what’s an “improvement”?

by jackie sheeler on August 8, 2006

i bet everybody living in this neighborhood for more than a year or so remembers this gorgeous wall. it was on the side of a building on 116th Street between 8th & St. Nick. next to the building was an empty lot. sure, there were some rats there, and some junk, but there are rats and junk around here all the time anyway.

i miss this wall. i miss this art. it’s gone now, the lot replaced with yet another high-end luxury housing development. even if they took that cookie-cutter building down, no doubt the artwall has been destroyed.

i remember in the 70’s, waiting for the elevated train in brooklyn, how breathtaking it was when a newly-graffitied B-train would round the curve toward 25th avenue. i didn’t like it when they painted over the windows, but the best of the artists didn’t do that, they incorporated the windows into their designs. since i was just a couple of stops from coney island, where most of the graffiti-ing happened in the trainyards there, i got to see a lot of it. they couldn’t just pull a rush-hour train off schedule because it got painted. i remember one morning in particular, the ugly old train was stunning, painted all turquoise blue (not over the windows) by an artist who tagged himself Skye. it was one of the most amazing things i’ve ever seen. then the city got serious about “protecting” itself from art, and set attack dogs loose in the yards, and let artists get electrocuted by leaving usually dead third rails on high current overnight. they won the battle, but they lost the war. is anything more ugly than a subway train in NYC? recorded (white voice) announcements and all? GIMME BACK SKYE!

(just looking at what i wrote. people were being killed in NYC for creating public art. murdered.)

and give me back that beautiful wall on 116th street. i’ll take it, even with the rats and crackheads and junk that sometimes filled its empty lot to the brim. that wall was breathtaking, and it spoke about peace, and love, and solidarity. what’ve we got now? more housing for the millionaires.

last laugh may belong to the neighborhood. new high-income housing and storefronts are going up ALL OVER southwest harlem. many of them have stood empty for months now, like the refurbished buildling on the corner of my block. it’s nice they cleaned it up, and sent the drug dealers who masqueraded as hairdressers off to jail or somewhere, but the fact is that the store has been ready for occupancy for quite some time and there are no takers. that’s the story up and down 8th avenue, up and down 116th street, surely up and down other neighborhood blocks that i don’t walk very often.

any of those developers reading the financial presses these days? the crash is coming, and it’s gonna crash HARD. and the low-income people in their section 8’s and rent-stabilized apartments won’t feel it at all. but these developers? they’re going down in flames.

but they’ve already taken away some of our magnificent art, though.

fuckers.