Nearby Café Home > Food and Travel > Island Living
|
Getting people to come to this particular part of Stapleton will take some doing. Specifically, it will take transformation of Stapleton Houses, and control or elimination of the thug-life element that rules there: Bloods, Crips, and the lunacy related thereto. What happens when gentrification meets gangsta? That’s the question no one talks about in discussing the revitalization of this area. At some point we’ll have to put it on the table; it’s the elephant in the room. […] The future of this bedroom community depends on new residential blood, which in turn will encourage and support new retail and commercial enterprises, so we pray for cinderblock, a sure mark of solid buildings that will go beyond the standard townhouse model — nowadays made mostly of 2x4s, plywood, sheetrock, styrofoam insulation, and aluminum siding — of which we have no shortage. […] Now that I’ve come back home, I have to get with the program. When people here ask what other languages I speak, I understand that according to the new social policy here in the States the politically correct answer is not French but Freedom. And that, along those same lines, when I dress up to take my girlfriend out this weekend to celebrate my return, I’ll put on a shirt with Freedom cuffs, while she’ll don some sexy Freedom lingerie and splash on a little fancy Freedom cologne. […] In the night, with the front bathed in the glare of lights from the fire truck, I watched the last remaining firefighters finish their scrutiny of the wrecked interior. The building has now been evacuated, and will probably have to come down. If it does, it will be the first of all the buildings in which I’ve ever lived — in three of the boroughs of New York, on Martha’s Vineyard, in San Francisco, and in Golfe-Juan, France — to vanish. […] My prediction: Watch Dubya and Co. try to use this unexpected advantage to pack every court, from the Supreme Court on down, with arch-conservatives whose benighted rulings will haunt this country for a century and more. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when your train gets lost. […] Just days after the destruction of the World Trade Center, our pundits and politicians starting talking about “finding closure” and telling us to “get back to normal.” Reminds me, oddly, of a cartoon (probably from the New Yorker) I saw in the late 1950s. Somewhere by the road in a desert, an Arab has unrolled […] When the final count becomes known, however, Staten Island may well take a disproportionate hit in the injuries and fatalities department, since many Islanders work in the Wall St. area (all those Working Girl secretaries, among so many others), and many more of them are police and firefighters and EMS personnel. […] Rudy Giuliani's official portrait Face it: even for his staunchest supporters, Rudy Giuliani’s unstable behavior over the past two years has become increasingly embarrassing. Let’s leave aside his doctrinal, knee-jerk support for any behavior toward citizens of color by any New York City policeman, no matter how lethal, excessive, or otherwise irresponsible. Let’s ignore […] Once again I’m coming back from Europe — this time from a stint in Swizerland and Austria, on a flight from Paris to Newark, finding myself seated, improbably, next to two other Staten Islanders, Cristina and her mother Alida, from Tottenville, who appear to have survived three and half weeks of up-close-and-personal mother-daugher and extended-family […] My house stands on Van Duzer Street between Targee Street and Court Street. From the desk where I’m writing this, I can look along Van Duzer toward its intersection with Court Street on the right and Smith Terrace on the left. Van Duzer bends sharply to the left just as those two streets join it, […] |