INTRODUCTION:
A SOCIAL DISTANCE
THE WORK EVERYDAY PLACES DO
Stepping off the Q Train at the Seventh Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, walking onto the platform, up the stairs. People going to Park Slope go up on the left; those going to Prospect Heights split off to the stairs on the right, which deposit them in front of the Jamaican patty and muffin shop, on the brownstone block of Park Place and Carlton Avenue. The buildings are low for New York, three and four stories, handsome stoops, small front yards, low wrought iron fences where the stoops meet the cracked sidewalk. Where there was once an empty lot, a condo building is rising. At your back, there's the rush of Flatbush Avenue—a wide thoroughfare that crosses Brooklyn. Small shops are on the next avenue you come to: a pizza place, a supermarket, a roti shop, a bevy of nail and hair salons to choose from.
You get a good view of Mosswood, Oakland, from the BART train, or from the freeway if you're stuck in traffic. Running parallel to Telegraph Avenue, you pass the pediments and steeples of the AME and Baptist churches interspersed with the spires of signs for motels and Church's Chicken. On the avenue, the color pops: the red, black, and green of small Ethiopian and Eritrean stores; down the side streets, yellow, white, and peach single-family houses, stucco and wooden, sit low and close to each other. Just before the train pulls up to the elevated platform at MacArthur Station, you see West MacArthur Boulevard stretching out before you—light bouncing off the pink motels. The leafy green of Mosswood Park is oddly lush against the concrete of a street so wide you can tell it was once a highway bringing travelers to those motels. In the distance on Broadway, the Kaiser hospital tower looms and the car dealerships glint in the sun.
When I asked Mike in Prospect Heights how he had prepared to take me on the tour of his neighborhood that I had requested, he explained, “I said to myself, we'll take a walk around the block and I'll tell you what I know, you know?”
Much of the work of being human happens in everyday places: we become ourselves, we become able to see each other, to be a community. Everyday places are personal but also global, intertwining history, emotion, and memory. They are experienced, talked about, negotiated, and woven into lives; we create places and, in turn, places shape us. It's not too much to say that these small public and semiprivate spaces even have the potential to be spaces of liberation. It is in these spaces that we find the cities we need.
What are these remarkable everyday spaces? They're often thought of as banal: sidewalks, diners, bus stops, churches, meeting places, barber shops, bike shops, repair shops, donut shops, laundromats, schools, parks, playgrounds, libraries.1 Not every one of these kinds of spaces does this important work; some are as banal as they seem, and others are merely places of consumption or simulation. Still others have been co-opted into places that surveil and enforce a social order, what architect Michael Sorkin has called pseudopublic.2 Yet there are these special places—and more of them than we might think—that continue to do this work, usually because of the special people who run them. The work these places do helps us become ourselves and to become communities, laying the groundwork for a functional society; I call that work placework.
Places that do placework don't just emerge on their own. People create them, often in between making sandwiches, giving out change, taking inventory, paying the rent. Without these kinds of places, we are lost. The chat that takes place within them, that ranges from ordinary to transcendent and back again, and the everyday places that allow this chat to take place are not simply “nice to have.” 3 They are, to use a word made ubiquitous through the coronavirus pandemic, essential. And yet both this work and these places are often at risk.
Through the voices of residents in two small neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California, who gave me unique “tours” of their places, this book tells essential stories of the placework that everyday public spaces have the capacity to do, the ways they do nothing less than help us become ourselves and help us be together. It is about how these hardworking physical spaces are created and protected and how they are threatened.
This book values the messy detail of everyday experience and everyday people as experts. At the beginning of this chapter, you got a snapshot in words from the early 2000s of each of our neighborhoods. Tangible things have changed since then; the Q train no longer goes to Seventh Avenue, the vista from the BART train is now blocked. And less tangible changes may be even more significant. Interspersed throughout the book, there are photographic tours of our neighborhoods—“portfolios” of images from Mosswood, Oakland, and Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Immerse yourself in the images. Listen to the stories. Ask your own questions. What places of your own do they remind you of? Do you have new questions to ask? What stories would you tell?
Of course, Brooklyn and Oakland do not hold a monopoly on important ordinary places; people everywhere find public spaces that do the placework of supporting much-needed dialogue with others, and of helping them become more themselves, and everywhere these spaces are threatened. Everywhere, the individual process of making a life is in conversation with cultural, historical, and political constructions of physical public space. The stories people told me in Brooklyn and Oakland demand that we take seriously the work (and needs) of the often-banal spaces that support the meaning-making of society, and its members’ ability to feel freedom and joy, when we plan for the future of our cities. We need to listen to these stories.
“GUIDED TOURS”
For twenty years, I have been researching everyday places, and I've spent hours and hours talking about them with residents in Mosswood, Oakland; in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn; on Manhattan's Lower East Side; in the East End of London; and in the informal settlements of Buenos Aires, Argentina.4 In each neighborhood, I have been struck by how a sidewalk, a doorway, a diner, a supermarket, a parking space can have such a multitude of meanings for different people. And, even more, how these unassuming places turn out to play such a big role in our understandings of ourselves and our ability to be with others. How do these unremarked places do such vital placework?
I wish I could just ask people these questions directly, but everyday experience is elusive. It's hard to talk about what it's like to live our everyday lives because mostly, we just get on with it. Yet there are so many ordinary things to which people give little reflective attention but that support a deep connection to place.5 The cyclical and improvisational rhythms of everyday of places are hard for people to talk about or even notice.6
This is why, to understand something not often verbalized, I began to ask people in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, and Mosswood, Oakland, for what I called their “guided tours” of their neighborhoods, however each of them defined their neighborhood.7 This book grows from the essential stories told to me on our tours by Mike, Tanya, David K., David W., Neville, Julia, and Ulysses in Prospect Heights, and Amanjot, Cynthia, Lois, Marty, and Tewolde in Mosswood. I asked the people I came to think of as my “tour guides” to walk me through their everyday spaces, to talk about them as we walked, and to later discuss them again with me over the photographs I'd made of these places.
The places mapped through these extraordinary peoples’ lives have links and breaks, continuity and pause. There are as many other defining stories of these places as there are other people whose neighborhoods overlap with those of my tour guides. These tours are no boundary-drawing exercises. They are an attempt at writing how a city is lived—through the experiences of a few of those lives.
By physically putting myself in their places, I attuned myself, as geographers Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst would say, to my tour guides’ experiences.8 I attuned myself to the rules they set for themselves in their places, experienced their serendipitous meetings, and experienced the constraints and needs that came with walking—especially when other people and other responsibilities were involved. As Tanya in Brooklyn said when we walked, “There really is a difference between regular walking and walking with a stroller.” I saw how walking itself could be a place of familiarity; as essayist Garnette Cadogan eloquently puts it in his memories of walking toward home as a child in Kingston, Jamaica: “The way home became home.” 9 In how my tour guides made their ways and routes their own, I saw how they shaped, and were shaped by, neighborhood places.
Asking people to think about ordinary places enough to take someone else to them sets in motion an unusual process. When I've been riding in someone's car, seeing the world from their windshield and at the speed they drive, and they proclaim how the neighborhood is with a broad sweep of their arm across the dashboard, or when I've been walking with someone, falling in step with their pace, and they see someone they know and engage in cheerful banter, I have to assume that this is both part of daily life and a little bit of performance for me, a presentation of self, as sociologist Erving Goffman would term it.10 I have asked people to do something that is inherently a little of both everyday practice and performance: to be in the places they usually are, to do things they usually do, but also to show them to someone else.
I had begun this project of asking people for guided tours of their neighborhoods in earnest when I was working in the East End of London in 1998, but had earlier trial runs on the Lower East Side in my own city of New York and when I asked college friends for tours of the cities and small towns they came from, some of which I could not fathom (“Cows!” I shouted, shocked, on an early rural tour). In Brooklyn and Oakland, the tours would surprise and teach me even more.
Far from being a nostalgia trip to the “old neighborhood,” this work is an inquiry into something hard-fought for in my own childhood. I grew up in a loft building in a neighborhood north of SoHo in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, a third-generation New Yorker. My mother, an artist, had her studio in our loft. My father had built most of the walls and furniture, including his photography darkroom at the back. Until the late 1960s and 1970s, when the artists and musicians I would grow up with began to move in, each floor of the building had been occupied by clothing factories, sweatshops. In these spaces people had sewn silks, suits, and sweatshirts; had made wigs, trimmings, and hats.
When the landlord who rented these splintery raw spaces as illegal residences defaulted on his real estate taxes in 1976, our building fell into ownership by the city of New York through what's called in rem foreclosure. That year, when my mom was five months pregnant with me, my parents came home to find an eviction notice on the front door. Our building was like many other buildings across the city owned by delinquent landlords—a city in the throes of bankruptcy that President Gerald Ford had famously told to “drop dead.” Through a New York City program called the Housing Development Fund Corporation, existing renters across the city, eventually including my parents and many people in the Brooklyn neighborhood I'd come to know later, were able to avoid threatened evictions by buying their buildings back from the city as co-ops for little or no money to be renovated through residents’ sweat equity; though ours was somewhat uncooperative, it was secure housing.11
It was an odd neighborhood to grow up in. I was friends with the guys who worked at the nearby cardboard box company. It was a big event when the wholesale Christmas supply store across the street opened to regular customers for a few weeks in December. There was no local supermarket or diner where people might know me. My public school was nearby, and I had my network of places—but mostly these were disparate, spread ever further across the city as I grew up.
Later, as a teenager, I felt like I owned the city, and many of my formative experiences happened in the hours I spent walking New York. Walking was the place I would most often go. I knew exactly what Virginia Woolf meant when she wrote that walking allows us to be “no longer quite ourselves,” how it lets us peek into other people's lives, to “put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.” Yet I never felt completely invisible or truly part of Woolf's “vast republican army of anonymous trampers.” 12
Walks and routes—whether taken out of necessity or curiosity—can have many meanings, can involve radically different decisions based on your race or gender, and can change over time. I never really connected with the privileged views of many of the famous French walkers: inebriated white male situationists crisscrossing the city, drawn by randomness and their own desires, or the strolling, observing flaneurs so beloved by graduate students, protected by their gender, race, and class.13 Walking isn't the same for everyone—the walks in Brooklyn and Oakland wouldn't have been the same for me walking alone, wouldn't have been the same for each of my tour guides, wouldn't have been the same for each of them without me. Walking is a curious intersection with power—sometimes toying with it, sometimes controlled by it.
When I walked as a young woman growing up in New York, I sometimes walked with friends—sometimes female, sometimes male, and the experience of each would be very different. In the first instance, we'd often be catcalled together, always as a way to exert power over us. In the second instance, I'd often be assumed to be the property of the guy I was walking with, even the subject of a remark made to him. I also walked alone, which I preferred, and this made me feel sharp, alive, but also vigilant—ready to cross the street, ready to duck into a shop if I felt someone near me was a threat, but also adamant in my right to walk, to own my city, to be an expert, to not be afraid.
Cadogan's essay “Walking While Black,” even more than my experiences, sharply underscores this vital need to walk, to be in the flow of things—a need felt by so many people—while also deeply exploring what happens to that possibility for joy when you fear that it is you who will be taken for a threat, and that this racist misperception will in fact existentially endanger you. It's a story many have told—and one that often has dire consequences, from feeling excluded from a place or a thing you love—I think of Christian Cooper in New York's Central Park, trying to watch birds—to losing your life—I think of Ahmaud Arbery, going for a jog in his South Georgia neighborhood. Cadogan writes that coming from a childhood of midnight wanderings and avoiding danger in Kingston, Jamaica, he'd had no fear of anything he might encounter on the street of an American city. But, he writes, “what no one told me was that I was the one who would be considered a threat.” In New York City, he made his own rules of engagement, to try to protect himself, though they could never fully work—rules so stringent as to make being oneself almost impossible: “No running, especially at night; no sudden movements; no hoodies; no objects—especially shiny ones—in hand; no waiting for friends on street corners, lest I be mistaken for a drug dealer; no standing near a corner on the cell phone (same reason) . . . [I] learned that anything less than vigilance was carelessness.” 14 These necessary self-protections, and the racist violence they hope to protect the walker from, mean that “walking while black restricts the experience of walking, renders inaccessible the classic Romantic experience of walking alone,” writes Cadogan. Walking while Black—and in entirely different ways, walking as a woman—can mean never fully being oneself, never fully being able to be immersed, because of the vigilance required.
When I ask people to walk with me on these guided tours, I am navigating my own experiences of walking—maybe even my own experiences of walking the very same places that they will take me to. And I am always aware that I can never walk completely in their shoes, can never need those same rules that someone else might, can only rely on their capacity to tell me, as we try to bring our movements in tune with each other's, what it feels like to put their feet one in front of the other. Walks are, like everyday places, not things that are nice to have, but things to value, that hold power, that are unequally safe, and that are vital to understanding experience.
In Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, I began asking my neighbors for their tours in the summer of 2001. Although I was a native New Yorker, I was new to this neighborhood. I'd moved there only a year before but had already made my landmarks: the building where Kaushik and I lived and then got married, the diner where my friend Emily and I regularly met for breakfast. A few months after I'd begun walking with my neighbors, I began graduate school across the street from the Empire State Building on September 11, 2001. That night, we walked back over the bridge and watched plumes of smoke and ash from the World Trade Center drift over our house and the rest of Brooklyn.
From that day on, my city reeled from those planes I'd first heard about from people breathlessly boarding our morning subway as it stopped in the station below the towers. On September 12, Emily, Kaushik, and I took a walk through Brooklyn on unnaturally quiet streets all the way to the Brooklyn Promenade, where we looked wonderingly at the smoking hole in the skyline across the river. Four days later, my grandfather died in his sleep in the Bronx. As we rushed down Saint Marks Avenue to find a cab to get to my family, I felt a kind of comfort from our neighborhood's front gardens and familiar places. In that emotional post-9/11 time, my work on the project I began calling “Guided Tours: Prospect Heights” built up steam, and I asked more and more of my neighbors to give me their personal tours of our community.
I would later return to make photographs of all the places to which they'd taken me, and later still return to my tour guides with the photographs, asking them to reflect on the images I'd made as similar to, or different from, their lived experience. As a photographer and an artist, I saw sharing these photographs as a way of sharing my understanding of these places with my tour guides; I made photographs knowing that images are always about choices, about storytelling, not about evidence.
Spending time with the photographs, spending time on the walks, gave us multiple moments and spaces for reflection, using artwork as one form of exchange and building knowledge together. I take seriously the idea of careful looking and phenomenologist David Seamon's suggestion that photographs can momentarily suspend the “taken-for-granted-ness” of the world.15 A photograph, which sits outside the world in the image, can reveal how the unnoticed everyday things pictured are inherent and vital parts of the way we experience the world. This is part of how making photographs, and using them in my work, allows me to see in detail the small pieces that make up the everyday.
My guided tours in Brooklyn continued for five years with my many tour guides, even while “Atlantic Yards,” a controversial plan for a basketball stadium and housing development using eminent domain to acquire land, was proposed for the edge of the neighborhood in 2004.16 When Kaushik and I moved across the country to the neighborhood of Mosswood in Oakland, California—I began to ask the same kinds of questions in a neighborhood that looked quite different. I found that Mosswood was shaped by similar histories and related pressures of development and gentrification as Prospect Heights, but also had different challenges including the redlined legacies of freeway construction and the real estate pressures brought on by the Bay Area's second tech boom.
My relationship to Oakland, too, was both similar to and different from my relationship with Brooklyn. In Oakland, we lived in a neighborhood that was new to me, but I did have family connections to the city. We settled there in part due to my sunny memories of having lived one summer with my aunt, uncle, and cousins in their home near Dimond Park. Yet there was no getting away from being a New Yorker in California. I moved to California as a person who didn't drive, and I left it much the same way. It meant that I walked often, and far. And took a lot of buses. Moving to California, I felt perpetually foreign, but also in awe. Even though the freeway loomed just behind our house, there was a lemon tree in the backyard, and an orange tree in the front yard of the house next door. In Oakland, the sun shone every day. Such abundance seemed impossible, and miraculous.
In Oakland, people took me on both walks and drives; the drives had much of the serendipity of the walks. This might be surprising, as driving can feel a solitary activity: novelist Joan Didion once described much of a Los Angeles day as “spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver.” 17 Indeed, in every photograph I made of Oakland, I can see car-surrounded houses; landscape historian J. B. Jackson argued that this is the new vernacular in a society about passing through and instant access.18 The uneasiness of passing through is particularly important in a neighborhood like Mosswood where the houses abut the freeway, its pylons and roadways soaring above backyards. And yet there was an important human scale in the spaces between people's houses and their cars—in front of their houses where young Amanjot and her cousins would play, in the space between house and parking spot that was important to (and well-planted by) Cynthia. There was even a human scale between people on the street and people in their cars—made clear as Marty called out to a friend of his on a small street, and we slowly rolled up next to him, joking with him out the window. “Eh, Rodney! This is Gabrielle—she's interviewing me so I can give her the history of the neighborhood. I'm the right person, right?” To which, answering back in kind, Rodney chuckled, saying, “Exactly! You're the right person for any job!” We rolled slowly on, as Marty laughed hard, replying, “Shut up, fool!”
The guided tours that people gave me in both places became my sacred texts to unravel the mysteries of the world—delivered by the wisest of people. Begun when I was in my twenties and continuing into my thirties, they, like the places my tour guides took me to, taught me nothing less than how to grow up, to be myself, to find ways of being together. People talked about how these places shaped their lives and how they held deep and (to me) unexpected meaning. As I've thought about their stories over decades, these tours have also shaped me, now in my forties, helping me learn about resilience, responsibility, parenting, politics, and the human heart.
STATE OF PLAY
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, and Mosswood, Oakland, are similar and also quite distinct. Their histories, from their indigenous roots to their development as nineteenth-century cities in relation to more famous cities across the water—sometimes even with the same people designing them—to war industries, redlining, postwar pressures of urban renewal and urban disinvestment, and to their later gentrification, shaped them both. These histories are part of what created the everyday spaces on these tours, and also what has threatened many of these spaces and threatened people's abilities to make space for themselves. These histories are told throughout the book, through my tour guides’ stories. But the time when the tours themselves happened, and what happened afterward, the crisis in which we find ourselves now, bears a short introduction before we embark.
For the last decade of the twentieth century and the first two of the twenty-first, housing or the lack thereof was central to both of these neighborhoods, which by the end of this era had become two of the most expensive housing markets in the United States. Geographer Neil Smith writes that “gentrification” is an economic creation that lies in the idea of the “urban frontier,” visible at the local scale, but the result of global processes.19 Too often the real power, and financial gain behind it, is not seen. As Brooklyn historian Craig Wilder says, in Kelly Anderson's film My Brooklyn about this time period in the borough, “gentrification in New York is not about people moving into a neighborhood and other people moving out of a neighborhood. The process of gentrification is about corporations sectioning off large chunks of those neighborhoods and then planning out their long-term development.” 20 It is impossible to separate “neighborhood change” from displacement.
In 2006, sociologist Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida described Brooklyn at the time as having a racial and economic “segregated diversity,” in which residents of lower-income census tracts that bordered higher-income census tracts were at a higher risk for housing displacement, echoing similar research Oakland. In the early 2000s, this described both Mosswood and Prospect Heights very well: they were each a mix of incomes, and both abutted neighborhoods that were much more affluent, meaning that their most vulnerable residents were at significant displacement risk.21
In the early 2000s, people in Prospect Heights talked about gentrification as being on the horizon. Diner owner Mike explained that the neighborhood could still not support a seven-dollar sandwich; at the time, his sandwiches were four or five dollars, even though that seems impossible twenty years later. When I asked if fifteen-year-old David K. felt the neighborhood had changed, he described it obliquely: “A couple of years ago, it wouldn't be this quiet. It would be real loud. And a lot of people would be out here, on the street, doing stuff. . . . People would be talking, standing out here, in front of buildings. Loud music, cars. Now it's kind of dead. I guess all those people moved out of here.” In 2006, I noticed a new bakery had opened up. The place looked plucked from a fancy Manhattan neighborhood, with prices to match. Investigating, I went in and had a coffee, watching the customers. Two middle-class thirty-something dads caught my eye. Each had a five-year-old daughter for whom they were buying an after-school snack, each showing their children the entire selection and asking them to choose: An éclair, a tart, a madeleine? Standing on line, the dads began to talk about the bakery: “You like this place?” asked one. “We've needed this place,” the other vehemently confirmed.
In Mosswood in the early 2000s, the redlining of the neighborhood could still be clearly felt. The residential areas to the west of Telegraph Avenue remained primarily Black, and the residential areas to the east of Broadway remained primarily white, leaving the triangle of Mosswood in the middle to a working and middle-class mix of Black, Italian, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Indian, Korean, and new white residents. Mosswood was in flux between new immigration, recent gentrification, and recovering from the disinvestment of Oakland at large. While I photographed on Fortieth Street one afternoon, someone warned me, “You're going to have to have one of those infrared cameras. At night. That's when things happen.” Yet Marty was hopeful that there were improvements happening for the people who had stuck it out: “I'm optimistic, for the first time since these freeways destroyed everything, and took out all the infrastructure.” But at a Mosswood block association meeting in 2006, I heard about crime and garage sales, and one woman longed for Mosswood to emulate the upper-middle-class neighborhood to the north, asking the city council representative, “What do we have to do to make it more like Rockridge?” One neighbor looked at a photograph I'd made of a recently opened café with a toddler play area and had a strong reaction to the neighborhood future it foretold: “In my opinion—it's the face of gentrification if ever there was. ‘We're white, we're rich, and we're here to stay.’”
In 2007, the city of Oakland proposed a high-density housing development on the sprawling parking lot of the MacArthur Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station: it would have 880 total units, of which 143 would have rents below market rate. Neighborhood residents celebrated the possibility of new housing but were concerned about the scale.22 The following year, the subprime mortgage disaster precipitated an enormous housing crisis across the country and in both of these neighborhoods, but particularly in Oakland where more people owned and lost their homes. With the loss of housing came corporate entities that bought and flipped foreclosed homes. The second (and third) dot-com bubble sent rents and house prices skyrocketing, lining some people's pockets even as many others were losing their homes. By 2010, the eviction crisis in Oakland was so extreme that a mapping project was started to keep track of the fight.23 Five years later, the think tank PolicyLink described the depth of Oakland's housing crisis, stating that “the majority of current Oakland residents could not afford to rent or purchase homes at the current prices in their neighborhoods . . . [so that] when Oakland families lose their existing housing to foreclosure, eviction, or other measures, they are unlikely to be able to afford to stay in their neighborhood or even in Oakland.” 24 By 2016, Oakland's median monthly rent was $2,280 for a one-bedroom apartment; the average two bedroom was $2,600 a month.25 Impossibly, Brooklyn's average rent was similar that year—$2,666—a truly radical departure for Oakland, which had never had rents anywhere close to New York's.26 Rents in Oakland had increased 25 percent in just one year from 2015 to 2016.27 Oakland was the fourth most expensive housing market in the country, with the fastest rising rents, with potentially the worst affordability crisis—as rents rose much faster than incomes.28
In 2019, the development on the BART parking lot opened, more than ten years after it was first proposed. The MacArthur Transit Village included one fully affordable building, the Mural, as well as two buildings (one a twenty-four-story, 260-foot tower three times taller than the other structures) of primarily market-rate—which by this point meant luxury—apartments, in which two-bedroom apartments rented for between $3,500 to $5,500 a month.29 The neighborhood had also struggled with a controversial twenty-five-story tower and parking structure expansion of the Kaiser hospital complex, which due to community activism ended up smaller than planned.30
In the same period, predatory lending, predatory purchasing, and evictions were taking a toll on Brooklyn too. My colleague Walis Johnson, in her work on walking and redlining, writes about the stunningly banal violence of a handwritten note she got under the door of her family's home in Bed-Stuy—not far from Prospect Heights—the day after her mother passed away. It read, “I am interested in buying your building I will pay cash now or in the future please give me a call if you ready to sell 646-400-9362 Todd.” 31 Much the same thing was happening in Prospect Heights; a few years later, Mike would reflect, “The neighborhood was so small and everybody knew everybody. Now, new people are coming in and all the old people are being uprooted. One thing I couldn't stand was big companies coming in and offering old ladies I've known for twenty-three years, offering them a million dollars for a three-million-dollar property.”
In the ten years from 2009 to 2019, the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn increased by 23.7 percent. Within the already overheated Brooklyn housing market, Prospect Heights struggled with an accelerated gentrification. This was in part spurred by the huge Atlantic Yards development, which broke ground in 2010 after years of community protests; by the time of this book's completion in 2024, twenty years after the project was first proposed, only half of the planned 6,430 units of housing had been completed and its latest developer had defaulted on its loans.32 The Barclays Center, for the Brooklyn (formerly New Jersey) Nets basketball team, was completed in 2012 and provided almost none of the economic boost to local businesses that its developers had promised—hardly a surprise since an enormous body of research shows that arenas and stadiums are almost never beneficial to local communities and are, if anything, actively detrimental.33 As a bulwark against further large-scale development, in 2009 activists had tried, and succeeded in part, to landmark portions of the neighborhood.34
The planned luxury housing at the neighborhood's edge in what was now being called “Pacific Park” (no longer “Atlantic Yards”) meant that landlords across Prospect Heights—beyond the development—began charging more for both residential and commercial rents, sometimes even preferring to keep storefronts vacant until the dreamed-of big spenders would arrive. In a country where there are few residential or small business rental protections, these are the domino effects of even the suggestion of large-scale luxury development, even when they include a percentage of “affordable” units; these effects have been clearly seen across New York City, from Prospect Heights to the Lower East Side to the South Bronx.35 By 2022, Oakland and Brooklyn were still on the top ten list of the most expensive places to rent in the country, with Brooklyn near the top of that list (the median one-bedroom in Prospect Heights itself was $4,295 a month) and Oakland at the other end.36
INTERSECTION | PROSPECT HEIGHTS
Having moved back from Oakland to a different New York City neighborhood in 2007, the guided tours stories and images had become my mental image of Prospect Heights, frozen in time. One day in 2014, my friend Emily and I reconvened in the beloved neighborhood we had both left and hadn't been back to for several years. When I got out of the train, walked up Park Place, and turned onto Vanderbilt Avenue, I felt like I'd been shoved. Hard. I stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. The neighborhood was dramatically changed. All the things we had feared had come true; gentrification and displacement were stark and unfettered. That giant development at the edge of the neighborhood, speculative development, and smaller-scale gentrification in a wild housing market had all wrought unbelievable change. Of course, I had heard the conversations about Brooklyn (and about the Lower East Side, where I had been working more recently) in regard to the many things that fall under the heading of gentrification. I had been frustrated, and then enraged, by the way the language used was vague, deterministic, and inaccurate—framing the losses that come with “neighborhood change” as regrettable but inevitable, even “natural,” as though some people's lives just aren't as important as others.
My gut reaction wasn't wrong. There had been very significant demographic change to match the visible change to the streetscape. Within a population that had grown in size by fewer than one thousand people, the percentage of Black residents in the neighborhood had dropped by almost half, and the percentage of households making over $100,000 a year had more than tripled.37 Clearly, though the population size was the same, the people who made up that population were not. In 2023, the New York Times would notice this trend and be shocked to realize that the city's total Black population had declined by two hundred thousand people over two decades, publishing an article titled “Why Black Families Are Leaving New York, and What It Means for the City.” 38 And what was happening in Mosswood was similar: while in 2000 over half the residents were Black, by 2013 only a third of the neighborhood was.39
I continued down the street, and as I did, a plan began to form in my mind. I realized I had an archive of photographs and oral histories that could help people understand what had been lost—and what there still was to lose (or protect): physical places, but also experiences, and senses of connection and belonging. As a public artist, I could make a place for casual talk about big issues, a place like the many that this neighborhood had once provided for my tour guides and I, and which, as I walked along, I increasingly found to be missing.
But how to make a place? This was a moment when much was at stake, and a public version of the guided tours was needed. I began to think about how to take everything I'd learned in Brooklyn and Oakland about fostering dialogue and make something from it. I thought about the creative practices I'd always argued were valuable ways to learn about our world, and how those same approaches might support groups of people in learning about themselves and each other, in the context of neighborhood. I thought about how my creative practice could foster new places in which essential everyday conversations could happen.
The guided tours had changed my life in so many ways—starting with changing my experience of my own neighborhood. Even from my very first walks with Neville, Mike, and Tanya, the neighborhood of Prospect Heights had seemed to fill with an enriching cacophony of other people's histories, needs, desires, and hopes. My own landmarks were transformed: a trip to the supermarket was no longer the same, nor was the unassuming building in which we lived; that walk back to Prospect Heights on September 11, 2001, became intertwined with neighbors’ memories of the view from Brooklyn. All the guided tours on both coasts had allowed me to realize how much I didn't know, how much other people were carrying, how much we were different, and in what surprising ways we might be the same. Taken together, these tours had changed my experience of every neighborhood, and I thought they might be able to do the same for other people too.
Along with the neighborhood, the reason to share my tour guides’ stories had shifted. In the face of so much change, I realized that these stories could also help people get a hold on the kind of change that is both so quick and so long term that it is slippery. You notice the day a store closes or someone loses their apartment, but you haven't seen the patterns leading up to it. If you notice the changes today, you may have forgotten, or you never saw, the changes ten years ago. I wanted to use the not-too-distant past of ten to fifteen years earlier as a way to help people reflect on what they were living through, on what decisions had been made to make it so, who benefited, and how we all might want to behave for the future. Most important, I wanted to make space for more specific, grounded, and nuanced conversations that called attention to real experiences of what is valued and what can be lost.
About half of my original tour guides were no longer in the neighborhood—displaced one way or another. Those who remained were largely people who owned their apartments. About half, or more, of the places they had taken me to were no longer there. It was dramatic to walk past a shiny high-end nail salon and remember the gatherings of a small group of West Indian men that had happened each week on that site. I wanted others to experience this disjunction that sparked important kinds of reflection in my own mind. I also remembered how powerful it had often been for my tour guides themselves to look at the photographs I had taken of their familiar places—how it helped them still time, hold on to moments, clarify, critique, and even talk about what really mattered. I wondered if these photographs could now do that for other people, in this moment when holding on, grappling with what was happening, saying things out loud was so important.
I wanted to hear the stories brought back to this place too. I'd listened to the interviews and looked at these photographs so often that I knew them inside out. These voices echoed in my head as I walked around, baffled by the neighborhood that no longer fit the narratives. I wanted to bring those voices back to the places for other people—I had originally heard these stories in place and I wanted to re-emplace them.
For years, I'd toyed with the idea of audio tours, digital tours, stories pushed to your mobile phone so you couldn't escape from them. Early on, my partner Kaushik and I had made an experimental DVD of stories and images from Prospect Heights, with a video menu to select a street to “walk down.” But in the end, the project we'd make, Intersection | Prospect Heights, would be about exchange and connection, to facilitate community, not to encourage more atomized people to be plugged into their own devices. More than anything, I wanted this project to be approachable, to honor and care for the stories people had told me, stories I had been holding and cherishing for so long.
It was important to partner with people in the neighborhood already doing this work. I reconnected with local organizers in the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council (PHNDC), a group I had worked with in the early days of their opposition to the Atlantic Yards project in 2004—when they had screened some of my images and audio recordings at the beginning of their very first community meeting.40 We talked about what this project could do to forward the work of holding developers accountable, of helping people know what was happening in their neighborhood, of making opportunities for both current and former residents to talk with each other. I also partnered with Brooklyn Public Library's main branch at Grand Army Plaza, which had been running a series of events about gentrification but had not yet done anything about the neighborhood immediately surrounding the main branch itself and had never done anything that brought the conversations out into the community and then back into the library. We all came to the work for different though related reasons, with different individual goals it would help us fulfill.
I set out to develop a space made from temporary connection, and thought about how the project could spark dialogue on three levels: First, within people's own minds, an intimate way they might even admit things they usually wouldn't to themselves. Second, a conversation with their neighbors. And third, a conversation with politicians, with the politics of the moment. To do this, I wanted to give people something to respond to, to be that instigator, that facilitator, to provide that straw man of stories that sometimes helps people share their own.
I created a series of guidebooks and creative walks to interrupt the anonymity and passivity surrounding conversations on gentrification by grounding them in individual stories from my Brooklyn tours. These funny, serious, surprising, human stories articulated the value of places that had been or could be lost. Six different “guidebooks” to Prospect Heights told six different people's stories of three places each—in different colors, so you could collect the set. I installed them in mini-exhibitions at businesses and organizations throughout the neighborhood: next to the beer at Met Food supermarket, on the counter at the dry cleaners, on the bar in a hip new restaurant, in the entryway of a long-time Dominican restaurant, in departments all over the huge main branch of Brooklyn Public Library. PHNDC's relationships with local businesses made it possible to have such a broad network of people who were enthusiastic about hosting the project and looking after it while it was in their space. Each of these sites hosted large-scale images of the neighborhood, copies of two or three of the guidebooks for people to take home, and cards, pencils, and a collection box for people to contribute their own stories.
Two months before we launched the project, Mike's diner, the Usual—formerly called George's after the two Greek men named George who had previously run the place—closed. The one place I had always imagined as the centerpiece of the project was no more, making the need to create spaces for conversation seem all the more pressing, and leaving a big hole in my heart about the whole thing.
The Intersection | Prospect Heights guides installed in one of their most popular locations, at Met Food, next to the beer.
These guidebooks and photographs, mysteriously popping up everywhere, were accompanied by a series of creative walking tours that I hosted for a year from 2015 to 2016. The routes of the walks echoed my tour guides’ original tours, stopped at the places they'd taken me to, and involved tour participants reading out loud from my original tour guides’ stories when we were in their places. In asking people to literally put themselves in other people's places, and to honor and repeat their stories, these tours built on the ways that walks have so often been part of both cultural reproduction and resistance. I thought a great deal about what allows walks to happen, thinking of anthropologist Emanuela Guano's description of how the essential Genoese passegiata, which itself does so much work to create culture, can only happen through spaces that support it.41 Like the passegiata, other ritualized walks also create culture through practice. Anthropologist John Gray writes about how Scottish border hill shepherds keep their culture and identity through daily walks of their land. And Raja Shehadeh's beautiful Palestininan Walks has long been a touchstone in my thinking about walks within a changing geography. His chronicle of his own and others’ ordinary and extraordinary walks over twenty-six years across the increasingly bounded, surveilled, and controlled lands of Palestine shows walks as practices of personal joy and of political action by insisting on the country's very existence, always with the tension of time and impending loss: “All my life I have lived in houses that overloook the Ramallah hills. I have related to them like my own private backyard, whether for walks, picnics or flower-picking expeditions. I have watched their changing colors during the day and over the seasons, as well as during an unending sequence of wars.” 42
In the structure I created for the Intersection | Prospect Heights walks, voice was important, and empathy was crucial. Each tour began at the Met Food supermarket, whose owners hosted us with exactly the kind of care and embrace that had made so many of my tour guides take me there in the first place. Each person on the walk received one guidebook, which really meant they held one person's stories, of which they were now the temporary guardian. As we walked to sites around the neighborhood, I would ask people to read the story they held about the place we had stopped in front of. Sometimes that place was still there, most often it was not, and they held up the photograph in their guidebook as a way for us to see what was now missing. Each person read out loud someone else's words, everyone genuinely giving care to what it means to read someone else's story—by turns laughing, crying, stunned, fascinated. Many participants came to the tour with moderate interest, and left feeling moved in ways they hadn't expected. On many walks, one of my original tour guides would join us, sometimes reading aloud from their own guidebook, remembering the stories they had told and reflecting on them. One participant, Marci, wrote about the project later:
The walk I went on taught me about the history of a neighborhood that I didn't know, and from face-to-face encounters with articulate residents arranged by Gabrielle, alerted me to how people and places have interacted there to create community and civic life. I also witnessed how a relatively simple strategy employed by Gabrielle—having us read aloud from oral history excerpts while standing in front of the place being discussed—created a bond among those of us on the walk, and between us and the residents she had interviewed. Speaking their words rendered their testimonies more meaningful and memorable, and drove home the experiences of gentrification and displacement that underlay their comments.43
The tours were accompanied by public events at the library—story circles, oral history listening parties, events with the original tour guides, and discussions with activists and elected officials reflecting on the tours in the context of gentrification, large-scale development and rezoning, and housing and small business precarity around the city.44 At the end of every tour and every event, participants could contribute their own stories to the project, through oral history recording sessions where neighbors interviewed neighbors, or through writing their stories on cards to become part of the project. All of these stories became part of a new oral history archive that lives in the Intersection | Prospect Heights collection at Brooklyn Public Library, and you will read some of these stories throughout this book.
People had so much to say, to each other on the tours, in our public events, in their oral histories. Most of the original Prospect Heights stories had been told to me before debate around, and the development of, Atlantic Yards and certainly before the large new development renamed Pacific Park actually started rising. They were told before wholesale purchase of property and violent evictions of residents in nearby Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy became commonplace. They were told before the majority of mayor Mike Bloomberg's incentives for large-scale development took effect and before the de Blasio mayoral administration's proposals for neighborhood rezonings across the city. Yet the project was about all of these, just as it was about creating opportunities to share similar or distinct experiences from other neighborhoods, and about imagining better futures for us all.
On an Intersection | Prospect Heights guided tour, one participant reads from the guidebook he carries, while everyone learns one of the meanings of this corner.
From Tanya's guidebook, from Neville's guidebook, and from David's guidebook. The 2016 guidebook collected old and new stories and photographs together.
FROM 9/11 TO PANDEMIC
During the fifteen years of work in Brooklyn and Oakland that I began in 2001, I learned a great deal about place and its sustaining capacity. Through that time, I also saw the housing crisis worsening across the country and witnessed the threats to small businesses and other places that hold communities together. I saw these things everywhere, but I understood their impact most deeply in these two neighborhoods I'd looked at so closely and through the conversations that Intersection | Prospect Heights had allowed me to have. I always knew what my tour guides had talked about was important, that they'd told me incredibly valuable things about what places have the capacity to do—but I didn't know exactly what they meant until much later, when I couldn't go anywhere but the rooms of my own apartment.
I began shaping this book in earnest in 2020 in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. One day in April that year, about a month into lockdown in New York City in my Washington Heights neighborhood, I realized that one strong feeling I had about the pandemic was grief—for lives lost, but also for the sustaining nature of our everyday lives and negotiations, those things enabled by these places I'd been so fascinated by for so long. I was taking one of the walks that sustained me in that time; as a parent of a young child, I was having rare time alone as well as rare time observing the few other people on the street. Avoiding each other nervously, not even daring to look at each other, it seemed as though we feared that even eye contact could transmit disease.
As I walked up a street I had walked thousands of times, I thought about how different this experience was from other parts of my work. I had spent ten years studying displacement, demolition, and urban renewal on the Lower East Side, grappling with the psychological impact of a neighborhood's becoming unrecognizably altered so that people cannot return to the physical spaces that once sheltered their lives. That work had seen trauma, and what psychologist Mindy Fullilove has called root shock, but it had also seen resilience through activism spurred by the goal of making concrete change. As I looked around on my walk, I saw that this was different. Our familiar sidewalks and buildings were all still there; they hadn't been demolished, it was just that the things that we did inside all of these spaces—and the people we did them with—were not there.
The events of 9/11 had spurred me almost twenty years earlier to talk with my neighbors to try to understand who we were. When I heard poet and performer Sekou Sundiata explain why he began his extraordinary collaborative theater work The America Project in that post-9/11 period as well, it helped me understand my own impulses. Sundiata had said, “Those events triggered a running commentary, an unsettling conversation with myself to understand what it means to be an American. I knew right away that the world had changed in ways that would challenge much of how I understood my life and work up to that point.” 45
Almost twenty years later, the pandemic was like a laser, bringing me back to the heart of my guided tours project, teaching me what was at stake in our everyday places, in what had been made visible by those tours people had taken me on. It was crystal clear that the work places did for us was existential, was about creating our very senses of self, as well as our capacity to be with, to talk with, each other—even when we hardly knew each other's names. In lockdown, sustaining ourselves in our apartments and houses felt wrong; these guided tours from years earlier reminded me exactly why it felt so wrong. These small interactions are the things I've always seen as valuable. In the midst of the pandemic, I didn't know if we'd lost them. I didn't know if people even realized what was missing. What everyone who'd ever given me a guided tour had said about place mattered so very much.
The day after those realizations in 2020, I got sick with COVID-19. By the time my family and I were better a month later, in a city reeling from the disproportionate toll the disease had taken on Black and brown communities, reeling from the disease's death toll in America in less than three months—the highest of any country at that point—and wondering what life might look like in the future, police in Minneapolis murdered a Black man named George Floyd. In New York City, on that same May day, a white woman named Amy Cooper was asked by a Black birdwatcher, Christian Cooper, to follow Central Park rules and leash her dog. She responded by saying she'd call the cops and tell them “an African American man” was threatening her life—which, performing deadly whiteness, she did. Both of these events were filmed and led to long-lasting protests—when I began writing this introduction, nineteen days of protest, and when I edited it the first time, more than one hundred—on behalf of Black lives. These protests came not just in response to George Floyd's murder but in the wake of that year's March 13 murder by police of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, as she slept in her home, mistaken for someone else, and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery just a few weeks earlier in February, shot and killed in Georgia by neighbors as he was jogging.
I spent one week in June writing a first draft of this introduction, and the brutality in that short time was staggering. On June 9, two Black trans women were murdered—Dominique Rem'mie Fells in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Riah Milton in Ohio. Three days later, Rayshard Brooks was murdered by police in a Wendy's parking lot in Atlanta, Georgia. On August 23, Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by police in front of his three children in his home in Kenosha, Wisconsin, paralyzing him from the waist down. On August 25, a white teenager, Kyle Rittenhouse, who had traveled across state lines with an automatic weapon, killed two people, and wounded another at a protest for racial justice sparked by the shooting of Jacob Blake. In November 2021, he would be acquitted of all charges. The list of people is now so much longer, and will be longer still by the time you read this. This violence is happening in public and in private, in places where people should be safe, in places where people should be able to negotiate, to talk, in places where people should be able to see each other as neighbors. Rooted in violent spatial histories, this violence is now part of our everyday places in ways that signal a real crisis in society.
I began this introduction in 2020, before 2021's January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol and the subsequent year of ever-deepening divisions in America, and internationally—over masks, then vaccine mandates, racial justice, and just about everything else. As 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 roll on, we appear genuinely not to be able to talk with each other at all. COVID exposed the cracks, deep injustices, and failures of our society that have been there all along. But it also has something to teach us about being in a society at all. Writing for Slate in mid-June of 2020, social justice journalist Steven Thrasher put it succinctly: “Viruses can be very dangerous. But they are good at exposing the myth that we live as discrete individuals.” 46
We are at the beginning of a new chapter of American reckoning with the country's founding on the tenets of racism, a reckoning that needs to be sustained. This reckoning is going to be long-term work, far beyond the incredible work of protests. It's going to require negotiation, real coming to terms with the existence and impact of white supremacy. If we are to move forward, it's going to require that we all build and exercise a capacity to talk about race and history, so that we can all get free.
And we need big spaces and small in which those conversations can happen.
The need for making our worlds together, building a shared consciousness, navigating being strangers through a banter that sometimes rises to the level of dialogue, and even collective action, is what I began learning twenty years ago from my tour guides. It is only now that I have come to understand how much was at stake in their teaching.