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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownstone |
As soon as I moved into a cheaper, smaller fourth floor walk-up in the 'hood, I knew it was trouble. Like my mom's typical "old lady" development, I could feel people tensely watching me behind their paranoid peepholes. It was also unnaturally quiet in the middle of the day for a New York townhome with multiple family dwellings, because gentrification has its own set of difficulties for native New Yorkers like me to contend with. Where were the laughing kids playing in the hallways, or the savory smells of homemade food that's always on the stove? Pampered white people bring economic stability with them, but with a serious fee that's often too steep an emotional price for us to pay for them, because they fucking hate actual hardcore urban living.
I can somewhat understand it. After returning home from out west, an old workplace "frenemy" of mine from back in the day took a picture of me with a rare shocked look on my face, as I took in the midtown skyscraper landscape anew with fresh eyes. This ain't like back there. What's even weirder for people like me is that after I get into the groove, I rock this town like I was born to it, which I am. That shocks a lot of people, especially out-of-towners who think they know what city living is all about. No, you don't. Unless you helped build and power this town like me and my crew for several generations, you don't have that kind of claim to this land, and that is actual soil underneath all this new concrete, "homey".
Same thing with rich white folk who've been transplanted here by their corporate firms from afar. I think they think we can't tell how stressed out they really are, because they think it's "uncool" to show the toll that this town takes on everyone, but their bulging wide eyes give it away every time. You feel it right away, too, just like every time I visited my mom's old person's development: I knew every set of retired, bifocal eyes took a look (or two) at me from underneath their old-fashioned lace curtains, as I walked it back and forth from her apartment to the parking lot (waiting to mess with me in that extremely hyper-tense way that older city people have), like the kind of curtains that Irish ladies who take tea at the exact same time every single afternoon (because they HAVE TO conform to some kind of a ritual, wink wink), ones that they put up as soon as possible to maintain that strict sense of privacy they feel entitled to in the plush suburbs.
Not so in the city. We live on top of one another atop some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. To me, it's a mostly happy communal lifestyle, but for those poor unfortunate people from wherever the fuck they come from, it's too much scrutiny for them to take. These are the type of people who lie for a living, and the kind of accountability that comes with close living is something they don't know how to process very well. As much as I will always love "Brownstone Brooklyn" (always, peeps, always), I also hated the tense, jittery prosperity that drives out people like us for cheaper points north periodically, though that's part of our lifestyle, too.
It's like you can feel their nervous juggling acts through the very walls that have absorbed the small vicious fights they try to have quietly so the neighbors can't hear, unlike the raucous drunk Micks who've inhabited these types of low income buildings for years. I don't like either type of dysfunction (the rich kind nor the drunk kind), but at least some drunk fuck is an easy mark for us natives: just add booze, and start the countdown to crazy. Easy to beat. Weirdo neighbors from other countries took to fantasizing about my "downfall" like the easy target of New York wealth and privilege they wanted me to be, or so they mistakenly thought.
The problem was (is), it took (takes) years to "push out" someone like me, because that doesn't actually happen unless I want it to, and they didn't (don't) control it; other savvier, harder, native New Yorkers had (have) to artificially rig it through a crooked homegrown system, and by the time it did (does) happen, my ousting had (has) lost all the luster that they used to spark with, over glasses of cheap white wine and overly shiny eyeballs that I never want to neighbor with. Not once. Because this native girl grew up with tea, tenseness, and mental patient standoffs like it was part of her landscape. "Sick house" or not, in our fair city of Gotham or out in the countryside, it just doesn't matter, Micks. I know it when I feel it. Don't you?
