The line of mourners marched past the boys on the couches and into the chapel. Poppa’s girlfriend sat in the front row, the mourners hugging her on their way to the casket. She was seven months pregnant. The last thing Poppa had posted on Facebook, a month before his death, was a photo of him kissing her belly.
THREE DAYS LATER, Poppa’s 19-year-old brother Clayton Gravenhise shot and killed 17-year-old Beverly Turner in Bed-Stuy. He later told police that she was a cousin of the man he believed had killed his brother. A month after that, on August 29, Clayton opened fire inside a liquor store in Brownsville. A 20-year-old woman was wounded. Jahzeph Crooks, a 19-year-old student at Saint John’s University, was killed. Clayton later told police that he was aiming at another young man inside the store, the young man he believed had killed his brother.
Clayton was arrested in November, when officers caught him fleeing the scene of a shooting a few blocks east of Rockaway Avenue. Police said he confessed to the two murders.
SUDDENLY, THE SEASON felt monumental to Chris. He’d already considered that the fate of the program might be on the line, but now the stakes felt even higher. The summer’s tragedies had heightened Chris’s desire to see his boys win their games. He wanted them to believe that good things happened to those who worked hard and acted right.
“It never gets easier,” Chris said. He’d been coaching for nearly 20 years and he was seeing the same struggles he’d seen when he got started. Like always, he found temporary peace at the park, where there were too many duties to think about to dwell on the sadness. The first game was six weeks away and the Pee Wee team was coming together.
Chris wanted them to show their opponents that Brownsville had more to offer than a string of sad stories for the evening news. He wanted to draw attention to his neighborhood for something positive, and maybe if enough people paid enough attention, their collective interest would help bring progress to Brownsville—though not even Chris was certain what this progress was supposed to look like.
11
ON THE HORIZON
July–August 2014
FOOTBALL GAVE CHRIS LEGREE PURPOSE AND POWER, but it didn’t pay the bills. For that, he worked at Consolidated Edison, his employer for three decades. He’d started as a general utility worker, digging holes, climbing poles, and checking meters, then worked his way up to supervisor. These days, he oversaw a team of emergency workers, who were dispatched across the city, day or night, to fix gas leaks and downed power lines. The crew arrived at the scene in a boxy red van. They dropped their orange cones, jackhammered into the street, and entered the earth. Sometimes they had to dispose of hazardous waste.
Chris didn’t talk about his job much. Sometimes he showed up to Betsy Head still in his gray Con Ed jumpsuit, and parents joked that they’d forgotten that Chris was a workingman. It often seemed to them that the football program was all he did. Chris liked it that way. He believed that his legacy would be rooted in Brownsville through Mo Better. He modeled himself after Greg “Jocko” Jackson, the longtime manager of the Brownsville Recreation Center. Jackson died in 2012 and was a neighborhood legend. At his funeral, the line to pay respects at his casket went around the block. “It was all day,” Chris said. “Like a dignitary died.” During the memorial service, Chris remembered, he stood next to then mayor Michael Bloomberg, who turned to him and whispered, “Chris, I’m not going to have this many people at my funeral.” And Chris replied, “Around here, we don’t forget where we came from.” The New York Times wrote Jackson’s obituary, proclaiming him “unofficially, the mayor of Brownsville” and quoting him from an old interview: “If you can grow up and survive in Brownsville, you can do it anywhere in the world.” Local leaders named a new community center after him. The city renamed a street in his honor. Chris often mentioned Jackson in his speeches and often noted that Jackson had been his good friend and mentor. He told people that he hoped to fill the hole Jackson had left.
The Con Ed job subsidized the community work that made Chris one of the most well-known figures in Brownsville. When Chris first got the job, he saw it as a symbol of his shortcomings. It was the job he needed because he’d returned to the neighborhood without an NFL contract, and playing semipro football on dirt fields for $50 a week wasn’t going to pay the bills. “Everywhere I walked, everybody wanted to know what was going on,” Chris said. He was ashamed. “Brownsville often feels like a village,” his brother Jeff said. “When you do something good, people know about it, and when you do something bad, people hear about it. Word spreads fast. When you was from Brownsville, you was expected to blow up. You was expected to be great.” Chris figured the whole neighborhood saw him as another has-been, the latest in a long line of local stars who failed to earn a spot in the pantheon of Brownsville greats. He missed the head nods and hand slaps when he walked down the street. He missed being somebody important and the pride that came with it. “It was a transitional period of realizing your dream won’t happen,” Chris said. “That’s a big deal.”
He began to believe that he was forever stuck with the feeling that he’d let Brownsville down. But then came the Million Man March, the inspirational words he needed, and the idea that would change his life. He found peace through Mo Better. “It stabilized me,” he said. “For not fulfilling the promise, the potential, or whatever you wanna call it, I put myself on a guilt trip for a very long time. This helps me a lot. This gives me a way to give back to this place.”
Now here he was, one of the most respected and admired figures in Brownsville: a man who slapped hands in barbershops and corner stores, who personally knew the NYPD precinct commander, the city council representative, the state legislature representatives, and the borough’s district attorney; a man who put on a suit and glad-handed at political fundraisers and civic functions, who touted his program to rooms full of rich liberals and received donation checks in return; a man who wielded enough political influence to draw candidates to Betsy Head Park seeking his support, just as Lori Boozer did one day in late July. Boozer was running for state assembly, and she seemed to win Chris over. He knew he needed more allies in elected office. Brownsville’s city council representative, Darlene Mealy, had stopped giving Mo Better a slice of her discretionary funding two years ago. She used to give them around $5,000 yearly. Now she didn’t even meet with Chris in person. He had to make his pitch to one of her staffers.
He considered running for office himself, a dream he’d held for a few years now. Perhaps he’d run for Mealy’s city council seat. He’d already drawn up the plan in his head. He’d retire from coaching football, hand the program to Esau, and campaign on the name he’d built up over two decades of community service. Not yet, he said, but one day. He wasn’t ready to leave Mo Better, he said. For now, he was happy to work behind the scenes. He had Boozer give a short speech to the parents and players, then offered to escort her a few days later through Brownsville’s Old-Timer’s Day, an annual neighborhood reunion that drew former residents from across the country.
It was an overcast and breezy morning, and the Brownsville Recreation Center was already lively when Chris and Boozer got there. Police officers had shut down the surrounding streets so they could be used as parking lots and pedestrian walkways. Long lines snaked out from beneath tents selling fried fish, oxtail stew, jerk chicken, lemonade, and chicken wings. A large man in a white T-shirt and camo shorts pulled a rolling cooler, from which he sold potent cocktails called nutcrackers that left customers stumbling after two or three five-dollar bottles. Teens played basketball on three blacktops surrounded by families sitting on benches along the chain-link fence. Grown men in full baseball uniforms played slow-pitch softball on a turf field. Spectators filled the indoor gym to watch a basketball tournament. A DJ on a stage outside played soul music that reached every corner of the place.
Chris, in a purple Mo Better jacket and purple Mo Better sweatpants, brought a small entourage: a cousin, two nephews, and two brothers. One of those brothers, Ricky Legree
, was in town from San Diego, where he’d lived since college. He and Chris only got to see each other once or twice a year, and Chris was eager to catch his older brother up on the neighborhood happenings. “I’ma get her elected,” he whispered to Ricky, as Boozer stood at the center of a small crowd. “I think we got a winner here.”
He’d been introducing her to every face he recognized. “Oh, there’s somebody I want you to meet,” he’d say when the opening small talk reached a natural pause, giving Boozer the floor to make her pitch. She’d lived in Brownsville’s Langston Hughes Houses all her life—still lived there, in fact—and had gone to Boys and Girls High School in Bed-Stuy. She had attended Vassar College after that, then returned to Brownsville to do community work.
“You’re from the projects, and that gives us comfort,” an older man said. “Says a lot about the person that you are. That determination.”
“It seems like every person we elect into office lets us down, though,” a woman in the crowd said. “They turning corrupt and going to prison while we’re left here with their mess. What will it take for things to get better?”
“We’ve been burned too many times,” Boozer replied, before giving an answer about how she hoped to restore their faith in government. The seat she was running for was currently vacant: the last state assembly representative for District 55, William Boyland, had been convicted of bribery, extortion, and fraud.
“We don’t get nothing,” said a middle-aged man in the crowd. “Reason why, nobody ever comes through here. They don’t send resources here. But they know how to send the cops here.”
He said that police harassed his teenage sons nearly every day. Then he brought up Eric Garner, the 43-year-old man who had been killed by a police officer in Staten Island earlier that month. The officer had confronted Garner for selling cigarettes on the street, which was illegal. After a short argument, the officer jumped on Garner’s back and pulled him to the ground in a chokehold. Other officers joined in, pinning Garner down on the sidewalk. “I can’t breathe,” Garner said over and over, but the officer kept the grip around Garner’s neck even as his body went limp. A bystander captured the entire thing on video, and the incident sparked outrage nationwide. “What can be done about that?” the man said, his voice dripping with exasperation as he correctly predicted that the cop who choked Garner wouldn’t be convicted.
Chris listened with a stern face. He thought about his Mo Better boys. It made him uneasy to think about the frustrating reality that he was but a small cog in the machinery driving the world. He preferred to focus his thoughts on the operations within his domain. Brownsville, his neighborhood—the old star quarterback had no doubt he had a hand in shaping its future, even as its present seemed to be changing faster than he could keep up.
What he loved most about Old-Timer’s Day was all the reminiscing. As Chris, Boozer, and the entourage walked through the crowd, strangers and old acquaintances stopped him, hugged him, asked him how he’d been. He was warm and leaned toward them as they talked—about lost friends, about high school football championship runs, about stickball games in housing project courtyards. He wore a broad smile on his face and slapped them on the back, and a distant observer might have thought that he was the political candidate in the bunch.
CHRIS REMEMBERED THE pigeon keepers who housed their flocks in rickety rooftop coops and raced their birds against one another, taking bets. The kids who snuck up to those roofs and stole the birds to sell to pet stores. The adults who played cards on Friday nights while the children listened to their banter from another room. On nice days, somebody threw a fish fry and neighbors and relatives passed through the house until the food was gone, and then the people still awake gathered with beers on the stoop. When somebody expected to be short on next month’s rent, they threw a “waistline party”: cooking a feast and opening their door to guests who paid one cent for every inch in their waistline. The public housing experiment was young then, and the elevators and front doors worked fine.
Sports ruled the neighborhood in those days. They played stoopball—throwing a rubber ball against the steps outside the project building and running around a set of makeshift bases until somebody picked it up. They watched the high-dive shows at the Betsy Head pool, and some nights kids would sneak over the fence to swim. They played two-hand touch football in a cement yard filled with obstacles that they strategically ran around to avoid defenders—drainage pipes big enough to drive a car through and waist-high stone posts sticking up from the ground. When they got older, they organized football games against boys from other housing projects. The way Chris remembered it, “two or three thousand people” showed up at Betsy Head to watch the teens from the Brownsville towers play against the teens from Tilden. “We had more people at that game than the high schools do now,” he said.
Hours later, after Boozer had left and the clouds began to darken, Chris and Ricky ran into a friend from childhood, Don Blackman. In 1970, Blackman became the first black player to receive a basketball scholarship from Duke University. In the years prior, he played pickup games with Ricky. The men spoke about those games, how much talent was on those blacktops and how much talent never made it out.
“Don, I gotta question for you.”
“What’s that?”
“Why does Brownsville produce so many great athletes?”
Blackman contemplated for a few seconds, eyes locked on the horizon. Then he pointed at the skyline of red brick towers.
“See them tall buildings?” he said. “You take this many people, you put ’em in this small space and give ’em one ball, what kind of competitors you think you’re gonna get? Simple mathematics.”
Ricky nodded and grinned. He wondered if the neighborhood still produced the caliber of greatness he saw in his youth. And if it did, he wondered how much longer it would continue. In recent years, the neighborhood looked different each time he visited. He didn’t see the same tight-knit community where he’d grown up. He didn’t see as many kids in the parks and playgrounds. He didn’t see the fish fries on nice days. He believed that something special was being squeezed out of Brownsville. “I see a transition to yuppie-ville,” he said. “The white flight, like seasonal animals, they migrated. Now they migrating back. It’s cyclical.”
THE LOCALS SAW signs. A Subway and a Dunkin’ Donuts popped up next to a cash-checking joint. New murals sprouted on Pitkin. White people were creeping south through Bushwick and east across Crown Heights, pushing up against the Brownsville border. The city proposed a redevelopment zone in East New York to allow for construction of new residential buildings, right along Brownsville’s northeastern edge. Speculators scooped up the cheap land of east Brooklyn. In Ocean Hill, the small neighborhood to Brownsville’s north, 1 in 10 houses had been flipped within the previous two years, and some had sold for nearly one million dollars. In East New York, a property that had sold for $140,000 in November 2013 resold for $600,000 six months later. There was talk in the real-estate business that the wave of development and gentrification would soon reach Brownsville—Brooklyn’s “final frontier,” some called it. Affordable space was available just off the 3 train, only a few blocks deeper than Crown Heights.
The locals saw their property values rising. Speculators who had bought houses in Brownsville within the past year or two were, on average, reselling them for more than twice the purchase price. From 2000 to 2014, the neighborhood’s median rent jumped from $714 to $951, even as the median household income dropped from around $31,000 to $25,000. Over that stretch, the price of a monthly public transit pass in the city nearly doubled, from $63 to $112.
The locals knew what always followed the rising property values. They’d seen it in other Brooklyn neighborhoods over the past decade. Their friends and relatives experienced it firsthand. Longtime New Yorkers from around the city were familiar with this pattern. They’d seen it in the 1980s, as the migration to the suburbs reversed, when boutiques and chain stores wiped out the bohemian cu
lture in Greenwich Village, SoHo, and Tribeca; when affluent families replaced the working-class communities in Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights. “Those special landlords dedicated to rapacity are still throwing poor and elderly and disoriented people out of buildings because of the enormous profits to be wrung out of converting the structures into co-ops and other luxury housing,” a 1982 New York Times op-ed stated.
This wasn’t limited to New York, of course. People who once moved to the suburbs to settle down were now moving into big cities. In San Francisco; Washington, DC; Nashville; Saint Louis; Los Angeles; Atlanta; Philadelphia; Seattle; Chicago; and elsewhere, neighborhoods once rough and blighted were filling with people who had avoided them. Working-class and low-income people were now moving to the suburbs, not by choice but because that was where they could afford to live.
In Brooklyn, as elsewhere, landlords had much incentive to drive out longtime residents—offering cash buyouts in exchange for their departure, hiking rents after minimal structural improvements, making homes uncomfortable with early morning construction work, and failing to fix deteriorating facilities. Once the rent-controlled old-timers were flushed out, the money flowed in. In Fort Greene and Brooklyn Heights, the median rent price rose by 58 percent from 2000 to 2012. In Williamsburg and Greenpoint, rents rose by 76 percent over that stretch, and the number of households making more than $100,000 a year more than doubled. In central Harlem, median rent increased by 90 percent. The consequence was a cascade of displacement. People who used to live in Park Slope or Williamsburg were moving to Bed-Stuy or Crown Heights or Flatbush, and people who lived in Bed-Stuy or Crown Heights or Flatbush were moving to Brownsville or East New York or the Bronx or leaving the city—over the past decade, the black population had dropped by 2 percent across New York City, including in Harlem, Bed-Stuy, and Brooklyn as a whole.
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