I recently had an experience that gave me a taste of what “street life” actually means and, simultaneously, insight to the underlying network of my neighborhood.
Basically my bike was stolen yesterday by a well-known neighborhood crack cocaine addict with help in the form of clippers provided by his friends, my crack head neighbors.
My building super. walked with me to the police station to file a report (which everyone seemed to think was silly, but I had to do my civic duty and also find a small way to quash some of the anger I was feeling). Along the way conversation about the thief gave rise to conversation about the neighborhood. He told me about the different people in our building and on our block and slowly I realized that I wasn’t merely a lone college student living among various nuclear families, I was an outsider living amidst one extended family – in the sense that they had all grown up on the block and knew each other for years and years.
John (my super) has a loving family with the woman who lives in 1B, he watches out for sweet Jarmela who lives in 1A , with her baby girl and her husband whose friends are gang members, and in 2A a single mother and her pretty 17 year old daughter fight. The mother is stressed out because of an ACS case that was opened after Destiny got in trouble for selling drugs (everything from marijuana to pills – John says it was because she was the only girl, surrounded by boy cousins getting into trouble).
John pointed out that he grew up at the end of our block, and never wanted to leave for good. He is lucky not to have experienced root shock. Instead his childhood neighborhood (I live right next to Newkirk Plaza) is experiencing a slow gentrifying change. Change that he and Jarmela and people like them – people that hope to see the neighborhood they’ve loved and lost in get safer – welcome. Change that the 40 year-old drug addicts and criminals, still smoking and drinking and fighting like teenagers on the stoop next to my building don’t welcome. They have their own network, and they know that a new system wouldn’t want them, and that they probably couldn’t thrive in it anyway, so set in their ways. John has known the guy who stole my bike for a while, he used to run around with the same crowd (but after spending 2 years flat in jail he completely reformed himself). He said when he returned home, after my bike was stolen, the guy had come back and was hanging out with my neighbors again. John got into a fight with him, asking him to bring it back. The guy kept insisting that John was “his boy” and why did he care about my bike. It seemed kind of a sad picture to me – two people that grew up in the same neighborhood but are now pitted against each other as the neighborhood moves towards a new future.
I don’t come from a city, with close – knit neighborhoods and I changed schools a couple of times from elementary to high-school, so I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of seeing childhood playmates, friends, enemies, and neighborhood notorieties grow up. One of the things Fullilove talks about in CH.8 of Root Shock is her successful attempt to get the residents of Pittsburgh’s “Hill” neighborhood to examine their lives, the waytheir lives intersect with their neighborhood, what needs to change, and most importantly, recognizing the good in their homes: recalling memories attached to places, examining beneficial networks that arose in the community, etc. And something I got from John in waves was true, deep love for his community (because of the good and the bad) combined with a desire for change, a desire to see the bad elements excised and his children play on the streets without being drawn to drugs or crime.
Does anyone have any particular or peculiar insight about the networks (any networks: familial relationships, economic relationships, drug relationships, etc.) that exist in your neighborhood?
