one wants to go there. They don’t want to move in.
If you say it long enough it becomes.
So it’s up to us.
I was always taught there’s no faith where there’s no action. Faith is dead without action. Love is dead without action. I can love you day in and day out but if I’m not doing anything to show it to you—
Suddenly Arty swings a seat out from the kitchen table and sits in it backwards, his arms resting on the back of the chair as he leans toward us. He asks me a question:
Arty: Writing a paper for college or something?
I am momentarily flattered—Arty thinks I’m young enough to be in college. I try to explain what I’m doing—my trip to understand gentrification—and suddenly I’m tangled, again, on what the word may or may not mean. Judging from the disengaged expression on Arty’s face, the word means absolutely nothing to him. He cuts me off abruptly—
Arty: I heard you talking to my wife but my opinion is completely the opposite. The problem with us is that we are our own defeat right here. We moved back to this community right here. My kids don’t want us in this community right here. My sons, they moved away from this community right here. My sister, she got money, she moved away from this community right here. We’re the one’s that stayed around for the community right here but community is the people, and the problem is the people. Uneducated. You have to learn to read and write and half of them don’t want to learn to read or write. And they get angry with you when you know how to do it. And they get angry at you when you have two or three cars. We have more than one car and they know you live the middle-class lifestyle and they can’t understand that. I was working at the office and I come home dressed up and they thought I was rich. Because they not used to seeing somebody being successful, doing what you need to do for yourself, they’re not used to that. They think you have to be in the pit of the ninety-nine cent store.
I’m a businessman. I think about business. She thinks of it from the social view. I mean all the social programs you bring in here, and still they don’t have the common sense to say, “Hey, I’ve got garbage, I’m going to put it in the incinerator.” Something is wrong! It is odd! I’ve never made someone come to me and say, “You know what, Mr. Williams, I don’t think you should throw Pampers out the window.”
But still she has to convince the people don’t throw Pampers out the window, don’t throw condoms out the window, don’t throw food out the window.
And the elevator! They shit in the elevator. I don’t want to be around them and I’m their color! We have a problem. Crack addicts on the floor in the hallway. That’s everyday-common around here. Let me tell you something: that’s abnormal!
Those that go to work are the working poor, and the others sit around here all day long and they want to rob the working poor. That’s the way it’s set up around here. The police, they know that’s the deal around here. We know that if you want to live in a better neighborhood you’ve got to get out of here. Because you’ve got to survive. That’s why my sons got out of here. I just had an argument yesterday with the guy next door because there was crack people coming into his apartment. That’s why I took my time opening the door when you came here because maybe you knocked on the wrong door. Let me tell you, you knock on the wrong door—and now he’s pointing directly at me—you might not be coming out the apartment!
Pointing at his wife:
This morning she says, “Honey, somebody coming by here to talk to me.”
I say, “Really? Why’d you invite them in?”
He laughs.
It’s safety concerns. If you’re coming to my house, I want you to be safe. You could be one of the statistics. You have to think about these things. You could be on the news. People thinking, “What was he doing up there?”
I have to be honest. And I have to protect myself all the time. Because we on the different level. They don’t like that she’s the RA president. They don’t like that I dress up and look nice. And they could get there but that takes time and effort and you got to go to school and get an education. Then you have to want to have it. You can take them to the water but they might not drink it. You have to want that.
I hate the social programs because, to me, the programs stagnate people’s minds. I’m partially Republican on some things. My wife she different than me. I can’t always see feeding somebody if they can’t fish for themselves. Eventually they’re going to get used to it and go generation to generation on welfare instead of saying, “This is just for me to get back on my feet.” They don’t see it that way. They see it as free money. They want to take your crumbs. They never made $50,000, $100,000 around here. You tell them you make a $1,000 a week they say you lying. I say, “Man, I’m making two thousand dollars a week. And my brother was making a half a million dollars. He was a rich doctor.” They don’t see that. They have never seen that type of lifestyle. So it’s hard for them to get into that. It’s a mind thing. If you never ate steak you only ate chopped meat you never know what a good steak is. And that’s how life is. You got to improve your mind. Go to the museum. If you don’t know something go see it. Nobody around here never goes nowhere.
My wife she has the programs, the trips to the theater and that’s all well and good but they would never get off their asses and do it on their own. They go because it’s a free thing. Only thing they’ll come out to get is some fried chicken. I say, “Why do they always have to give a party out here for black folks to start thinking about their community?” I said, “Sweetheart, you’ve got over four thousand people over here. You don’t even have one hundred people in the RA office. There’s something wrong with that.” If there’s nothing you hand out to them free they ain’t coming. You got to give some food or some music so they can jump around and clap instead of learning how they can get themselves off the ground.
My sons say, “Dad, can you please get out of there? Can you and mom go?” They’re always trying to get us out of here. She knows that. They’re against this whole thing right here, like I am. But we lay here and the rent is cheap. The rent is definitely cheap and it’s a Manhattan address. I don’t mind her being in these social programs because she likes doing that. She has her heart and soul in it.
But you can sit around all day with your social programs and it’s still all about dollar bills. Because you had to have that dollar twenty years ago and you always gonna have to have that dollar tomorrow. New York City is definitely the financial capital. Anywhere you go you got to have money. You have to think on the money terms. I don’t care what you say, the more money you have—you live better, you drive better, everything’s better. And I keep explaining to my children, my daughters too, you got to have this—Arty rubs his thumb and forefinger together, like he’s thumbing a wad of bills—that’s what’s going to solve the problem around here.
Barbara: Money is a huge part of it. But did you hear what my husband was saying: They. “They don’t want anything.” But this is my view of that: I hear that they and I’m like, wait a minute you live here, too. When they say they, they’re talking about you, too!
Arty: No I didn’t say everybody, I said the majority of everybody.
Arty rises from his chair, sliding it back under the kitchen table.
Arty: That’s all I got to say. I had to throw something in there when I heard y’all talking.
Arty goes back to the bedroom—no television this time—and Barbara continues:
Barbara: I don’t like the “they” thing. That is very dangerous to say that somebody don’t want to read or write. I went to business school, I went to college. He went to business school and he went to college. We have a schoolteacher who lives across the hall and she taught right here in the school. We have another lady who’s raising foster kids. We have people over here who work in business. So yeah, I got a bad neighbor next door but I don’t like they because when people refer to me as they, who’s they? Do not paint me with a brush. I am an individual and I deal with you as an individual. Don’t suffer me because you have a problem with someone else. That’s unfair. I never met you. I might have some negative feelings about whites—she indicates in my direction with her open hand—but guess what? I never met you!
Why am I going to feel that way about you when I had an experience dealing with somebody else? We’ve got to learn how to stop grouping people good or bad, and start learning how to deal with people individualistically. Hey, I’ve got black people I don’t like.
She laughs.
When I came up as a girl, we weren’t taught certain things because with our parents and grandparents there were certain subjects that you just did not talk about. So when you got information, you got information from somebody your age who didn’t know nothing just like you. So we were all walking around blind thinking we all know something! And using that analogy, I say, go out and get the information so that when you’re talking to your friends you will know what you’re talking about. When you’re saying something you have a reference point: “Go over here and check it out, man. See what I’m saying is right.”
My mother stopped me from saying they. Sometimes even now I start talking and I’ll catch myself and I won’t say it. Or if I do say it I’ll give some kind of description so you know who I’m talking about because it could be anyone.
You hear people say, “They said this …” And, “They said that …”
And I say, “Where did you learn that from?”
“Well, they say it.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
I often ask that question.
And I do make people a little frustrated.