My dad is Puerto Rican my mom Italian/Peruvian. When I was a kid, I lived on 12^th St. and Avenue D in the Jacob Reiss project building. We would cross over 14^th St and go into Stuyvesant Town. And I remember for me it was kind of an emergent class-consciousness experience. The lawns were so well manicured.  They had lawns! We didn’t have any lawns! We just played in bushes around our buildings. Everything was cleaner. I remember thinking, “Oh wow!” I don’t recall that we were ever run out of there, maybe sometimes we were… But we didn’t give a shit!

When I was a kid there was only Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. When the Lower East Side became fashionable and investable.  It became know as the East Village so that people could sell it to the better-healed people. In the ‘50s and ‘60’s it was just the Lower East Side. It was really very diverse: Puerto Ricans, Italians, Jews, Irish Catholics. Loisaida was a cultural name derived from the Puerto Rican cultural community, Bimbo Rivas, Miguel Calderin. It was Bimbo Rivas who was attributed to the name in the poem that he wrote, Loisaida.

Redlining is something that people don’t see. After 1968, he banks didn’t draw red lines around areas that said “no loans here”. People don’t see money being sucked out of the neighborhood and the individual owner denied financing. It’s not just the bank disinvestment. That’s one form of redlining, but maybe the process of disinvestment signals all the rest. You can document the decreased sanitation pick-up, the fire boxes being pulled out of the so you can’t get the fireman there; the drugs – it’s a sign that people in this neighborhood are expendable, displaceable. After the neighborhood goes down it reaches a certain tipping point when it investments come in again. Maybe some well-known developer picks up a piece of real estate up on 6^th St. and Avenue C. That is a sign to other developers that it is okay to start buying property again. City government also takes a role. Suddenly sidewalks are repaired, sanitation is picked up and the local heroin dealer is run out.

Everything starts to go up.       

This cyclical process triggers all sorts of contradictions between people. Storeowners get more customers at the same time rent start to increase and old stores are displaced and the bodegas are gone. People had squats where they took over abandoned buildings. I am an activist and Episcopal priest.  There were churches across from vacant lots that wanted to buy some of the abandoned buildings and fix them up. The city wouldn’t let them because they didn’t have economic or political standing – they weren’t the right kind of business entity that would develop and increase gentrification and displacement of poor people. Displacement and physical dispersal of poor and working class people is one of the primary ways that civil disorder in the 1960’s was quelled. People were dispersed so there was no critical mass to protest or share stories.