when my Art is Rage
We live in a dramatically gentrified neighborhood, in an upstairs apartment, in a 1920 brick two-flat that my Nana owned. We rent from my mom. We've lived in this apartment for twenty years.
I like to crank up the volume on this song when I have to drive a certain path through the nearly destroyed neighborhood, in which I also spent my high school years and my college breaks.
My family, during those years, owned a beautiful and small A-frame.
My father died in that house when I was 18.
These motherfuckers tore that house down to build a McMansion.
They tear down eight-unit apartment buildings to put up McMansions. They convert two-flats (wherein two families can comfortably and efficiently live) to single-family homes. These people have devices installed in their basements to help control flooding in the climate disaster era, and these devices make others' basements more likely to flood. These people walk expensive dogs down the block as if they were here the whole goddamned time. These people blithely walk around with open containers. These people speak of old buildings as eyesores. They call out to each other across the street like a bunch of fucking white-hatters outside of a frat party. They have gourmet cupcakes at their block parties.
In our building: piles of junk at the apartments' back doors, the books and boxes and overflowing kitchen tools of people who have lived in a small space for a long time. A beautiful garden that feeds so many creatures with its bursting. Siding that looks like shit and is crumbling. A basement that floods and is filled with art supplies and boxes of costumes. Loulou and her friend set up a rug and table for their band. A broken organ. Thirty-year-old washing machine. Weird corners of mildew and dust.
On Christmas Day Loulou visited a friend for the afternoon and when I went to retrieve her I took the car because it was raining and I knew she'd be soaked. I turned down the block that holds the pulled-tooth space of my high school home. I picked our daughter up, in a Christmas storm, just doors down from the house in which my father died. I blasted my song to activate the deepest relief of rage.
i don't have a precisely similar experience to draw upon but i am certainly in a rapidly and aggressively gentrifying neighborhood. our property taxes have skyrocketed, or at any rate they did last year but we have fought it and are in a long process of reclassification--our building is still classed commercial although it is now very obviously a residence. our taxes had leaped (at the end of lightfoot's time) by something like 400%. now it's stabilized at around 200% of what it had been. i expect yours have leaped, too--though not because developers are pushing to buy & demolish "decrepit" commercial properties.
ReplyDeleteloss of place, though. loss of history. that isn't talked about enough. how are we supposed to prevent this? how are we supposed to "move on" from the loss of a home when the absence smacks us in the face every day?