Beyond the Pansy Patch
In the future shadow of the Nets, a Brooklyn nabe remembers what's at stake
My nameless neighborhood—the blocks above and around Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue and PacificStreet subway station—has suddenly become hot property. Developer Bruce Ratner wants to build a small town, including an arena for the Nets, on top of the one that's already here. ("We have to get over the Dodgers," he's remarked.)
A lively network of residents has organized to oppose Ratner's vision; their first problem is explaining what's at stake. We're steps away from Prospect Heights and Fort Greene and Park Slope and Boerum Hill, areas that conjure images of the best of brownstone living, but we're not really part of them. Many people seem surprised that anybody here sees something worth saving.
Our house is on Dean Street between Third and Fourth avenues, just shy of Ratner's footprint. The block was an infamous prostitution market as recently as 10 years ago, but in the years after Stonewall and Vietnam and before AIDS and gentrification, it was also an oasis of gay rooming houses and communes. It even had a name.
spirit of the place. He lived on the first floor in the front and was generous to a fault, inviting in whoever he saw passing by. "There were always 10 people in the kitchen," remembers Audrey, a painter and occasional resident. In her Park Slope studio she keeps photographs of our backyard crowded with people and heaping platters of food; a few of the portraits on her walls were painted here.
Carl was more of an innovator than a renovator. He built leaded windows out of salvaged stained glass, an interior wall out of windowpanes, and a greenhouse from scraps. He found his furniture and decor in the street, an aesthetic still prevalent on the block, and he treasured a scrapbook left by a woman from Alabama who had lived here as a roomer decades before. He died of AIDS in 1991, before any practical treatment was available, and in his last years he became a prisoner of his own tenants. Tom and Ann, the renovators who bought the place from Carl's estate, took possession of the still-occupied house and kept their door padlocked from whichever side of it they were on. When the last of Carl's men moved, they shoveled out a deep carpet of used needles from his room. My son sleeps there now. When I carry him to the changing table, I hear the echo of the works crunching underfoot.
Tom and Ann restored the plaster walls, peeled up layers of piss-soaked linoleum, and erased subdivisional partition walls. They lived here with their own extended family, just as the first residents must have. We paid a price well above the cost of their labor, a price many here thought was astronomical, and hence proved Bruce Ratner's point: This neighborhood has arrived.
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