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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. […] I’m back. And so is this column. I stopped writing and publishing it in June 2003, when the last “Island Living” column appeared in print in the North Shore Star Reporter, a local giveaway paper here on Staten Island that accepted some editorial content, my column included. In the paper’s February 5, 2003 issue my […] 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 […] 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, […] When we speak of the emerging global culture, a term that pops up frequently is pluralism. What exactly do we mean by it? Years ago, in any of the boroughs of New York City, when you told a friend that you knew “a nice little ethnic restaurant” in the neighborhood, the term stood for a […] (In last month’s column, I spoke about a large photography show I’d curated almost two decades ago, in 1980, for the Newhouse Gallery at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center; titled “Silver Sensibilities,” it included work by Roy DeCarava, Allen A. Dutton, Richard Kirstel, Michael Martone, and Julio Mitchel. One Islander raised objections to the show’s […] The malignant, lingering spectre of Puritanism stalks the land today, rattling its chains everywhere from the Senate floor to our exhibition spaces for contemporary art. Contemplating this revenant has reminded me of my own encounter with it here on Staten Island, back in the fall of 1980. The Island’s indefatigable champion of the arts, Dan […] |