Gentrification happens so steadily in this corner of Bed-Stuy you hardly notice it day by day. Only when you look back a couple months, a year, do you realize how much the neighborhood has changed over the last couple of years.

This corner, on the Southeast edge, is under pressure from three fronts. Prospect Heights to the east, the Atlantic Yards development which is jacking up real estate prices Fort Greene into Clinton Hill, the steady march of both the Williamsburg hipster-yuppies and the Satmar Hasidim from the west. The Satmar, in particular, are moving in block by block: a grocery store on DeKalb, a school on Lafayette.

I’ve heard incredible stories about how expensive the neighborhood is becoming: a couple paying nearly three grand a month for a two bedroom in one of the new condos between Bedford and Nostrand south of Lafayette. That’s Manhattan prices for a dinky condo unit on a desolate stretch of concrete behind a Home Depot parking lot . . .

Down on Classon and Greene, a pizza restaurant has opened up, underneath the vintage, long-derelict ‘Liquor’ sign, the wall of logos of companies long since out of business. Across the street is the ‘International News’ shop, itself long since abandoned. Behind the long-established ‘Nero Doro’, is a new artisanal bakery, rounding out the other artisanal bakery on Bedford Ave, and the artisanal doughnut shop on Lafayette and Classon.

All these new businesses cater to the gentrifying class. None cater to the (still mostly poor) people who lived here before gentrification, or even the lower end of the gentrifying class, which inevitably includes outliers like yours truly. A generation ago, gentrification came in degrees. A few interesting bars where locals rubbed shoulders with punk rockers, artists, a decent grocery store, communities evolving around areas with cheap rent and available loft spaces. Newcomers often had an uneasy relationship with people who’d been there before, but many attempted to form links, do something for the communities of which they’d become a part. Cheap rents meant businesses could afford to cater to people of limited means. Now, it seems, there’s no in-between. If you open a business, the rents are so high, you have to cater to the gentrifying class to turn a profit – or very likely even get a loan.

But more than that, gentrification took place in a vacuum: ten years ago there was virtually no business in this area, many properties stood derelict, and when property prices rose many long-time residents either sold their properties off and moved south or, if they rented, were pushed out.

Sometimes, at night, I am amazed at how quiet this neighborhood can be. Gone the dogs barking all night and day, their barking echoing off the backs of the brownstones in a constant din. Gone the people at the end of the street blaring music so loud windows shook a half-block away. Gone the gunfire at night. I’m not one of those people who believe living in New York should involve intolerable noise, danger, mayhem. That’s for tourists. People who actually live in the city should be able to live here in peace: it’s just that peace shouldn’t be predicated on being affluent.

Go over one block, maybe two, and you’re back in that this area was a few years ago, the only stores a few badly stocked bodegas, the only restaurants take out Chinese or fried chicken joint, usually behind bulletproof glass. Police helicopters buzzing low, sometimes for an hour, circling first to the North – sometimes a couple of days in a row. According to a report in Bed-Stuy Patch, crime is up 20% in this precinct over last year.

Whenever I have out of town visitors, I always enjoy seeing how they see New York, especially in touristy or over-hyped areas (Times Square, Williamsburg, the East Village) that I rarely get to anymore. You forget, when you live here, that all things are relative, and that what might appear hopelessly over-gentrified, or flooded by tourist tack, might, to outsider eyes, seem vibrant, diverse, or even exotic. And who’s to say which view is more accurate? Walking through the Village recently with an old friend, I saw not the procession of identical pseudo-Irish bars and erasure of a neighborhood’s identity, but the vibrancy of a neighborhood populated by young people, people on the streets, with bars that, with a bit of selection, could still be interesting. One forgets that, as homogenized as New York has become in some ways, it’s that much more homogenized everywhere else. Our late-capitalist culture has a genius for flattening everything out, making one place look just like any other. At least, in New York, there’s life.

I was reminded of this watching the above charming holiday video, shot mostly in midtown and Soho. Banal street scenes, that still manage to capture some of the dynamic of the city as it is now. Using John Coltrane’s lovely ‘Naima’ as a soundtrack certainly helps, and lends a mood of introspection to what might otherwise be banal street scenes. But I found it curiously beautiful nonetheless.

And of course, here’s the great man himself, playing Naima live in Antibes, Belgium. Here, the chaos and tortured emotion below the city’s calm surface break through:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve been going through some major life changes, hence the absence of blog posts recently and am presently convalescing from some minor chest infection but hope to be back blogging at least somewhat regularly soon.

When I was a kid, long before I came to New York, John Coltrane was the man. Never as colorful as Charlie Parker, nonetheless he embodied the same sort of Nietzchian ideal I had at the time of the figure standing outside and above society, creating on his own rules, his own metaphysics as it were. John Coltrane was a man dedicated to his music. Someone recounted walking past the open window of his Harlem apartment in the morning and hearing him practice scales, holding each note for a couple of seconds, then walking past a few hours later to hear Coltrane practicing the same scale, but at blinding speed. It was said he could practice scales eight hours a day, every day.

It’s been a long time since I read John Coltrane’s bio and after reading his Wikipedia entry (what else), I was surprised to find out he was not actually born and raised in New York, but grew up in North Carolina (and served in the Navy) and got his start in Philidelphia before coming to New York with Miles Davis. Nonetheless, his sound has always meant New York to me.

With Miles Davis, another transplanted New Yorker, playing the timeless ‘So What’. Look at the class those guys had. I really wish the next sub-culture movement would take up styling like this. ‘Cause these guys had STYLE.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On Martin Luther King today, a chance to look back at that remarkable figure, and a time when America produced truly great, inspirational leaders. Though not as well known as his great ‘I have a dream’ speech, this ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence’ speech is both compelling and entirely relevant today. Dr. King delivered this speech at Riverside Church, Manhattan, April 4, 1967.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s how they do it.

I like my Chase branch down the street. It’s in a nice old building with big fireplaces at the back, and old wooden wainscotting. The black and Hispanic staff seem largely drawn from the neighboring community, and are friendly, helpful, courteous and I like dealing with them. Chase makes it easy to deposit cheques, the cheques clear in a day, and their bank machines are easy to use. Online banking is easy, you don’t even wait too long to talk to a rep. You can’t hate your local branch or the people in it.

But you can sure hate Chase.

They have a new policy: if you open a checking account and you don’t have direct deposit, or your account level dips below $1500 for more than a couple of days, they ding you with a $12 monthly servicing fee. That’s a hundred bucks a year just to maintain a checking account. If you have bills withdrawn from your account, as most people do, and you lose track of how much comes out every month and your account goes into the negative, they ding you again – #35. If you leave this for more than five consecutive business days, they ding you another $15. If you cancel your overdraft insurance, which they charge you for, they still allow some subscriptions to charge your account into the negative, then ding you $35, with that $15 after five consecutive business days. If you take out your money from a Chase bank account, it’s free, but if you go to one of those convenience cash machines, you get dinged at the machine, and back at Chase. Once, before I realized they did this (I’ve never encountered this in either Canada or Britain, where you single fee per bank machine), I got dinged once for $5, just to take out $20.

Of course, if you have the money to not go below $1500, you won’t be charged the $12 a month, nor likely will you incur the $35 dollar overdraft fee. You’re okay. But that’s the whole point. My Chase is in a poor neighborhood, where many people are struggling to find work, and Chase thinks of ever more ingenious ways to separate these people from what little money they do have. These policies are specifically designed as a tax on poor people. It’s too easy to say, people have a choice, they don’t have to use Chase. There aren’t any other banks in this neighborhood.

How much did the Chase CEO make last year? What astronomic sum will he pull in at bonus time, subsidized by these usurious fees?

Corruption takes many forms.

Louis CK says it best: “Ever been so broke the bank starts charging you money for not having enough money.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

I recently watched ‘Taxi Driver’ again for the first time in years. I was fascinated by the portrait of darkness and light, not just in the character of Travis Bickle, but in the New York City of the time. Though of course this tension exists now, it really existed in the New York of the ’70s and ’80s, when so much of the city had fallen into intense decay. Unfortunately I have the flu and am much too sick to write a coherent essay, so instead I’m posting a couple of videos.

The first, above, is a panaroma of photographs from the New York of that period, said to Bernard Hermann’s amazing score. A reminder of just how dark, and barren much of this city used to be, even when I first got here in the late ’80s. Those neon signs were still around then too, almost all disappeared now.

The second is a montage of a collection of photographs from the era.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The third (I couldn’t resist), a short clip of how Travis Bickle would see Times Square now:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now back to bed . . .

I went back downtown around four. Riots cops made a cordon down Broadway, and were already gathering in numbers around Foley Square where the big evening rally was due to take place, even though there were only a couple hundred protesters milling around. Around City Hall, the cops stood in pairs, maybe twenty feet apart, with police vans lined up down the street, and metal barricades sectioning off the sidewalk. The protestors had left Zuccotti Park earlier in the afternoon and gone to City Hall, but they had dispersed and only the cops where left. If you could ignore the riot gear they were not particularly menacing. Many were giving directions to confused tourists, and one big black cop waved, smiling cheerfully, at a lone protester girl who glanced at him warily as she walked by carrying a sign.

But their very presence ratcheted up the tension. At the last big rally on October 15th, the police had been in regular uniform.

At Zuccotti Park, two women were sitting knitting at the bottom of the square, talking to a man leaning in over the fence about the night of the NYPD raid, the destruction of the library. One of the women had been sleeping in the camp when the cops arrived:

“The sanitation workers threw all the trash on top of the tents, the sleeping gear, everything. One of the kids watched his guitar being crushed in the back of the garbage truck. They say we can reclaim our stuff – how can we reclaim what’s been crushed?”

“I thought the sanitation workers’ union was behind you.” Someone said.

“So did we!” A young black girl broke in. “they thought if they went along, they’d get a good deal from the city.”

The sanitation workers are part of the Teamsters, one of the first big unions to support Occupy.

The real crowd was gathering at the foot of Brooklyn Bridge. A couple dozen protesters, mostly middle-aged or near middle-aged, guarded by almost as many cops in riot helmets, were waving signs and chanting slogans at the bottom of the City Hall steps. The protesters at the foot of the bridge were more diverse in race and age than the crowd down at Zuccotti. A lot of kids, but many middle-aged people, and a heavy doze of black and Hispanic people who looked like they came from Brooklyn or the Bronx. In the middle was a circle formed by the United NY people who stood out because of their white shirts. They were mostly young, black or Hispanic, but I wondered who they were since I didn’t recall seeing or hearing anything about them before, and they seemed to be organizing as some kind of internal community policing service. I later read they were part of the 1199seiu, the Healthcare Workers Union but at the time, I wondered if they were an arm of the police.

The crowd was bottlenecking into the narrow space formed by the police cordon to keep protestors out of the traffic, so I cut around to get into Foley Square. Everywhere small groups were gathering for the rally – nurses waving placards, students, more from the TWU and other unions. Foley Square was filling up, well ahead of the 5pm start. I later learned that there were many groups converging on the Square at once, but at the time the crowd seemed fragmented, the speeches largely confined to chants of ‘We Are the 99%’ interspersed with a shouted ‘Mic check!’ (through a microphone), a tip of the hat to Occupy.

Unlike the last rally, the cops had full riot gear on, and had closed off the roads around the park, so you had to pass through a bottleneck to even get to the park, and couldn’t go across the other side up the steps of the justice building. People were streaming in from all sides, as were the cops who soon formed a perimeter around the back of the park, standing a few feet apart, sometimes with their batons out, as if they were only a few steps away from moving in, and there were yet more cops keeping protestors back from traffic at each end of the street. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many cops in one place before, and I remember thinking this is what Tehran must have looked like, as the security forces gathered for the crackdown; I was beginning to wonder if the NYPD saw the occupy movement as one big make-work project. What made the buildup especially absurd was that the crowd by this point was dominated by middle-aged union and professional people, and students, not exactly the types to storm the barricades. The average age must have been above 40. Some balding guy who looked like he could have been an undercover cop himself went up to one of the riot cops and pointed this out. The riot cop had a reasonable, intelligent face and maybe that’s why the guy chose him.

“Most people here are older, in their ’50s and ’60s.”

The cop laughed. “I know. Guess they miss their ’60s days.”

There was humour in his voice, but contempt as well. A young guy walked by. Past college age, but could have been anything -web designer, electrician. He caught what the cop had said as well and shouted:

“Miss their middle-class days more like!” Then, loud enough for the cop to hear: “Fucking clown!”

People were clustered on the pavement across the street. Many were indeed in their ’50s and ’60s, many sounded mid-Western; perhaps they’d come out from their own battles in Wisconsin or Ohio. They too were awed by the police presence: “I wonder how much it must cost to keep a couple helicopters out like that?” One asked as the helicopters droned overhead. The riot cops kept moving in. Many more were waiting in the police vans parked along the street, and yet more were approaching from both streets, wearing full riot gear. Even if they showed no signs of moving in, their presence was intimidating, a very obvious show of force, especially as they kept changing formation, following arcane orders over their walkie-talkies.

I left before the rally got underway. On both sides, it was a show of strength, but the cops really turned it on. Later the protesters marched over the Brooklyn Bridge. It had been a successful rally, yet the next day both the mayor and the mainstream NY media were dismissive, as if it hadn’t mattered at all. Reading the papers, you’d believe them – that is, if you hadn’t seen the cops. The cops told you the higher-ups took this very seriously indeed.

Cops in full riot great, down Broadway and around the park. It was 10:30 and the protesters had left their blockade of Wall Street to go back to Zuccotti Park, ignoring the security checkpoints to break through the barriers and flood the park area. There must have been at least a thousand protesters inside the perimeter (more, apparently, than tried to block the NYSE), mingling with the few remaining Zuccotti security in their yellow vests, with the cops two or three deep around the perimeter.

I watched the struggle from the corner of Cedar and Church. It was like having a front row seat at a rugby match. The protesters kept trying to rip down the fencing, then lines of cops in riot gear, shields down, would attempt to put it back up. Sometimes a mass of protesters would surge into the corner, stand on the parapet shouting down at the cops or taking videos and photographs. Several protesters were arrested. First a white kid, looking none too happy as he was led away in cuffs, then a white guy and a black guy together, looking much more resigned like they’d been through this before. As the arrested were held down and coffed, dozens of cameras were held up, shutters snapping and lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild, wearing yellow caps, rushed up to observe and take names. Just a few feet away were dozens, even hundreds of spectators, along with cameramen and reporters from all the major networks. It had the air of a spectacle, like a street performance, but there was real menace as well. You could never be sure when the melee might spill over to include you and the anger, even hatred, between segments of both the cops and the protesters, was very real. You could see that, after the eviction, there was a percentage on both sides spoiling for a fight.

Yet, on both sides, many remained calm, even cordial. Many of the cops, especially the ones not in riot gear, seemed ambivalent. In their faces, you could see confusion, doubt. Amusement even, when the protesters taunted some of the white shirts or their comrades in riot gear. It had been curious to me, before the eviction, how many protesters seemed to have cordial, even friendly relations with the cops standing around the park. Sometimes you’d even see them hanging out together. Like everything else about this movement, the relations between protestors and police were complex, mysterious and ever-changing.

I went to Grand Central to see a friend. The cops were down in the subway, patrolling with police dogs, on the trains, and even in the food court of the train station, hanging around in groups of two with plastic cuffs on their waist. Clearly, they were bracing for something big, and getting ready to arrest a lot of people.

Pt II to Come . . . Click here for more looking back on Occupy, from (near) the start to the present.

At five pm, the cops were still blocking off Liberty Street. A line of riot cops stood on the escarpment, above the crowd, looking as if they were in formation on horseback, getting ready to charge. Behind them, the trees of Zuccotti Park were in full bloom, glowing with an almost neon yellow, from the park’s floor lights that had been turned back on.

The night before, the NYPD had raided the Occupy encampment, arriving at one am in full riot gear, with klieg lights. They’d kept press helicopters out of the skies, blocked press access on the ground, and ripped the encampment to shreds in a couple of hours. Gone the impressive library, the cook shack, the information centre, the information tables. Despite knowing this was inevitable, I was a little shocked: a part of me had come to think of the Zuccotti Park camp as permanent, a village within a city.

Aside from the odd lone protester holding up a sign and shouting about the 99%, I hadn’t seen too much sign of the protest down Broadway. Then, a block from Zuccotti, came the line of police vans, cops sitting inside, and protesters picking up duffel bags. I’d heard on twitter that the NY Court had ruled against the camp, but there was energy in the air nonetheless. The park was cordoned off by a metal fence, but protesters had gathered in numbers around the steps and on the pavement and down the next street, with the cops making no attempt to push them back. It was so crowded that ordinary pedestrians had to push through, and behind me some guy was yelling, “Don’t be scared of them! Have some balls!” A mic check sprang up from the crowd, and I wondered if I wasn’t being pushed into some melee, but at the other end Cedar Street was open. Down the street were more riot cops, standing in line, then a line of TV vans, parked bumper to bumper cameraman and anchors out circulating among the crowd, looking for someone to interview.

I talked to a middle-aged black guy sitting on the big stone windowledge of the neighboring building. He was with with his young daughter who was holding up a “We are the 99%’ sign. He didn’t know if the protestors would be let back into the park, just that they’d been kicked out the night before. “They did it early, so no one would see ‘em.” At least three helicopters hovered overhead, the sound of their blades echoing all about the narrow space so you felt you were in a war zone.

A woman was speaking to the assembly, with that human mic thing. All I caught was: “Anybody . . . who feels that being arrested . . .would cause problems for them . . . either with immigration . . . or with their job . . . should not be in the park. If you go in the park . . .be prepared . . . to be arrested.”

A huge cheer went up. I pressed to the metal fence to see the first of the protesters stream in. A few at first, then dozens, filling what had been empty space. It was curious to see Zuccotti Square so empty, with just trees and lights and few people. Even before the protesters, food carts had covered the square whenever I’d gone by. With the floor lights, it looked just like a stage.

I walked down Cedar street. Riot cops stood in a line all the way down. Many were playing with their batons, even fondling them, like they just couldn’t wait to use them. At the bottom of the park, where the drummers used to gather, was some huge riot cop, so big he was like a walking fridge – he must be their battering ram. The beat cops seemed more casual, hanging around the edge of the crowd, watching what was going on. The protesters filling the east end of the square, trickling down the west, sitting on the steps like they were gathering for a weekday noon to have lunch. On Liberty street, I saw a shape by the fence and looked down: a guy was passed out right by the fence, on top of all his possessions, oblivious to everything was going on. It was totally surreal looking into the square and seeing protestors, riot cops, and maintenance guys in yellow vests all milling around, each group ignoring the other, with the lights shining up from the ground, the brilliant yellow of the trees behind them. A big guy in a construction hat and an MTA vest was walking up and down yelling at the cops: “I’m a first responder! This what your brothers and sisters looked like ten years ago when I was working across the street!” while up the square Seargant Shamar Thomas, the big Iraq war vet who made a few media appearances a couple of weeks ago after shaming the cops, was giving an interview dressed in his fatigues. A drum circle was going on outside the entrance, where the cops seemed to be checking bags.

The energy was high, but you felt something had changed for good. When I went back a few hours later, the park seemed a little more empty. There were rumors of a ten o’clock curfew, and the riot cops were gathering, plastic handcuffs on their belts. As I was walking back up Broadway, one cop said to another, “stand by for orders,” but there was no real tension. And, sure enough, ten o’clock came and went and no cps rushed the park. The next morning a few protesters remained, but not many.

The Daily News, of all places, has pretty good updates, all through the day and night.

Often overshadowed by the Beat triumvurate of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac, Herbert Huncke and Gregory Corso were nonetheless integral to the Beat family and, on a personal level at least, often the most interesting. Both had been in jail (the same jail though not at the same time), both, in contrast to the Big Three who were all Columbia Grads, were self taught.

I never read a lot of Corso because he mostly wrote poetry and I don’t read a lot of poetry. I still have my copy of Huncke’s ‘The Evening Sun Turned Crimson‘, which, despite a relative lack of artlessness, is direct, honest, even charming. Huncke details his early life hustling, plumbing the depths of drug addiction (I still recall, even years after I read the book, Huncke describing walking into Alphabet City with open sores on his face after scratching his skin raw shooting speed). This kind of thing has been done to death (literally), but Huncke was the firstest, even amongst the Beats, and his stories about the people he met along the way – drag queens, hustlers, junkies, and general people around the city – often have warmth, even tenderness, even when he described the most desperate characters.

Corso I remember most from ‘The Beat Hotel’, a dive hotel in Paris where Corso lived and shared a bed with Ginsberg and Ginsberg’s love Peter Orlovsky. Not that Corso got into any kinky three way thing. Corso knew from his days in jail that he was into chicks, and chicks only – they shared a bed because they had no heat.

In contrast to the gaunt, priestlike (or creepy, depending on your point of view) Burroughs, who lived in his own room on an upper floor, the three younger men (and Corso was the youngest of all) run wild like especially Rabelesian college kids on a spree. Invited to meet the French surrealists, they arrive ecstatically drunk, crawl around on all fours barking like dogs in what they thought was an appropriately Surrealist action. Corso, I think it was, jumped on Breton’s lap and chewed on his tie. Breton and most of the other guests, good Parisian bourgeoisie despite their pretensions, were not amused by this behaviour. Duchamp, the exception, was charmed by their very American irreverence and energy.

These guys were still around when I first got to New York. I had a friend who knew Huncke through Robert Frank. Huncke used to come by his place on East 3rd, bum cigarettes and talk. He was a great talker apparently. I missed meeting him one afternoon by a few minutes apparently. I missed meeting Ginsberg as well, which I regret less, having been oggled by the Great Man in the East Village a couple of times. I don’t say this out of any vanity – if you were under 30 and male and in the East Village before 1995, you were likely oggled by Allen Ginsberg.

In this charming little film, which must have been shot in the mid-’90s, Corso and Huncke read at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and are interviewed separately. Corso is irascible, brittle; Huncke is more amenable, sitting at a desk in his room in the Chelsea Hotel. We see the lobby of the Chelsea, and the 42nd that Huncke first discovered in the ’50s. Of this discovery, Huncke says:

“I liked the lights, I liked the way people moved. It was fresh . . . people seemed a lot freer in their actions than people did elsewhere.”

Corso, who also hustled on 42nd for a time, getting older men to take him out to dinner then running off, remembers the Deuce in less romantic terms:

“The most deplorable area in the world. Only the lowest of the low hanging around, a danger to themselves and everyone else.”

When I first moved to New York, the Beat tradition lived on, in places like the Tribes gallery, Nuyorican Cafe, in countless places now long gone, and amongst the Unbearables, Sensitive Skin Magazine, Red Tape. By the mid-’90s, the Beats were becoming a brand, more famous for their lives than their books, endlessly imitated in form if not in spirit. Some of these groups, or former members of these groups survive in rent-controlled apartments, in places they were lucky enough to buy when the real estate was still cheap. But no one would call the East Village bohemian now.

With thanks to Dangerous Minds where I found this video