Don't worry Katie

I ima­gine that some, but prob­ably not all, of you out there may have got­ten some amuse­ment today from a Slate piece by the ever-reliable Katie Roiphe, ridicu­lously head­lined “The 99 Percent Take Over Brooklyn,” or from the sub­sequent Gawker mock­ery of said piece, more amus­ingly hed­ded “Katie Roiphe Saw A Fight.” Roiphe’s piece is a rather breath­less account of a street alter­ca­tion between appar­ently mostly youths of African-American ori­gin, fol­lowed by Very Serious rumin­a­tions on what this all means. The piece is largely not­able, as is usu­al for Roiphe, by the mages­teri­al con­tempt it expresses for people who are pretty much exactly like Roiphe, only they don’t write for Slate, unlucky them. But I write this piece not to offer mock­ery (much), but rather, an explan­a­tion and per­haps some consolation.

In the piece Roiphe describes “her” Brooklyn neigh­bor­hood as one lined with side streets that con­tain “cof­fee shops that sell $4.50 iced lattes made from some­thing called ‘Intelligentsia cof­fee.’ ” The Gawker piece mocks Roiphe for using scare quotes around the phrase about the cof­fee, but in fact Intelligentsia Coffee is more than a hoity toity concept, it’s an actu­al brand, as you may see by click­ing the link, and I’ve passed by the joint where they sell those lattes. As it hap­pens, Roiphe is describ­ing what is also MY neigh­bor­hood, how do you like that? And she’s RIGHT, there has been a bit of an uptick in bois­ter­ous activ­ity among the minor­ity youth in that vicin­ity. And she has a THEORY about why.

“There are no mes­sages. There are no demands. There are no signs made out of pizza boxes. But there is some­thing about our unten­able situ­ation nev­er­the­less mak­ing itself known.”

Ah, Katie, dearest, I wish I could tell you that your pretty, soul-filled words tell some hard-won truth, but I’m afraid it’s just not so. Here’s what’s going on: around May of this year, just as school had ended, the MTA shut down—didn’t just stag­ger ser­vice at, did­n’t just sched­ule reduced hours for—actually shut down the Smith and 9^th Street sta­tion ser­viced by the F and G sub­way lines. I remem­ber when it was about to hap­pen, and my wife and I were mak­ing small talk at the check­out of a loc­al deli, and the own­er was mut­ter­ing unpleas­ant implic­a­tions about what was gonna hap­pen once “those kids” (and we had abolutely no doubt as to what he meant with that phrase) would be empty­ing out of/getting on the sub­way at the Carroll Street sta­tion (an entrance to which is seen in the above photo, that I took all by myself) instead of the place where they ought. “[Name redac­ted] is such a nice man, but that’s kind of a racist thing to say,” my wife said as we walked home. “Well, maybe it’s not so much racist and more that he under­stands how large groups of young kids tend to act,” I shrugged. “And any­way, haven’t you seen Do The Right Thing?” 

The thing is, the deli guy was­n’t pre­cisely wrong. Right now there are grubby, nasty kids—of all races, really, I hasten to add like a good liberal—clotting up the streets in the after­noons in the ways they gen­er­ally did not in this neigh­bor­hood ever since the school year ended. Quite a few of them are what any num­ber of char­ac­ters played by Eugene Levy on SCTV 90 would call “hood­lums.” They don’t give me much trouble, because I’m so AWESOME and I RELATE to them, no, actu­ally because I’m tall, but they are pretty damn annoy­ing and they do make nuis­ances out of them­selves in/on any giv­en retail out­let or street corner they opt to blight. They do not, from what I can glean, them­selves have much con­cern with “our unten­able situ­ation.” They seem more con­cerned with act­ing as if they’re audi­tion­ing for a black­board jungle iter­a­tion of Jersey Shore, I’d say. But I ima­gine that’s just my own social pre­ju­dice talk­ing. And if I find them annoy­ing, just ima­gine how freaked out the res­id­ents of 320 Smith, the apart­ment mon­stros­ity we tried to keep off my block (also seen in the above photo that I took all by myself) must be. Given that they’re all more or less liv­ing here under protest (the rest of the neigh­bor­hood’s, not theirs) (no really—when I’m out some­times in the morn­ing I swear I see most of the people who live there com­ing out with their hands over their faces like they’re doing a perp walk or some­thing), and now they’ve gotta put up with these yo-yos loiter­ing in what is essen­tially the front of their home, the situ­ation must be mak­ing some of ’em won­der how they can get whatever ridicu­lous money they’ve spent back. 

Me? I’ve been in Carroll Gardens since 1989, and I seen a lot of changes. I remem­ber when on July 4^th week­end you could­n’t even walk ONTO, let alone UP Second Place for the lit­er­al blankets of fire­crack­ers they star­ted light­ing up a full 48 hours before the hol­i­day actu­ally landed. Sounded like you were in Beirut, like they used to say. Almost scared my poor little kitty to death. Recently one of the loc­al good, um, fel­lows, looked me up and down on the street and said, “You! You used to be one of the new guys. Now you been around so long, you’re one of the old guys!” “Uh, yeah,” I said. “Thank you. And thank you for, you know, not break­ing my legs that one time.” So all I know is that this, too, shall pass. Eventually, Katie, they’ll be fin­ished restor­ing or recon­struct­ing the Culver via­duct, or whatever the hell it is they’re work­ing on, the Smith and 9^th Street sta­tion will reopen, and for a lot of kids in an unten­able situ­ation their days of goof­ing off and screw­ing around in Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill will be over. Of course, I sup­pose had you giv­en the mat­ter a little thought, you might have been able to suss that out your­self, but then you would have been out one dopey Slate art­icle and the no-doubt juicy fee you got for it. 

I am reminded of a story told me by an old friend, a journ­al­ist and itin­er­ant musi­cian who once played in a band fron­ted by Lucy Simon, Carly’s older sis­ter. One day after rehears­al (I gath­er this was some time in the 1970s), my friend was tak­ing off, and he and Lucy were walk­ing togeth­er. She asked him what he was going to do, and he said he was gonna grab the sub­way and go to X and meet a friend for some­thing to eat, and Lucy said, “Oh, you’re tak­ing the sub­way?” and he said, “Yes,” and why do you ask, and appar­ently Lucy got kind of sheep­ish and asked him if he had a sub­way token on him. He respon­ded in the affirm­at­ive, and she got fur­therly sheep­ish and asked him if she could see it. He assen­ted, and she admit­ted that she had, in fact, nev­er laid eyes on one before.