Dylan Gauthier is sitting at a booth in a shuttered luncheonette in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It is night and the place is dark; the only light that hits his face is the ambient glow from the streetlamps, finding its way through the windows.
Personally I’m a little bit leery of creating enclaves. If you create what happened in the Lower East Side with the squats that are still remaining, you create this enclave where there’s the right politics, the right relationships within the walls, but meanwhile the neighborhood’s changing and you’re still powerless. Those spaces were really inspiring and part of New York even when I came to the city. But I do wonder about that question: If the neighborhood changes will the space still mean the same thing?
I also wonder about what Bea would want to do.
Bea is in her apartment behind the luncheonette, presumably, but Dylan can’t get her on the phone. Bea is seventy-nine, so there’s a good chance she doesn’t hear the ring. Eventually there is some rustling near the bathrooms at the back of the restaurant. Bea emerges, short and stout, mostly obscured by the lack of light in the space where she stands. We see enough to know she’s waving us on so we follow after her. She is talking from the start, first something about how she left the door to the luncheonette open for us so that we wouldn’t be cold outside but then most of what she says is hard to track as she speeds along in her thick Greek accent, her unsteady voice, swerving from one topic to another. I catch pieces:
Bea (to Dylan): On the corner, why do they put the tree?
Dylan: A million trees. Bloomberg. Purify the neighborhood.
Bea: It’s a bathroom for the dogs.
Dylan: You’re probably the only person that doesn’t like the tree.
Bea: And the leaves—I have enough from the park.
As we near the door to her apartment, Dylan manages to interrupt Bea long enough to introduce me. She sort of turns around to look at me, nods, and smiles—a limited investment from someone who has already memorized enough names in a lifetime. I pick back up with what she is saying when we arrive in her living room, where she offers seats and beers. Dylan and I take the seats. She presses on the beers, and we promise that we’ll get to them soon.
A single table lamp illuminates a room that has not seen fresh paint in years, or new furniture for decades. The plush, brown chairs are lumpy from innumerable naps and books and conversations. Oil paintings hang from the picture rail, and a selection of family photos—or, more precisely, a shrine to her grandchildren—is crowded onto a few shelves. Bea’s last name is Koutros but:
Bea: You know if you’re married your name is gone. You have to have your husband’s name. You know the story. My name is actually Katrualis. I’m from Sparta. I was born 1934. February 14, Valentine’s Day. Years ago, if you were my age, you’d be famous. Now people live longer. You know, the Greek people, they don’t celebrate birthdays like you do over here. They are smart, after they are forty years old they don’t want to know.
Bea and her husband, Louie, ran the luncheonette from 1963 to 2008. Even until the end the hamburgers were $1.25 and the cheeseburgers were $1.50—and the dusty menu posted behind the counter still proves it. Much of the place seems unchanged from its earliest days—the antique silver coffee samovars, the wooden icebox, the red linoleum countertops.
Dylan, thirty-five, is originally from Los Angeles and teaches at Hunter College, where he received an MFA in integrated media arts. He maintains an office in the former home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, which the city university system, CUNY, bought in the 1940s and reopened in 2010 as the Public Policy Institute at Hunter College.
He likes to be on the water, exploring the rivers and beaches and bays of New York. Dylan belongs to Mare Liberum, or The Free Seas, a collective that describes itself as an organization that has been “hacking the free seas since 2007” with roots in “centuries-old stories of urban water squatters and haphazard water craft builders.” The group engages in a range of activism and work including building small seaworthy vessels; some are made of craft paper and wood glue, which ends up looking like a varnished papier-mâché canoe. One of the paper boats is stashed in the hall outside of Bea’s apartment. Though Dylan has a place of his own down the street, which he shares with his wife, he is at home in this building with Bea. He became a regular at the luncheonette shortly after arriving in the neighborhood:
Dylan: I moved here in 2002, and Louie didn’t come out that much but he was really the engine of this place. Thinking about the way they ran this for fifty years was, to me, an eye-opener when I first moved to the city. It was more than just a restaurant, it was a community space. And it wasn’t that they weren’t in it for the money, but they did enjoy communing with people and supporting the neighborhood. And so there was that: meeting them through that sort of initial exchange. Bea was like anyone’s grandmother. She’d make a peanut butter sandwich if something was taking too long. Really sweet.
The room where we sit is cold and drafty. Bea wears a hooded sweatshirt, black sweat pants, and tennis shoes. She leans forward in her chair, like a boss giving orders.
Bea: I got married in 1955. My husband used to have an uncle who sent for him to come over. We couldn’t come together. I can come after a few years, 1958, by a boat. Ten days, I think. A beautiful time. I was young. I’m an American citizen but not my husband because he was in the Greek army and he don’t want to be American citizen. For me, I think if you’re here long you’re supposed to be an American citizen, no? My husband he say, “Naw.”
Louie worked at a beer factory in Williamsburg, the neighborhood directly to the south of Greenpoint. After five years of saving up they bought this three-story building across from Monsignor McGolrick Park. They opened the luncheonette on the ground floor, taking the apartment behind it while renting out the remaining four apartments on the two floors above.
We opened in 1963. June 19, I think it was. We never closed a day. Only close early on the holidays. No vacations. It was nice all the time, people was nice, friends come all the time. It was fun. I had some Greek friends, they used to drink a little bit. For years, I was busy in the restaurant and everything was beautiful. I was young, easy at the grill.
The young people used to come, a lot of young people because I used to have good stuff and cheap prices. And they used to give me more tips than the prices for the food to help me pay the rent.
The health inspectors used to come all the time. And most time, no problem, good, perfect. They found everything alright. Maybe they write something down but no money or anything. If they say fix the floor, we do it—all those years. And now you see what’s going on? If they find something—anything small: $200, $300.
Dylan: Sort of right around 2008, there was this market crash and Bloomberg was bringing in letter grades for restaurants, and it was making it even harder to be a small business in the city. So if you were running a scrappy diner, as they were here, the fridge wasn’t the right temperature or you didn’t have the right kind of lights, you were shut down.
Bea: I tell you everything is money now. Nothing else. Forty-four years and after they find something wrong—no gloves, no hat—they make it a violation. I say those plastic gloves they give you more trouble! Go to the sink next to you every time—you wash hands!
But everything’s money. You don’t believe? You know how many people they close because it costs too much? The health department closed us. Seven years ago. Even now, everybody think it was wrong. Everybody come into the restaurant and they say, “See the place is beautiful.”
The day we closed, I tell you I was so upset with it. Very upset. My son say, “Ma, forget it. Don’t bother.”
But I stayed very, very depressed. All I dream is cheeseburgers and coffee.
Dylan: Louie was getting pretty sick at the time, too, pretty frail.
Bea: After the restaurant closed he laid down and he get stroke. The store closed in ’07 and my husband died in ’09. I say if they didn’t do this maybe my husband still alive. Not because he loved to work.
She laughs.
But he never sit down. He always had something to do. He woke up at five o’clock in the morning, six o’clock downstairs. People come talk. He’s not a hundred percent but at least he used to do something.
Old people, I tell you, they lay down all day, but I don’t know if it’s good. For me—I can’t.
Dylan: When they closed down the space sat empty and dark and I think also at that time it became something it hadn’t been before: there were makeshift memorials erected outside and people didn’t know what had happened. Online there were all kinds of posts, hoping the place would reopen. So kind of this absence when it closed.
I also thought, living in the neighborhood, that it was this sort of generative absence. It was this dark space that people could project their dreams and plans and ideas onto. You could walk and wonder what’s going on in there.
Then one day I saw her coming out and I hadn’t seen her in years. It seemed like she was making more appearances out during the daytime and going around the neighborhood. And once I’d seen her that one time I started seeing her everywhere. So I was continuously talking about things going on in her life.
I came into the luncheonette one day, and she read all the letters she was given and had me give her advice, going over these offers.
Bea gets up and retrieves a stack of business cards from her mirrored coffee table.
Bea: Every day, they call me to sell the house. People, they want it.
They bother me all the time.
She points at one of the cards:
She’s Greek, I think—or she’s married to a Greek guy.
She hands the cards to me, one at a time.
I got a lot. I throw away.
As evidenced by the cards in my hand, she doesn’t throw them all away.
Dylan: She was also getting offers from young entrepreneurial couples from the neighborhood who wanted to start a dream business in the space.
Bea: A Polish guy, he owns in Greenpoint—I don’t know how many houses—he stops by every week. I say, “I don’t want to move.”
He say, “You can stay upstairs.”
I have an old lady like me upstairs; she lived here since twenty years. I never raised the rent. I have four families in the apartments upstairs, above the restaurant. They pay $700, $800. No rent control, no lease. If I wanted to, I could raise the rent and make them to go. But you feel sorry for the people. How are you going to pay?
If somebody buys this place, what they do? They take everything down and they build.
I don’t want to move from here. But the building needs a lot of work. I have damage from the hurricane. We try with the insurance, and they don’t pay. If I showed you the bills from the house—forget about it. I’m scared to look at them.
She glares with distain at the pile of bills on the coffee table.
Six, seven thousand dollars a year—maybe more. The water bills, almost $800, $900.
The only new thing in the house is the boiler and the roof.
Dylan: The two most important things. Eleven thousand for the new roof two years ago. The boiler is six or seven years ago.
Bea: But you don’t believe it for an old house, all the money they want to give you. A lot of people moved into the area. Now they say people move from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Young people now, like you are, I don’t know how you can afford it. I think years ago it was easier. Now it’s hard to find jobs. Too many people. New York has almost nine million, I think they say. It’s what’s in the papers.
Dylan: I don’t want to live in Greenpoint in ten years if it changes to a certain extent. I am in a rent-stabilized apartment, so my rent won’t go up too much, which means I might even be able to stay. But talking to people around the neighborhood who have rent-stabilized apartments, it’s this feeling of golden handcuffs because you know that if you move, you’ll be moving to Yonkers or East New York. And you’ll be trapped there. Gentrification means all these different things in all these different cities but you can’t really disconnect it from place.
Bea: Greenpoint was always nice. I never had problems. Only once I remember there was a man in the store. He was at the table and then he went in all the registers, took the money and run. Another time, another guy from inside the store went upstairs into the apartment. I used to have this beautiful stuff from Greece, always I used to hide them, and he run in and take and run away.
Twenty-five years ago, some Greek friends from Astoria, they try to take taxi to come over here. The driver said, “Greenpoint?” They don’t even know where is Greenpoint. Maybe he don’t want to come, I don’t know. But now they say it’s third best neighborhood. Park Slope is the first. Everything here is old. Every house is one hundred years old and up.
Always Polish people here. But now it’s a mix. You can see every people here now. Everybody loves to come to New York, right? Everybody dream to come to New York, from all over—this is true. I don’t know why. They think you could find easier job over here. But it’s so hard. A month ago in Long Island City in Queens, they have some kind of job. They say $17.50 per hour and they sleep for two nights in the streets to see who is going to go first for the application. It’s hard now to get good jobs.
The only good thing I tell you now is that the young people coming to the area. That’s nice. But some old people like me they don’t like it. They say, “Oh, it was better before.” They don’t like the noise. They complain. But it don’t bother me. I say, “What’s better? It’s not better to see young people?” They make you feel better! If you go with the old people always we complain. They don’t feel good, all these problems. The young people they feel better. It’s nice to be young! I wish to be young like you!
She points at Dylan and me.
Enjoy your age!
Most young people, their parents pay. One girl she comes from Manhattan and I say, “How you pay the rent?”
And she say, “My mom and daddy help.”
Bea shrugs.
If you have money, you do for your kids. I mean, what are you going to do, take the money with you? But how many have that kind of money? Now they say New York has the most rich people of the whole country. Everything is money now.
Dylan: I think since even before they were closed—Bea, you started getting notes under your door from speculators and developers and it hasn’t stopped. If anything the offers have become more and more lucrative.
She has several notes from people who find her on the street and offer her $2 million cash to buy the building so they could ostensibly kick the tenants out and turn it into condos. We are right on the park here and it’s really desirable real estate. Meanwhile parts of Greenpoint have been rezoned along the waterfront, the Newtown Creek, and there’s the feeling that that’s the new Greenpoint, and it’s going to slide back this way and developers and real estate types are preparing for that flow of people. The Bloomberg model has been a very particular beast and it’s driven by ideas of capital accumulation as this sort of panacea for fixing the ills of the city.
I’ve only lived here since Bloomberg’s administration but reading about so many other administrations—you know, certainly Bloomberg and Giuliani instituted these paternalistic—I think it’s beyond paternalistic: they didn’t want to listen to the people in the community. They demonstrated this time and again. Their efforts to defund the community boards, or dismantle the community boards. At a certain point Bloomberg just said I don’t think we can afford them, so we should just get rid of them. Excuse me? Who are you building the city for?
At a certain point you start to hear them speak what you’ve been imagining behind closed doors, only they’re saying it in public and you say, “Wait, you’re not supposed to be saying that in public.” It’s no accident, it’s planned. Motivations? I don’t know. There’s capital. Their friends are involved. They’re involved. It’s this vision of taking back New York City. Bloomberg says my daughters now live in Bushwick or Bed-Stuy and fifteen years ago you couldn’t live there. Really? You couldn’t live there? Who the hell is “you”?
Bea: I’m here all those years. I never move from here.
My son says “Why? Just sell this and buy a condo something, a little house.” But I don’t want to move. If something happens to me, what are my sons going to do? They’re going to have to sell.
My son, he lives in New Jersey, in a beautiful house. He says come over here. But sometimes it’s not good to live with your kids. You get in an argument or something and you worry. And if you go to New Jersey you don’t see nobody. Here you see people and talk. You get a few drinks and you see everything beautiful.
I like the noise. I don’t like it quiet. Everybody knows me. And they give cans and bottles and I bring bottles to Key Foods. My son, he got mad at me. He don’t want me to do that. But I don’t want to throw them away. Bring it to Key Foods and make a few dollars.
My social security check is not even $300. And now I get my husband’s check and it’s still not high, $850 something.
Dylan: She recently said she would take $10 million.
He laughs.
I thought that was good. Why not? It’s good to have your price.
What is gentrification? It is Bea in this moment, wrestling with herself, shaking her head. She does not deny what Dylan says about the $10 million but she does not like it either. Capitalism, by its own design, does not care who participates in free-market competition—only that there is competition; democracy, by its own design, cares deeply that everyone participates. So it would stand to reason that democracy might exert power over capitalism and enforce the inclusion of all neighbors when it comes to the development of their neighborhood. But enforcement is limited at best, so Bea must maintain this principle on her own. She does it by keeping her tenants, who are in good standing, in their homes at rents well below market rates. She does it by opening the luncheonette for neighbors to share meals. She gives Dylan a report on last night’s dinner.
Bea: That was good but the night before was delicious—all the kind of vegetables.
Dylan: We were having informal dinners here and other people in the neighborhood were using it, too. It sort of became this community resource where you could say I want to have a dinner party, I want to have a birthday party—can we rent the space? She would always be happy to have people. And we had this one dinner and she seemed really happy, really glad to have people. We cooked this pasta she loved and talked about for weeks and she started saying, “Do you guys want to come back and do some more things like that?”
She proposed that if we want to keep doing stuff we could give her a little bit of money and figure it out. To me it seemed like without necessarily having the vocabulary for it, she was talking about having a form of mutual aid or assistance. She does own the building but her tenants pay just enough to cover the property taxes, water, electric—all this stuff that’s been continually going up every year. Like she said, she hasn’t raised their rent in over twenty years, so the top apartment is paying $700 a month for a two bedroom and two blocks away, new two bedrooms are going for $3,000, $3,400, which is insane.
So she needs some kind of money and it was kind of like, “Okay, we have this space. What should we do with it?”
I sent an email out to five or six people I knew who I’d been involved with in different projects throughout the city and invited them to think of what we could do with the luncheonette. And we formed into this collective that runs the space, tries to keep the walls and roof from caving in, putting time and energy into it, upgrading the electric and plumbing and all these things that we need to actually use the space and get it through the winter. Always with Bea there.
The model we’ve kind of hit upon is—it’s in the federal tax code, the 501(c)(7)—is a member-based social club. We haven’t formalized and there’s talk about whether we will formalize but it seems like a good model to have a member-based club where members pay dues and that’s what pays our rent and keeps the lights on.
Having been involved in some event spaces—the scramble to get the public to come in, not treat you like shit, not destroy anything—was something that I’d tried for too many years in New York and was sick of it. And I didn’t think this was really the right place for it anyway. It’s small. You get thirty people in here and it’s pretty crowded. So rather than base it around programming, we’re involving more members who shape the space, add to the space, plan events, invite friends over.
There are about thirty members. Certainly a lot of the people who would describe themselves as artists. There’s a fair mix of educators, art history professors, urban planners, activists, a couple designers. I guess there are carpenters, who don’t necessarily see themselves as artists, but builders. Couple of poets. Couple of musicians.
I think there was a pretty strong sense that we didn’t want to get bogged down too much in talking before things started happening. I think that maybe there’s a resistance to having too many meetings or formal kinds of concoctions, and that means you have to leave a lot of leeway for people to do what they want to do. We don’t have any formal rule structure, or leadership structure. We try to have a meeting every month so that we can all be together and see each other’s faces. And then we try to get the neighborhood involved in some way.
For me, a lot of the work I do as an artist, activist, or educator is all about different forms of collaboration. And here it’s collaboration with the members of this collective and then there’s this other collaboration with Bea and it’s hard to describe. We never sat down and had the art theory talk about collaboration but she expresses what direction she wants things to take in the space and what’s inside her comfort zone and what isn’t, and it really is a full collaboration.
One of the things she told me was you can have things in here but it’s got to be on the DL. She doesn’t want inspectors. She doesn’t want paperwork. She doesn’t want the city involved at all. Which makes for a good collaborator in this scenario.
They both smile.
Bea: Dylan, you know, he’s good all the time. I don’t know if he wants to show only that. But it’s no good to be perfect. If somebody’s perfect there’s something wrong. This is the truth, you know.
Dylan laughs.
Dylan: She’s happy with us being under the radar and her preference would be to keep the space as it is for as long as she can. Hard to say what that means in the long run.
In terms of the long-term plan, it’s dependent on Bea. Initially there are a few ways that you might be able to create something sustainable, and the 501(c)(7) might be one of them. It won’t keep her from selling the building if, by some misfortune, she becomes sick, or decides to sell the building and move in with her kids. I think it’s probably in the back of a lot of people’s minds that we could try to fundraise and buy the building, but realistically it’s a ton of money. It’s nice to imagine that would have been possible at some point in New York City’s history.
Our relationship with the neighborhood has been very multi-textured and multilayered and the old-time residents can’t wait for us to reopen it as an ice cream parlor or a luncheonette. A lot of the kids want ice cream. A lot of the young, urban—not to put them in a group—but the younger small-business owners that move in here think, oh, there’s no cafe here—bam—open a cafe. Or there’s no bakery for pies, open that. There’s no Korean restaurant, open that. I’ve had funny encounters with them and heard funny mumblings from them of, “Oh, you won’t be there long, it won’t last.” Also criticism that we are somehow depriving Bea of the market value of the space. This is something we hear a lot: You’re not giving her the market value of the space. You’re not paying her market value rent. You’re cheating her etc., etc. Not that people say this directly to us but you hear things. I think that’s when you get into, “Why wouldn’t she get the two million dollars?” Or, “Why wouldn’t she take the six thousand dollars a month that an ice cream parlor was offering?”
You know what? Money: in the end, people better fucking realize it isn’t everything.
The one thing I’ll say as a caveat to the whole sort of experiment is I don’t come at it with the feeling that just because you will it to be different, it’s going to be different. You know, the rents go up or the neighborhood changes so much it’s unrecognizable. So just by coming here and saying that we’d like to freeze development in this neighborhood: A) Is that even feasible? And: B) So you’ll have this rarified patch?
For me this is an opportunity to make this model for using space that isn’t necessarily quite destructive and doesn’t quite lead to displacement. That’s kind of a privilege that comes with this very copacetic relationship with the owner, which is something that you don’t usually have or usually takes years and years to work out. Usually the building owners are the enemies. It’s a weird thing.
Recently we’ve added a few new members who are urban planners who are involved in community groups. There’s this whole other language of policy. I don’t always know if it’s the most generative or the most fruitful; it’s definitely not something I had any contact with.
Urban planners and certainly the mayor’s office try to “increase density” in these neighborhoods. There’s all kinds of reasons like increasing the tax base and planning to compete with these megacities that are cropping up in China or wherever. But I don’t know why you’d be trying to turn New York into Hong Kong or something. You’re really going to add twenty million people to New York intentionally?
People who argue for density point to Paris, where development is extremely limited within the city so the world’s elites are the only people that can afford to live there. They say if you freeze development in one zone then you get these historic quarters like Fort Greene or Brooklyn Heights, and they’re brownstone districts. They’ve become these little jewelry box places.
So on one hand we need to build more buildings so that there’s more affordable housing, so that it doesn’t just become this little jewel for whoever the worlds’ rich are at the time—Koreans, Emiratis, whatever. Which is a compelling argument. But you also have people saying we need to bring in as many millionaires as possible, they’ll help float the bottom. So it is complicated and confusing thinking, well, what’s the alternative to this? You get to thinking, well, maybe we’re talking in extremes. It’s not Paris vs. Shanghai. It’s not Paris vs. Rio. That’s a lack of imagination. Why not think of how you can keep the people that are already in this place and they’re happy and doing what they’re doing. I don’t know, consult with them? Invite them to live in new spaces that you’re building. I think these things could be really easy and wouldn’t create the same level of displacement.
We’ve also thought about not overburdening this space with meaning. You could come in here and turn it into a nonprofit and have things going on every night. But the opposition to that idea is that if you have some nights where nothing is happening some people walking by will peek in and it’s just this kind of mystery. Why is there this dark storefront in this neighborhood?
If you leave the space dark then you create this sort of dream space, which I think encourages people to be productive actors in the city and not just accept the city as a built environment we move through.
Bea: “Maybe what will happen in life will happen,” my grandma used to say that. My grandma say, “The time we are born, it’s lying next to us, what’s going to happen to us.” As little kids she used to tell us that. But it’s no good to believe that because then you wait to see. It’s not good to believe that because then you’re not going to do nothing.
Dylan: If you project yourself into the city and think of how you’re able to change it then you’re better capable of answering questions about what belongs there and what doesn’t. The worst thing I think are these developments that they’re putting up on the waterfront where literally every inch is completely planned and paved and everything is so orchestrated that you can’t imagine anything other than what’s there when you’re standing there.
Bea tells me I should come over for dinner soon. She looks at her watch—it is late, and much colder than when we first sat down. Winter is coming, and her windows need repairs to keep out the wind.
The three of us walk back out to the luncheonette. The space remains unlit so it feels boundless. Bea is still pushing the beers. Dylan and I decline again—I don’t know why, really. It’s mainly me, I think, rushing to get back to my six-month-old daughter and wife. As I edge my way to the door, Bea reaches into a refrigerator under the counter. She pulls out two Budweisers and a couple of club sodas and insists we take the drinks for the road. I thank her and she apologizes because she’s out of straws. I thank her again—for her time, not just for the beers—and she waves it off as though it was nothing:
I like the blah, blah.
She says blah, blah with the coolness of someone who’s been meeting new people for nearly eight decades—and the generosity of someone who’s always open to the idea of one more new face. She tells me to bring my wife and baby when I come back for dinner.