When I was four years old, my parents moved with my sister and I from the gentrified neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn NY, to a section of the Flatbush district currently undergoing a similar process of gentrification. We left a coop apartment building on Carroll Street to a Brownstone type house on a block that is zoned for single families only.
Coming from a white middle class family with the means to purchase a house in your neighborhood separated me from the black children who were my peers in the neighborhood, as well as the black adults who lived there. Being situated on a strictly zoned block of single family houses meant that I would have to leave the block to find kids my age to hang with.
I experienced this separateness strongly, and I didn't spend too much energy with people outside the block. The block itself was pretty inaccessable to a creative kid. It was full of much older adults whose children had moved on, and shapes and shades of families that I had no common language to relate to. My parents house became a fortress where I hunkered down to feed and sleep, and a trek through what was to me a strange neighborhood to the subway station into manhattan became my way to meet people and experience the world.
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Now my neighborhood has been steeping in gentrification for two decades. The small privately run pre-kindergarten my parents' peers sent their kids to has a nice well-maintained facility. The police presence is in full force with beat cops hanging around flatbush avenue at most hours. A few coffee shops and restaurant bars are the fruit of a more stable economy, based on higher-income earning residents and similarly wealthy people attracted from elsewhere. The dissonance of people belonging to a white gentrifying class passing through the black and caribbean atmosphere of Flatbush Ave and the connecting blocks is a daily common occurance.
That same dissonance was my everyday presentation to the world outside my block and outside the train station, and my burden to carry and work with. At times I would get exhausted it took so much out of me to simply leave the house, and I would stay inside, shivering for lack of sunlight and hunger for fresh experience and the company of other people. I was very alienated from the world around me. My childhood home was as much a prison as it was a sanctuary.
When I return to Brooklyn in my mind or in person, this separateness that is my legacy is so sad to me. Black and white, street and single-family dwelling, gentrifying class and working class, there are separate worlds and frustrations that were not shared openly. As a child I had the chance to bridge that gap. What is my role today?
