This project started as a look at gentrification in East Harlem and upper Yorkville, where I grew up from age 10 – 18. Gentrification is “the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces earlier usually poorer residents,” according to the dictionary definition1.
As the project developed, I discovered that the stories of people I knew from the neighborhood and those I met in the present were far more varied and told a much more complex story than the one I first conceived.
Introduction
From 1966-68 Bruce Davidson photographed East 100th Street in East Harlem.
East 100th Street between First and Second Avenues had been called “the worst street in America,” and Davidson gained access and succeeded as prior photographers had not.
If ever a neighborhood called for renewal and rebuilding this one did. It was just such a concern that led the Reverend Norman Eddy and others to organize groups like the Metro North Community.
Also, in 1968 George Calvert helped found Hope Community with the objective of renovating deteriorating housing stock as affordable housing for local residents. According to his son Peter, when his teaching salary was increased above a pre-defined poverty level after a teachers’ strike, he and his family were forced to leave their apartment in the George Washington Houses. Should some modest financial success mean local residents must leave, he wondered.
After leaving the George Washington Houses, Calvert renovated a burned out building to house the church of the Living Hope with an apartment for his family above. The Church of the Living Hope was founded by a number of people, including George and Buffy (Peter’s mother) Calvert, starting in their living room in the projects at Third Avenue and 102nd Street before outgrowing that space and moving to 104th Street. Peter explained, “we lived on the 4th floor of the gut rehab building, Ramon (Ray) Rodriquez, Emilio Graciano, and Mercedes Otiz, and her sister Quintina Ortiz, (who was a seamstress in clothing factories downtown and the Treasurer of the Church for decades until she died in the late 1990’s and for whom a one bedroom apartment was built on the Third Floor,) – there was also a one room and bath studio apartment on the third floor next to Quintina Ortiz that the Church Pianist, Jim Schaefer, rented for many years before he got married and moved to Queens in the 1980’s.”
When he went into the street one evening to stop a fight between two men, George Calvert invited them upstairs to discuss their dispute. When they saw the apartment, according to family lore, they were so impressed and surprised that they said if they had such nice apartments in the neighborhood, they wouldn’t be fighting in the street. This was the spark of inspiration for the Hope Community.
In miniature, we see here the tensions within gentrification. On the one hand, the neighborhood needs improvement. Improvement requires capital. It also usually means, for an apartment building to be renovated, the current residents must move out while the renovations are undertaken. If the project is publicly or charitably funded, it’s possible to ensure the return of the tenants to their former, newly improved home. If it’s privately funded, what stops developers from seeking the highest rents, preventing the return of the prior occupants? If the former residents of the neighborhood are forced out so it can be “improved,” who decides what “improved” means?
In 1967, when I was 10, my family moved to a modern, private apartment on East 96th Street in Manhattan.
Living a scant 4 streets away, I was wholly unaware of what Davidson was seeing and photographing on East 100th Street. I attended Public School 198 and graduated from 6th grade (age 11) in 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F Kennedy were assassinated.
Four of my classmates collaborated with me to review the changes in the neighborhood.
- The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition [emphasis added] ↩︎