She looked at the residents around her and saw mostly older men and women. Some beamed and nodded as the mayor spoke; others frowned, their arms crossed. There was also one young man. He was tall and wiry, thin wrists poking from the sleeves of his hoodie like scarecrow sticks. After a number of other speakers, the officials handed this young man the microphone.
“Good morning. I’m Tyrell Scott,” he said calmly. “I was born and raised in Brownsville Houses. If you’re here today, you should really see firsthand the conditions folks are living in, so I’m taking agroup through 289. We have some residents kind enough to let us in their apartments, and you can also meet members of BYTE—that’s Brownsville Youth for Truth and Excellence, my 501(c)(3).”
Sadie jotted down the acronym, impressed. Perhaps she could do a profile on BYTE later in the fall.
She joined the tour through Brownsville Houses. As Tyrell pointed out the broken elevators, the peeling paint on the walls, and the window cracks, the mayor shook his head and complained of the prior administration’s neglect. Sadie tried her very best to focus on getting good quotes from the mayor, but she was distracted by Tyrell. He slapped the hands of every kid in the hallway, remarked on how BYTE was breaking the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and helped an elder tie her laces. At the end of the tour, Sadie approached him, and he smiled warmly and shook her hand as if they’d known each other for years. She asked for his card, and since he didn’t have one, he typed his cell number into her phone. She stared at it on the train ride home, aware her giddiness was inappropriate.
That night, she stayed up late writing the article, and Wendy had it posted by six a.m. the next morning. Immediately, Sadie sent it to Uncle Johnny. Maybe within a few years, the neighborhood would finally begin to flourish, and people like her uncle would change their tune.
She was proud of the piece and inspired—at least until the comment section blew up.
DoTePeters1953:This reporter just copied and pasted the mayor’s press release. There’s no quotes from residents. I don’t think she actually knows anyone in this neighborhood.
EsmeraldaFrancois-Conrad:NEW GOTHAM THINKS IT CAN COLONIZE OUR NEIGHBORHOOD LIKE JUST ANOTHER THIRD WORLD COUNTRY BUT THE TRUTH IS BROWNSVILLE HAS HISTORY, THERE ARE CONTEXTS TO EVERY ONE OF THESEINITIATIVES AND PROGRAMS THE REPORTER MENTIONS, ITS NOT LIKE THE MAYOR JUST THOUGHT OF ALL THESE THINGS BY HISSONERS SELF.
TyScott1ply:How does Broken Windows Policing fit into the larger plan? That’s a follow-up question for the mayor.
TrevorGMWBE:“After years of total neglect, Brownsville may now see some light”—Am I the only one who finds this phrasing racist?
Melissa P:By “light,” does she mean white folk?
LinaRodriguezArmstrong44:Please ask the mayor about exact timeline & budget allocations for each initiative, especially the development of vacant land on Livonia Ave. We’re not interested in empty promises.
THE WONGS
Richard didn’t know anything about Robert Moses. Even on his deathbed, Richard would never realize how much he owed to Robert Moses, the extent to which he was, in some way, a child of Robert Moses.
Born in 1888. Son of the famed philanthropist Bella Moses. Raised in affluence on the East Side. At Oxford, Moses wrote a thesis on the superiority of the English Civil Service, which relied on tests of merit instead of graft, bribery, or religious kinship—though in a footnote he added that naturalized Orientals from the British Raj were to be excluded:Can the state repair the defects of heredity or of early education?
Upon returning, and through a series of appointments that catapulted him to the highest offices in the city’s bureaucracy, Moses became the most powerful man in the world’s most powerful city. When Richard was a child, Moses buried the ash dumps in Queens with sod and seed to make Flushing Meadows Park. He paved over Manhattan’s rail tracks so cars could glide along the Hudson. He ordered two hundred humongous trees from Long Island nurseries, had them trucked to Bryant Park and swung into position overnight. He stood up to the robber barons of Long Island, running highways through those tycoons’ estates, building Bethpage State Park and Belmont Lake State Park and Heckscher State Park. He createdbeaches out of swampy marshland and erected convention centers, performance halls, and science centers.
In 1936, Robert Moses selected Brownsville for pool renovations sponsored by Roosevelt’s Work Progress Administration, and, once the city had completed its improvements, he came to direct the opening ceremony. Hundreds of families gathered in Betsy Head Park that special night. They crowded onto the bleacher stands and on all four sides of the enormous white tarp. A city worker yanked back the tarp, revealing the transformation of their small stone pool into an Olympic-class facility as wide as the block was long. Green, pink, and blue beams of light rippled through the water, eliciting gasps from the crowd. Alderman Hart proclaimed the rebirth of the neighborhood, and a rabbi and a preacher performed blessings, reflections of the water warbling on their robes.
Then came the commissioner himself, a man like a towering monument, glowing in his white suit, stepping forward as the people chanted “Moses! Moses!” After a few remarks, he handed the shears to Mayor La Guardia.
And then the eruption! Scissors slicing through ribbons, fireworks exploding above the pavilion. The Thomas Jefferson High School band played “You’re a Grand Old Flag” while Brooklyn College’s swim team dove into the water. Most of Moses’s opening ceremonies were elaborate, but the ones for the pools especially so. Moses liked to swim, and he saw himself in the young men who arrived at the ceremony in their suits, eager for the first lap.
Richard had grown up near the bay, but he’d never learned to swim. At the Betsy Head Park pool, he watched how the other boys kicked their feet, and he imitated them, but he was afraid to let go of the pool’s rim or to leave the shallow end. Eventually, he fought through his fear and let himself float; he learned to bear the sting in his nose and the chill in his limbs. By September, he could make it across the sixteen-foot deep end.
From then on, he went to the pool every summer, especially for the free hour at ten o’clock, whether his father needed him at the restaurant or not, so that one day he would become the neighborhood’s fastest swimmer. He kept to himself, for the older he grew, the more he tired of the way his friends teased him.
Below the water, Richard sometimes saw the ancestors clustered near the drains: toothless A Bak with lumps under her eyelids and frowning Bak Geng, whose long beard hung like a dog tail from his chin. They urged him to return home and help his father with the mopping. “You’re not allowed here!” he’d shout at them. Whenever they made a reach for his legs, he kicked them away.
He was thirteen when a young Jewish lifeguard with a bushel of curly hair squatted at the pool’s edge and offered to time Richard on his watch.
“Two minutes and thirty-nine seconds. Not bad,” the teenager said when Richard returned, gasping for breath. “You ever play baseball?”
Richard shrugged.
“I’ll teach you. Come find me at Nanny Goat Park tomorrow afternoon. Christopher Avenue.”
The young Jew, Alan Friedman, was the cofounder of a new group called the Brownsville Boys Club, an organization created by and for the boys of the neighborhood, without any adult interference. Alan and his friends had gathered boys from every warring block and united them with the mission of securing better facilities to play ball. They’d succeeded in winning meeting space at the Brownsville Children’s Library and even persuaded the board of education to reopen the P.S. 184 gyms.
They needed hardworking players on their baseball and basketball teams.
“Each member pays a penny to be in the club. Don’t matter your religion, don’t matter your nation of origin,” Alan told Richard at Nanny Goat Park. “We follow a strict code: no stealing, no gang fights, no slurs. Those are the club’s rules that we voted on ourselves—we’rea democracy, we make our own decisions, just like the American forefathers wrote in the Constitution. A Brownsville democracy. You want to be a member?”
Richard said he did. From then on, he attended the practices every afternoon. He learned how to hold a bat, how to throw a blackball, and how to dunk on a basketball court. Koon Lai, resigned to his son’s lack of studiousness, felt it was better than him aimlessly roaming the streets.
