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Making Rent in Bed-Stuy

Page 11

by Brandon Harris


  Remnants of the nascent black society in Weeksville remained largely forgotten until nearly a century after LeGrant’s death. James Hurley, head of the Long Island Historical Society, frequently gave tours of Brooklyn neighborhoods sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York. He had begun a search for surviving Weeksville structures in 1968 while teaching a workshop at Pratt Institute’s Center for Community Development entitled “Exploring Bedford-Stuyvesant and New York City.” Hurley had done aerial photography in Pakistan for the U.S. consulate and navy and so quite naturally, after failing to locate any while walking through the area, he enlisted Joseph Haynes, a professional pilot who also worked as an engineer for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, to fly him over Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. At low altitude he was able to take several aerial photographs that revealed four wood-frame houses, hidden in an overgrown alley once known as Hunterfly Road. These houses had sat there, decaying and out of sight but still inhabited, even as housing projects went up around them in the early years of World War II. By the time Hurley visited, only one woman remained in one of the houses, Muriel Williams; it had belonged to her family since the early years of the century.

  Hurley was part of a growing community engaged in recovering African-American roots in central Brooklyn. Inspired by the discovery of the houses, the artist Joan Maynard and the activists Patricia Johnson and Dolores McCullough founded the Society for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford-Stuyvesant History in 1968, with Hurley, whose workshop they had attended at Pratt, as its initial director. Several members complained that Hurley, who is white, was an inappropriate choice to lead the organization, and that a black person should be found to replace him. Initial efforts to help oust him were rebuffed by Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, who represented the district in the era before and after her historical 1972 presidential run and was influential in the community. Eventually Maynard, who had worked as a graphic artist for the publisher McGraw-Hill and the NAACP magazine The Crisis, became president of the organization in 1972, and devoted the next thirty years to preserving the homes and to founding a cultural center on the site.

  Much of Maynard’s early support came from nearby P.S. 243. In 1970, children from a third-grade class raised $900 toward the restoration of what they called “the houses in the alley.” At Hurley’s behest, the children also participated in an archaeological dig that unearthed several artifacts from Weeksville, among them slave shackles that had presumably belonged to a Weeksville resident who had escaped southern bondage. Later that year, a busload of P.S. 243 students and teachers accompanied Maynard as she delivered a petition to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to grant the Hunterfly houses landmark status, which would protect them, despite their condition, from being razed for development. A few years later, the Weeksville houses were added to the National Register of Historic Places.

  Maynard’s group wasn’t incorporated, and it didn’t have the resources to restore the properties, so she appealed to the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, an early model of combined public and private support for community development that had been championed by Robert Kennedy in his final months as a senator. After the students at P.S. 243 raised the initial $900 toward purchasing the homes from the Volckening estate, several financiers, including the Restoration Corporation, helped in purchasing three of the four homes; the state’s Historic Preservation Office contribution, matched by private individuals recruited by Maynard, provided financing for the fourth. All were wrapped in corrugated tin in order to prevent further damage, while Maynard’s group raised money to repair them, which was badly needed; one house had been vandalized, a car had struck another, and a third had been so severely compromised by neglect that it would need to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Only the house that had remained a residence was fully intact.

  For the next two decades, Maynard’s group tried and failed to raise the money to complete the renovation, although the houses were restored in the early ’80s to something resembling their original character. Difficulty raising money to pay adequate tribute to the history of the community, and to study its lasting cultural significance, had been commonplace from the start. Over the years, Maynard was able to win financial support from the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the Downtown Brooklyn Association, the Vincent Astor Foundation, the Sheffield Rehabilitation Corporation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust among other institutions, but major federal funding for the emerging project’s efforts dried up after 1973.

  For some time, violence in the surrounding neighborhood had prevented restoration efforts from gaining traction. Fencing was installed with guard dogs to separate the homes from the crack-infested streets. The house closest to Bergen Street, 1706–1708 Hunterfly, burned down in 1980 for unexplained reasons and took a decade to rebuild, and just as it was being finished, another house was vandalized. But in the early aughts, just as gentrification was beginning to creep into Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, a $400,000 grant from the federal program Save America’s Treasures made it possible to restore the houses at long last. In 2005, after contributions from Goldman Sachs and the City of New York helped in getting the restoration process to the finish line, they were finally opened to the public. Ground was broken for the Heritage Center’s new building just months before the financial collapse of 2008, a catastrophe largely engineered by the new center’s benefactors, the federal government and Too Big to Fail banks.

  Weeksville was ultimately undone as a predominantly black enclave by forces that aren’t so different from those threatening to once again undo the wider area’s particularly Negro character; the community was swallowed by Brooklyn as its urban grid and transportation infrastructure moved eastward, bringing waves of white immigration with it, just as rising housing prices and high demand are driving upper-middle-class whites, and the brokers and developers who serve them, eastward into black Brooklyn. Its semirural texture quickly eroded along with the black population as developers began buying up plots of land, leveling out the deep hills and laying down street patterns that would cast various existing houses at bizarre angles to the new grid. The wooden frame houses that had existed amid these hills, along with the forests and ponds that lined them, were gradually replaced by Italianate row houses, often made of brick, designed for the dense urban living that the city fathers foresaw for the area.

  Weeksville’s black enclave had long accepted whites; for instance, its school, Colored School No. 2, was one of America’s first integrated educational institutions, both among its students and its teaching staff. White teachers taught under the guidance of Junius C. Morel as early as 1869, and perhaps even earlier. In 1851, long before European immigrants began moving to the area en masse, twelve of its forty students were Caucasian. Although Weeksville had been referred to as a black backwater, a “terra incognito to most of the people of Brooklyn,” according to the Brooklyn Eagle in 1868, that same year the city of Brooklyn began developing its street grid eastward at an exponentially increasing clip. By this point, Weeksville had already lost its mostly African-American majority; by 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, blacks made up only 36.9 percent of its population. While at the time they remained more concentrated in Weeksville than anywhere else in New York City, the deluge of whites moving into the area continued unabated.

  With the new infrastructure investments in place, by the late 1860s and early 1870s city services that had not been provided by the city to the colored people of Weeksville began to appear in the area. Gas lanterns and light posts were installed on Schenectady Avenue and Fulton Street. Drains and a well and pump went in on Rochester. Both Rochester and Buffalo Avenues, along the route where the Weeksville Heritage Center rests today, received pavement. Herkimer Street got sewers. The modern city came to Weeksville and swallowed it whole, although as late as 1883, Weeksville, which was more a loose collection of neighborhoods than a contiguous community, was off the grid en
ough that between settlements there were no paved roads, let alone sidewalks or street lamps.

  All of these changes resulted in a significant power shift, along with unforeseen changes to the social landscape of the place. Increased crime came with the white influx; according to accounts by local police from the early 1870s, houses of gambling and alcohol became more rampant while the area saw an increase in robberies and murders. Police in the Crow Hill area noted that colored persons made up only 55 of the 674 arrests made in the area in 1883, well below a proportionate number given their dwindling but still significant population.

  The black population had been declining in Weeksville even before the Civil War; it dropped by 9.8 percent from 1855 to 1865 as newly arrived Germans and Irish began to live alongside blacks in the area when the Brooklyn City Railroad Company’s Fulton Street line to East New York was completed in 1857.

  In short order, strife ensued over integration of local institutions. The Brooklyn school board ruled, in 1869, that the former Colored School No. 2, then known as P.S. 68, could no longer instruct the forty Caucasians who made up nearly half of the school’s student body because it was unhealthy for black and white students to have the “intimate relationship” of attending classes together. Eminent Weeksville citizens were rebuffed by the school board when trying to send their kids to nearby schools made up mostly of Caucasians. Three other cases of educational segregation reached the state Supreme Court in the 1870s. The black plaintiffs lost them all, although a similar case was finally won in the 1880s and P.S. 83 (it had been Colored School No. 2, P.S. 68, and these days is known as P.S. 243, the Weeksville School) eventually became a fully integrated public school.

  By the 1890s, after the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge allowed for foot traffic to flow from Manhattan to Brooklyn, the surrounding area was almost entirely European-American dominant. The community and rural infrastructure laid down by the generation of James Weeks and Francis Graham in the 1830s were demolished and largely forgotten. Meanwhile, the mostly middle-class families that moved in were, by and large, living in handsome modern housing. Many of these town houses and brownstones, built for a previous marauding gentry class, are being redeveloped today for another wave of mostly white immigrants.

  Many of those moving to these black spaces, both then and now, didn’t want their children in integrated schools at all, at least ones with the blacks they found in Brooklyn; once whites had a majority, they needn’t play nice with Negroes any longer. In the 1890s, when the school board that governed Weeksville acquired the land at the corner of Bergen Street and Schenectady Avenue to rebuild P.S. 68, they received a petition from many white residents who opposed the school being located there, only a block from the old one, because it would “be attended by colored children” whose presence would “depreciate the surrounding property.” Other white parents offered testimony to the board that “the development of the neighborhood assures an immediately useful future for the school if it be devoted to the use of white children alone.”

  These individuals sound not so different from the Hasidic speculators, interviewed by New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer blog in May 2015, who spoke about their desire to remove black tenants from Bedford-Stuyvesant, claiming they bring property values down. “Everyone wants them to leave,” said one speculator, “not because we don’t like them, it’s just they’re messing up.” Another young landlord claimed that black tenants “bring everything down,” but in saying so opted to remain anonymous in fear of losing his reputation. They sound not so different from the parents at P.S. 8 in modern, affluent Brooklyn Heights, described by The New York Times as “anxious about their children’s being part of a racial minority,” who have resisted efforts, aimed at reducing overcrowding, that would move their children to nearby and predominantly Negro P.S. 307. Efforts to integrate the area in a way that honors and maintains the hard-won semisovereignty blacks have periodically found in central Brooklyn, from the time of Weeksville onward, have always proven unsuccessful. P.S. 243, the Weeksville School, the direct descendant of Colored School No. 2, whose students stood with Joan Maynard to have this space of black sovereignty remembered and protected, has, as of today, a student body that is 97 percent people of color, with white students making up less than 1 percent of its population. It is, very obviously, like much of the surrounding area, more segregated in 2015 than 1851. It is likely to stay this way, until another wave of racially coded change inevitably comes and tears it asunder, remaking the school and the surrounding community in its own image.

  730 DeKalb Avenue

  With little money, a green crew, and a lead actor who would threaten to kill himself, arching his body high off a walking bridge on the Ohio River, if I didn’t shoot a scene the way he demanded, I produced and directed Redlegs, my feature film debut, in the summer of 2010. A comedic drama about the aftermath of an untimely death in Ohio, it was greatly inspired by John Cassavetes’s seminal 1970 film, Husbands. The night Lena’s film Tiny Furniture won the grand jury prize at SXSW, it had been deliriously conceived while viewing, on YouTube with Kevin, a Dick Cavett Show episode in which the Husbands cast drunkenly promoted the film. Five months later, surrounded by people who had known me from many different walks of life, we began the first day of shooting on a farm in Alexandria, Kentucky.

  It was a calamitous, fly-by-night process from the start. The money was raised from drug dealers, art nonprofits, and crowdsourcing, the cameras and many of the locations given to us in kind, the labor of recent college graduates from Wright State University’s nearby film school duly exploited. During one take that begins in Ohio and ends in Kentucky, we were breaking six laws simultaneously. I’m not sure if shooting well past midnight in a moving vehicle driven by an unlicensed driver while drugs and far too many people are crowded into a Jeep is ever a wise thing to do but it resulted in an electric scene, one of my favorite in the film.

  My first editor, a friend from film school who is the daughter of a nun, broke down and cried when I first sat down at the editing table in the upstairs parlor of her home in Sunnyside, Queens, that fall. She had decided only days before not to leave her rock star husband, another ex-classmate of ours who was always on tour and rarely if ever made much money despite his band’s growing reputation and top-shelf national press clippings. The reason? She wanted to edit my film on his gear. I was inadvertently keeping a broken marriage together, but our own working relationship couldn’t withstand the pressure. The full-time job she held down cutting the Tom Selleck cop show Blue Bloods meant we could only cut during evenings, and after four difficult months we parted ways, friends no more.

  I had spent much of that year living in a tiny front room of a former Crown Heights meth den with an EMT named Monty for $500 a month and a South Slope two-bedroom with a graffiti artist named Flo, the star of the movie Bad Posture, who charged me $800. I could hardly afford either situation and, unsurprisingly, neither ended well: both of them threw me out to move in women with whom they were sleeping.

  Unfinished versions of Redlegs were rejected roundly in 2011 by SXSW, Sundance, Rotterdam, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and, with great heartbreak, Slamdance, my alma mater. My sound mixers took four months to do three days’ worth of work on the film. It wasn’t until early in the spring of 2012 that I was able to give the film the shape it needed, largely due to my roommate Jake’s editing equipment. For the entirety of that year when I released a movie and America reelected a black president, I lived in a hallway separating the two sides of a two-bedroom railroad in Bushwick, sleeping on a raised platform that allowed me to squeeze a skinny dresser and the fraying white leather love seat underneath it. Along with my mattress, it was all the furniture that remained from my relatively opulent dwelling with Tony a half decade before.

  Despite the cramped quarters, the Bushwick residence had been felicitous creatively in ways none of the other places proved to be—it’s where I finished Redlegs, largely in my pajamas or with a spliff in my
hand. One of the stars of the film moved in that spring after yet another broken housing situation of his own had collapsed. He shared that hallway with me for the better part of the year, sleeping on the love seat beneath my bunk when we were both in town. When the film was done, having squandered my chances with bigger festivals, I passed up the opportunity to play at smaller fests, hoping the Tribeca Film Festival would take the film. It didn’t, and all my options seemed exhausted. But leveraging a few relationships I had made as a journalist, I arranged a small premiere at a festival of no repute in Brooklyn and four-walled the smallest cinema in town, the ReRun Theater in Dumbo, Brooklyn, during the final weekend in May of that year.

  Redlegs received, truly out of nowhere, glowing reviews from The New York Times and The Washington Post and largely supportive notices from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. It was carried by word of mouth to more weeklong releases, festival bookings, and a no-advance distribution deal from Cinetic FilmBuff. But, ultimately, few cared. Through a quirk in the movie release schedule, only six movies were opened that week (it’s routinely four times that amount most weekends in New York these days), allowing our reviews to garner some traction. But two of the other films opening that week were Moonrise Kingdom and Men in Black II, both bound to vastly overshadow my modest, self-distributed effort. Redlegs made less than $5,000 theatrically and disappeared, like most of the 800 or so movies released in 2012, into the digital cloud of iTunes and Amazon. It only irks me when I remember the film hasn’t even inspired pirates to torrent-stream it. A year and a half after they put it out on DVD and VOD, FilmBuff sent me a check for $497.

 

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