The Edge Becomes the Center

  If you live in a city—and every year, more and more Americans do—you’ve seen firsthand how gentrification has transformed our surroundings, altering the way cities look, feel, cost, and even smell.

  Over the last few years, journalists, policymakers, critics, and historians have all tried to explain just what it is that happens when new money and new residents flow into established neighborhoods, yet we’ve had very little access to the human side of the gentrification phenomenon. The Edge Becomes the Center captures the stories of the many kinds of people—brokers, buyers, sellers, renters, landlords, artists, contractors, politicians, and everyone in between—who are shaping and being shaped by the new New York City.

  In this extraordinary oral history, DW Gibson takes gentrification out of the op-ed columns and textbooks and brings it to life, showing us what urban change looks and feels like by exposing us to the voices of the people living through it. Drawing on the plainspoken, casually authoritative tradition of Jane Jacobs and Studs Terkel, The Edge Becomes the Center is an inviting and essential portrait of the way we live now.

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2015 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com,

  or write us at the address above.

  Copyright © 2015 by DW Gibson

  Photograph on page 104 courtesy of Michael De Feo

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1187-7

  Contents

  Map

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Chapter 29.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For all citizens of New York City—especially Gigi.

  1.

  “Opportunity in New York springs from strong neighborhoods. When we demand that big developers build affordable housing, and fight to keep our hospitals from becoming luxury condos, it’s not to punish the real estate industry. We do these things so the everyday, hardworking people who anchor our neighborhoods can live and work and be healthy in the communities they love. That’s how we all rise together.”

  It is November 5, 2013, and Bill de Blasio stands on a stage surrounded by an exalting audience. The crowd sways to Lorde’s anticapitalist anthem “Royals”: That kind of luxe just ain’t for us. We crave a different kind of buzz. Victorious on this election night, de Blasio will soon be a mayor in charge of a budget with more than three billion dollars in surplus. The money started flowing into the city several decades ago, the spigot dripping steadily by the early 1990s when Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton built a police force muscular enough to frisk its way to a city free of broken windows and tagged stoops; a city with a lower rate of violent crimes, capable of seducing developers to buy up abandoned buildings. The capital surged under a twelve-year Michael Bloomberg administration, despite the fact that he took office three months after the city’s two tallest buildings, its welcome beacon to global capitalism, collapsed.

  Now here we are: Bill de Blasio, recently arrested while protesting the closure of a hospital, becomes the 109th mayor of New York City just as a leading real estate agent says that 80 percent of his clients are hedge funds; not individuals concerned with the quality of vegetables at the corner bodega but corporate entities who see potential in the bodega’s square footage.

  I set out to understand how gentrification affects lives and not far into my trip I realized the word gentrification is useless—rendered so by overuse, too broad to adequately capture a huge range of disparate experiences, contexts, and, ultimately, meanings. But no matter how idiosyncratically one defines gentrification, it is an idea that never strays far from money—investment, capital moving into the neighborhood.

  “I’ve spoken often about a Tale of Two Cities. That inequality—that feeling of a few doing very well, while so many slip further behind—that is the defining challenge of our time. Because inequality in New York is not something that only threatens those who are struggling. The stakes are so high for every New Yorker.”

  The stage where de Blasio stands is not a curtained number in a midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom; it is a temporary platform constructed in the center of a stone and brick building that was originally an armory for the 14th Regiment of the National Guard on Eighth Avenue in Brooklyn. The building has had several incarnations, a YMCA at present. This is Park Slope, de Blasio’s neighborhood, and thus a meaningful place to party, but more to the point: one hundred and eight mayors preceded this man and not one chose Brooklyn for his election night celebration—a fact not to be underestimated. This outer borough feels front and center.

  Outside the YMCA the streets are relatively calm. The flames of the de Blasio fire only carry so far. Voter turnout for this revolutionary election was 24 percent. This is not an easy city to rile, politically speaking, particularly when the violence of gentrification that fuels the de Blasio battle cry is so subtle, less like a bullet or a blade and more like the slow encroachment of carbon monoxide, filling one building after another. The mayor’s neighborhood of Park Slope—reminiscent of The Cosby Show and the affluent middle class—is already subsumed and the vapors are advancing on the crumbling brick facades farther into Brooklyn.

  I follow the vapors.

  By the time I reach Lincoln Road in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, there is no trace of the din from the de Blasio uprising. I find a forty-five-year-old man on the front porch of a towering Victorian home. It is late, deep into the night but still his snug, gray suit remains unwrinkled. His polka-dotted pocket square hasn’t budged. The pinpointed fashion shaves ten years off the bachelor’s age; his demeanor has a confident bounce to match. Prospect Park—formed by glacial debris some seventeen thousand years ago, sculpted by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1867—is two blocks away.

  My name’s mTkalla. I always get questions. mTkalla?—how do you say that? And I tell the story: My full name when I was born was Martin Kennedy Keaton. My mom named me after both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. I was born in 1968. I used to win awards as a kid doing Martin Luther King speeches. I remember once when I was nine I did the “I Have a Dream Speech” and a woman in the front row—an older black woman—was balling with tears and she told my mother, “I can’t believe that a little boy did this speech.” I performed like I was in front of Martin Luther King.

  Then in ’88 or ’89 there w
as so much violence against black American men in Brooklyn. People getting beat up. People getting shot by the cops. I was doing some research regarding the whole middle passage and people getting brought here, European names being forced on them. I read Assata Shakur’s autobiography and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Here’s a man whose only true god was the truth as he understood it. He could go on for years and years saying one thing, but once he understood the truth to be different, he admitted that the truth is different now. He lived that. And he continues to be an inspiration for me.

  So recently I decided to change my name officially. I decided to put the silent m in front of the name Tkalla. The m is homage to MLK.

  The result sounds like Ta-KAH-la. There is an unkempt yard in front of the porch where we sit. Up against the sidewalk, an overgrown hedge hides us from the street. A busted car (broken windows and flat tires) lists in the driveway alongside mTkalla’s Porsche SUV (tinted windows and polished tires). The house looks mostly empty through the windows; a few walls have been partially removed and drywall dust covers the floors and banister and built-in shelving of the decrepit mansion.

  This place is part of my story actually. I’m moving from Park Slope—my mom’s still there. You familiar with Park Slope? My father bought a couple of houses there a long time ago. Had to take out a big mortgage to pay off the family to keep the properties. A lot of debt. He passed about fourteen years ago. So I decided to sell everything and have a house free and clear. I had an opportunity to move somewhere else, some suburb, some palatial something. But why would I move away from Brooklyn? I consider it the planet. So I bought this house—he points back over his shoulder at the looming structure—which is a little bit of a big deal because my mom always wanted to live in a place like this. But there’s a lot of effing work, man, there’s a lot of work.

  When I tell people that I’m moving out of Park Slope back to Lefferts Gardens people are like, “You’re crazy. You’re bugging out. How could you move? You’re one of the only black dudes that owns in Park Slope,” da da da da.

  And I’m like, “First of all, you don’t even know what I’m moving to. If you saw where I was moving, you’d get it.”

  “No, you’re bugging out.”

  And then they come here and they’re like, “Oh, I get it.”

  I’m so excited about this house.

  The lot is a hundred feet wide and a hundred feet deep and you can fit like eight cars in the driveway—there’s a two-car garage.

  mTkalla escorts me over to his driveway, which extends the length of the property. In a city where drivers circle for hours searching for a spot and spend $747 million on parking tickets in one year, the long driveway looks even longer, feeling more like a landing strip for small planes.

  To have a driveway—mTkalla smiles like a conquering teenager—I just like saying it: driveway—I could just repeat driveway, driveway, driveway …

  The smile runs on with the incantation of the word until mTkalla turns and walks toward the garage. He stops suddenly—I’m no Hugh Hefner or anything like that but—and continues walking.

  Someone shot a short film here not too long ago. If I’m talking too fast or moving too fast just let me know. I’m trying to say three sentences at the same time.

  We walk around to the backyard. The jungle that I saw in the front yard is deeper here, richer. And there are certain additions: various piles of garbage and demolition—splintered wood, bent siding. But for all of that, it is still a backyard in the center of New York City—the center of Brooklyn, to be precise, which, for mTkalla, is the center of everything—he requires Manhattan for nothing. Manhattan is a museum dutifully toured when friends from out of town visit. mTkalla has not been there in a month.

  Circling back around to the front of the house, we enter through the main door and stand in the parlor. mTkalla envisions the following tweaks:

  We’re going to paint a little bit darker to give it more of that richer look. I want to leave as much undisturbed as possible.

  We’ll keep that—pointing at the fireplace before ascending the dark wood staircase to the second floor.

  Originally, I wanted to move from Park Slope to Bed-Stuy ’cause a lot of my business is in Bed-Stuy. But those homes are, at the most, twenty feet wide and for someone who doesn’t really do stairs—my mom can’t use the stairs—that doesn’t really work. She’s seventy years old. And I’m not going to move any place that my mom doesn’t approve of, ’cause she sacrificed so much for me and I need her last few years to be good. So I came here, and I stood right in this place—pointing at the recently sanded flooring beneath his feet—and I started getting chills all over my body. I went home, I said, “Hey Mom, I found the house.”

  She said, “Really?!? You found the house?”

  “I found the house.”

  We walk down a hallway here, a hallway there, and wind up in a mostly empty room with an unmade bed in the middle of the floor.

  I’ve kind of co-opted this room until everything else is done downstairs. You can control the construction better when you’re on-site. Eventually, this will be my master bedroom.

  He points to one massive window between two other massive windows:

  We’re going to do a deck off there. This is away from the street, this is southwest exposure, I mean, you know …

  He rolls his eyes, displaying a bit of ecstasy, and continues:

  We’ll rip out the kitchen. We’re going to do a nice, all-white kitchen, Carrara marble, blah, blah, blah.

  This is going to be my living room.

  That room will be the family thing.

  That’s a classic baby room. I have no babies so I have no idea what’s going to happen with that.

  This is actually the only house on the block that has a legal commercial space. This room is an addition—they used to run a little school out of here. So I’m using it as my office, consultancy, whatever—where there’s film, editing, music production, design. I plan on blowing that wall out there, keeping the ceilings kind of raw and doing a nice industrial type of kitchen in the corner. A three-quarter bathroom. And this will be the reception area for the mTkalla Group, the Casa Brooklyn, the whatever the hell—we want to take over the world. Or take over Brooklyn. Because it’s not about taking over the world. If you take over Brooklyn, it’s partly like taking over the world.

  He laughs and heads back out to the last traces of sunlight on the front porch. Across the street is an apartment building with three or four or five men standing near the entrance, laughing and talking, coming and going. The rest of the block is lined with spacious, free-standing homes like mTkalla’s, making the street seem misplaced in a city where most people live in boxes stacked much closer and higher.

  I can’t wait for this to be somewhat done so we can just relax and have people over. Raise a family or create a vibe, man.

  It’s funny because I remember growing up in Bushwick, six blocks from here. I was a nerd, and people would say, “Where you from?”

  I had to drop it in a certain way: “Yo, I grew up in Bushwick.”

  People would be all, “Really?”

  Now people say, “Ah, Bushwick, what does that mean? Hipsterville?”

  Even if I could have afforded to live in Park Slope I would not have chosen it. There’s no vibe. I think Park Slope is definitely one of the more Manhattanized parts of Brooklyn. When you walk the streets it doesn’t feel like Brooklyn. There’s something cold about that neighborhood. A lot of people who live there, who own there, who rent there—they’ll say the same thing.

  For all the time mTkalla spends distinguishing between different neighborhoods—and there are distinctions to be made—these neighborhoods don’t correspond to borders observed on a map—not always, anyway. Urban historian Suleiman Osman writes that before the 1970s “Brooklyn had no real neighborhoods. Those who did use enclave names could rarely distinguish where the area began and ended. Early attempts to locate Brooklyn’s authentic neighborhoo
ds were not by local residents but by two groups of outsiders with very different motives: community organizers and real estate agents.” The labeling—and, ultimately, branding—of Bushwick and Fort Greene and Clinton Hill and Sunset Park and Stuyvesant Heights and Park Slope et al. is recent and evolving. And regardless of the monikers, a neighborhood is where daily life plays out, and daily life does not involve lines on a map; it is a spectrum of places: a home, a school, a playground, a diner. And the people who fill those spaces:

  When I talk about a neighborhood, I think 70 percent of it is the people and how they relate to each other. And a lot of people who are in Crown Heights or Bed-Stuy—particularly African American folk—come from the South. Both sides of my family come from the South, from Virginia. My pops came from Bloomingburg. I remember driving down this road there and everybody that passed, my dad waved to them. Every single bloody person. I’m ten years old and I’m like, “Hey Pops, do you know all these people?”

  And he’s like, “No.”

  “So why are you waving at them?”

  “That’s what you do! When you come down here you wave at everybody.”

  And I’m like, “Are you serious? It seems tiring to me!”

  He laughs.

  And we’d go into a store and people were taking their time, and I was like—he snaps three times in rapid succession—and he said, “You need to calm down man, you’re on Brooklyn energy. You need to turn it down.”

  My father came up here with his brother in the ’50s and they bought property when New York was going through a recession and no one wanted to live in Brooklyn. The two homes he bought in Park Slope, they were either seventeen or twenty-seven thousand dollars.

  I don’t ask mTkalla the current sticker price for the Park Slope properties though it’s safe to say the going rate on those homes is upward of three million dollars. But you could fit two Park Slope brownstones inside his palatial spread on Lincoln Road and there’d still be plenty of driveway, driveway, driveway.