Making Rent in Bed-Stuy

by Brandon Harris

  I had returned to the area to take care of my ailing father, a ceiling cleaner and janitor with diabetes, heart disease, chronic back pain, and a menthol cigarette habit he’d stopped trying to kick. After the dissolution of his third marriage, he had first stopped taking all of the nearly two dozen medications he was on. After a stint in the hospital, he began to take his medications liberally, without much rhyme or reason. He spent the summer in rehabilitation. I had never seen him so low.

  Unable to keep his apartment in his current condition, his belongings were moved into storage. I was charged with finding him a place to live after he was let loose, but we had no idea when that would be. By summer’s end, fearing he’d be put out on the street as his rehab stint was coming to a close, he became a tenant of my mother’s, paying rent to live in the room I had called my own in the decade since she built our newest home, at 5920 Rhode Island Avenue in Roselawn. His pride and her comfort weren’t as shattered by the development as I had imagined; given that her construction business had seen lean times for many years since the recession, she needed the income and he needed the security. Anyway, she mainly did it for me. Her love knew no bounds.

  Later that summer, on July 19, a few days after I assumed the worst about the man approaching my car on a humid Bond Hill night, an all-too-real spectacle of violence against a defenseless black motorist sent chills down both of our spines, and that of the entire city. In Mount Auburn, a neighborhood on the steep hill that separates downtown from the University of Cincinnati, Samuel DuBose, a forty-three-year-old father of thirteen, was shot in the head by the University of Cincinnati police officer Raymond Tensing, who had stopped DuBose for not having a front license plate on his Honda Accord. Cincinnati police initially said that Mr. DuBose, who had been arrested sixty previous times, handed Officer Tensing a bottle of alcohol after being asked repeatedly for his license, suggesting he may have been under the influence. Officer Tensing allegedly asked Mr. DuBose to exit the vehicle. After he refused, Lt. Col. James Whalen of the Cincinnati police told reporters on July 22, “There was a struggle at the door with Mr. DuBose in the vehicle and the officer outside the vehicle, and the vehicle sped away,” while the police report, written by Officer Eric Weibel, stated that Tensing claimed he was being dragged by DuBose’s car and had to fire his weapon as a result. Officer Phillip Kidd, who arrived on the scene just as the shooting took place, backed up Tensing’s account, and so did Weibel himself, writing, “Looking at Officer Tensing’s uniform, I could see that the back of his pants and shirt looked as if it had been dragged over a rough surface.”

  As national news outlets pursued the story of Sandra Bland’s death in a Waller County, Texas, jail cell following a similarly minor traffic stop, the DuBose mystery picked up momentum locally. The police were in possession of body camera footage of the incident, but the Hamilton County prosecutor, Joe Deters, was unwilling to share it with the public. The Associated Press, The Cincinnati Enquirer, and four local news stations filed a joint lawsuit against Hamilton County on Friday, July 24, claiming that Deters’s refusal was in defiance of Ohio’s open records law. Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell—who had considered resigning in May, after there were four homicides in ten days and reports of dissension within the police leadership—and City Manager Harry Black were grave when discussing its contents that Tuesday. “It was not a good situation,” Black told local news station WLWT. “Someone has died that didn’t necessarily have to die, and I will leave it at that.” Blackwell added that the police were “prepared for whatever might come out of it.”

  The Mini Microcinema, in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district, is perhaps the country’s only corporate-backed experimental microcinema. Screenings during its initial opening in 2015 were held, for most citizens, on the second floor of the former Globe Furniture building at 1805 Elm Street, a gorgeous structure that dates back to the 1890s. It sits across the street from Ohio’s oldest continually operating market. The first floor, adorned with old movie chairs, serves as a gallery and gathering space; its white walls are covered with well-manicured posters for various programs that the Mini, as its supporters call it, had hosted in its inaugural season.

  Gentrification works differently back home than it does in New York. In Cincinnati, just like in Mississippi, poor people don’t have organizations of resilience that demand political accountability for their needs. While the black community’s highest strata have collective clout that can shake city hall, their working-class brethren, out in the neighborhoods, don’t. Meanwhile, the city’s long-blighted and now suddenly cherished urban quarters are gobbled up and renamed, not by Hasidic developers and unceasing wells of foreign money, but by public-private partnerships in the name of Germanic city heritage.

  Over-the-Rhine, with the largest collection of Italianate architecture anywhere in America save Greenwich Village, has recently become a neighborhood of shiny boutiques and fancy restaurant-laden streets, or restored nineteenth-century German beer halls with ten-dollar bratwursts. The Globe Furniture building, along with many of the buildings near it, has been newly renovated at the behest of 3CDC, a private nonprofit that is the constant target of the city’s gentrification critics, who bemoan the billion dollars of mostly private money that have gone into remaking the neighborhood to fit the imagination and sensibilities of the elite. James Pogue, writing in n+1, suggested that 3CDC has “the money to write the future” in this town where the job of city planning in the once-riot-torn neighborhood just north of downtown has been largely taken over by corporate interests.

  Sponsored by a grant from, and housed within the property of, People’s Liberty, a self-described “philanthropic lab” that acquired the building from 3CDC and purports to bring together “civic-minded talent to address challenges and uncover opportunities to accelerate the positive transformation of Greater Cincinnati,” the microcinema is really just a large room that was once a showcase for sofas and is now a glass-encased corporate headquarters. With a pulldown screen, some ineffective curtains to shutter its large windows, and a hundred or so portable plastic chairs, the room is converted into a screening space.

  The brainchild of C. Jacqueline Wood, a former staffer of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, one of the country’s premier venues for avant-garde work, the Mini has some influential supporters. Eric Avner, CEO of People’s Liberty, has since 2008 been a vice president of U.S. Bank’s Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile Jr. Foundation, one of the largest arts- and culture-focused philanthropic organizations in the region. Their fingerprints are all over almost every significant cultural institution in the city. They have clearly decided to put their resources, at least temporarily, behind experimental film exhibition.

  This is surely unprecedented, at least in this town. Cincinnati, where I grew up and where I hope to continue making films, was once overflowing with cinemas, but by the time I came of age most of those were long closed. Even in its cinematic exhibition heyday, there was no place that catered to experimental movies; those types of pictures had rarely—if ever—reached the northern shores of the Ohio River, and when I shot my feature debut in parts of Over-the-Rhine, not far from the Mini five summers ago, the space was still pockmarked with blight and disinvestment. Although the 3CDC-powered Disneyfication of the area was already under way then, The New York Times was typically obtuse when claiming Cincinnati was finding its “artsy swagger.” The city and the corporate proxies it had ceded authority to were in fact creating an environment in which a previous generation of low-rent gallery and exhibition spaces where one might encounter experimental film, such as Publico, would no longer exist.

  Meanwhile, in some still “undeveloped” parts of Over-the-Rhine, one would be hard pressed to find a young black man who does not have some sort of criminal record, usually for the slightest of offenses. The stakes for second- or third-time offenders from the black underclass, who nearly never have access to their own legal representation other than court-appointed defenders, are high. They are seen as de facto
criminals by the city’s police establishment and as unemployable by the posh new businesses opening in their neighborhood. Their grievances are many and they have little reason to believe, at the present time, that education and self-enrichment, let alone protest and civil disobedience, are attractive alternatives to crime when navigating the troubled waters of inner-city poverty.

  They’re certainly not the individuals who were welcomed into free screenings at the Mini Microcinema that summer. All the events were free. So too were the popcorn, beer, wine, and cookies that were served for a half hour before the screenings. Wood talked about the need to educate new audiences, people who had not been exposed to the aesthetics of experimental movies and would, given the conditioning of American television and mainstream film culture and our continued unwillingness to fund K–12 media literacy education, likely find them unreadable. But that didn’t seem to include longtime residents from the surrounding neighborhood. I’d seen a lot of strange things in my days, but never experimental cinema hosted by major financial institutions that catered to Negroes. I wasn’t holding my breath.

  The first program I saw there, of new experimental dance films, began with a short by Maya Deren, the grand doyenne of American experimental cinema, to give historical context to the development of the craft, segueing into more recent works. The whole thing seemed promising. But the next time I visited the microcinema, the most talked about movie in Cincinnati was one none of us were allowed to see, the videotape of Samuel DuBose’s murder, which was still being withheld by the prosecutor’s office. While waiting for an ultimately underwhelming screening of Detroit-based experimental work at the Mini the following weekend, I discussed the DuBose affair with Peter van Hyning, a volunteer at the theater. While pouring me a glass of rosé, he went on about how he was withholding judgment on the matter until he could see the tape. If we ever had the chance. Censorship was in the air in more places than the prosecutor’s office.

  Soon the screening started, and hackneyed Motor City experiments washed over us. One film late in the forgettable program, the most ambitious of the lot, focused its attention on the demolition and disrepair of various empty structures in Detroit, interwoven with occasional tongue-in-cheek text detailing who or what we were seeing. The movie, like much of the program, strained for relevance, but what I do recall most from it was a wide shot that included a portion of Detroit’s skyline in the background left and, in the mid-ground right, a rooftop where a group of black men were congregated. The building that both they and the filmmaker were standing on was, we were led to believe, condemned. Two sets of text popped up at the top of the screen. “Detroit,” with an arrow pointing toward the skyscrapers, appeared on the left. “Gangbangers,” with an arrow pointing toward the young Negroes congregated on the rooftop, appeared on the right.

  The three other black people besides yours truly who had come to the sparsely attended screening left during the Q&A. At the end of the talkback, Wood announced the screening to be held the following Tuesday, a program concerning the nearly forty-year effort to gentrify the very neighborhood the Mini was located in. Curated by the local documentarian and activist Erick Stoll, one of the key figures in New Left Media, it was sure to be a hot ticket; it had attracted more than 700 confirmed attendees, according to Facebook. (The fire code for the space would prohibit anything more than a fifth of such a crowd.) For the Mini’s biggest event yet, Wood planned to hold two screenings in the space, which holds just 140, to accommodate at least a slightly larger portion of the demand. She then suggested that although gentrification was a hot-button topic in the city, the space she oversaw was one where the aesthetics of filmmaking were to be discussed, not their political content. “This isn’t the place to complain about 3CDC,” she said. No kidding; they used to own the building.

  I was dumbfounded by this notion that the director of a cinema would tell her audience what they were allowed to discuss and not discuss in the space in advance of a screening. I spoke to Wood afterward and didn’t mention it; everyone was making nice. She was standing next to a local teacher and writer, Danielle Ervin, who also shared an interest in holding screenings and promoting film culture in the city. Ervin had a hand in a documentary film series that had taken root at a meeting space for young artists and activists, Chase Public; perhaps a partnership of some sort could be forged.

  Before long, however, three black preteens ambled up the stairs into the space and began making their way around the room in some mixture of confusion and awe; just where the hell were they? I doubted they had ever seen an experimental microcinema. Wood’s attention drifted away from our conversation. She approached the children, who were somewhat aimlessly wandering around, and very brusquely told them that they were in a cinema and the screening was over before ushering them back down the stairs and out into the street. A man sitting at the desk on the first floor gave them uninviting looks as they partook in some of the corporate-sponsored cookies that sat on a tray near the welcome desk. Following behind the spectacle in shock and shame, Ervin, who is white, and I made our way out in silence.

  “Did you feel that?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Those kids were a menace, based largely on the color of their skin, or they didn’t belong in such environs, largely for the same reason, went the logic that suddenly overwhelmed Wood’s thinking. Perhaps, as blacks are often told, usually by white Americans, this is simply paranoia, that any children would have been treated with a similar mix of disdain, fear, and annoyance. But it seemed to fit a pattern others noticed too. All this Over-the-Rhine development, my consultant aunt told me one day over sixteen-dollar fried chicken sandwiches at one of the posh new beer halls, “was all about the White Man.” How could it be otherwise? In Obama’s America, we had not thought through any solution to the poverty within our cities besides handing over most of the buildings to well-to-do whites and the Stuff White People Like. That most of the invaders felt no shame about this, carrying out a class war, block by block, boutique by boutique, bar by bar, displacing people they would never personally evict or have to look in the eyes, made me wonder about the limits of empathy. Could I muster enough myself? Where did my culpability begin and end?

  Danielle and I were both upset about the disregard we had seen those children treated with, the presumption of their lack of innocence, the disinterest in “building new audiences” for experimental cinema that had clearly just been displayed. Ervin informed me that many in her local documentary and activist circles had given up on the Mini and said disparaging things about its proprietor and sponsors. Apparently Wood had offered a troubling anecdote at the space’s opening event. She had encountered a local family in front of the building who, after glimpsing the sign in front of the Mini, inquired about whether the neighborhood was getting a new movie theater. She told them that it was but it was one where they’d inevitably find the films “hoity-toity.” You’d need advanced degrees, such as the one Wood holds from the University of Michigan, to understand them, she offered.

  In the telling of Ervin and others, Wood went on to suggest during her opening comments that, in the wake of this encounter, she had decided to screen Aladdin for black Over-the-Rhine residents and their children, like the family she had encountered. The insinuation was that such people couldn’t be expected to comprehend and engage with the work she planned to screen for the increasingly middle- to upper-class Cincinnatians for whom Over-the-Rhine had recently become all the rage. Experimental movies, in Wood’s mind, were ostensibly Stuff White People Like. When she did find some photogenic black children (and one lonely black mother) to invite into the space, she screened Who Framed Roger Rabbit for them on the ground floor via flatscreen, not in the cinema above, and posted a photo on Facebook celebrating her own inclusionary impulse. Let them eat cake!

  Another even more haunting audiovisual testimony to radicalized plunder surfaced when video of Samuel DuBose’s killing was released to the media. At the same press conference
in which it was unveiled, Raymond Tensing was indicted for murder. The video clearly depicts Tensing, who is twenty-five and Caucasian, shooting DuBose with little provocation. Deters is a Republican who was called “pro-cop at any cost” by Cincinnati CityBeat following his refusal to prosecute Officer Marty Polk for running over a homeless woman, Joann Burton, while she slept in the city’s recently renovated Washington Park five years earlier. Polk claimed not to see her as she was lying in a blanket. This was enough for Deters to refrain from prosecution. He was unambiguous, however, in his condemnation of Tensing during public remarks unveiling the tape and Tensing’s indictment for murder, a move widely credited with stamping out any potential unrest. “It’s an absolute tragedy that anyone would behave in this manner,” Deters said. “It was senseless. It’s just horrible. He purposefully killed him.”

  In the run-up to the press conference, largely due to Blackwell’s and Black’s comments and Deters’s reticence in releasing the video, fear of riots gripped the city. Cincinnati has a long history of them; while nineteenth-century riots, such as those in 1829, 1836, and 1841, often directed their anger at the city’s burgeoning African-American population, the riots of the past fifty years, such as those in 1967, 1968, and 2001, have largely been forums for blacks to unleash their own dissatisfaction. Cincinnati was the site of the last major American riot, in the spring of 2001, following the deaths of fourteen African-American men in the five years leading up to the April 7 shooting death of unarmed nineteen-year-old Timothy Thomas during a foot chase in Over-the-Rhine.