106th Street and Amsterdam

Albanian Invasion

The first one to arrive was Marco. He came alone and we had no idea that others would follow. We being the tenants of my building; Marco was our new super.

He was not warmly welcomed. Our landlords had tried to make our old super Jerry the fall guy for all of the mismanagement we had endured--mismanagement is an understatement: negligence is closer. Severe negligence. Negligence that eventually resulted in the death of my neighbor Gene, an older man from Texas who had lived alone on the 5th floor.

I'd like to think that event had woken them up to their responsibilities, but it is much more likely that they simply noticed the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Could get more rent now if they cleaned the place up a bit. And Jerry was getting old. Bring in someone younger and stronger to take care of the place for them. "My dad's not happy with the way Jerry's been running things," they said through their daughter who had suddenly appeared on the premises and was occupying the apartment below mine. They tossed Jerry out of his home of twenty years without so much as a thank you.

Jerry had been very dear to many of us and our loyalty to him, and our dislike of the landlords, was fierce. We knew whose fault everything had been and it wasn't Jerry's. He just didn't have the protection that we had in our rent-stabilized leases. We took up a small collection for him and he moved in with a relative around the corner.

So, when Marco appeared and began renovating Jerry's apartment many of us refused to speak to him. It wasn't really hard to do because he hardly spoke any English anyway and none of the us spoke Albanian. I don't think I'd ever met an Albanian before I met Marco; the only one I'd ever heard of was John Belushi.

Marco was middle-aged, round and bald and mostly always smiling. "He gives me the creeps." I told another woman in the building. "Me too," she said. It didn't matter how much he smiled; he got icy stares from me.

During his first few weeks of service, he kept coming to my apartment in an attempt to fix a leak that many other tenants below me had complained about over the years. Now the tenant below me was the landlord's daughter, so now they wanted to fix it. I was not inclined to be cooperative.

"One minute, one minute, "Marco said and pulled out his cell phone and dialed. He apparently thought I didn't understand what he was saying and was going to put me on with someone who did. He handed the phone to me.

"Hello."

"HI, I'm the super's daughter, " a woman said to me in perfect English, only the slightest trace of an accent. This did not make sense to me and I was as cold to her as I was to Marco as she again explained what her father wanted.

"It's been leaking for the 15 years that I've lived here, another 15 shouldn't do any harm," I said and gave Marco back his phone and shut the door. That was the end of that.

He'd come in the early fall. One day in mid-December I came home from work to find Marco and two of the prettiest little girls I'd ever seen putting up a Christmas tree in the lobby. This was indeed a strange sight. It was not the kind of lobby anyone had ever thought about putting a Christmas tree up in before. And it was not much of a tree: an artificial job that was missing several large branches. Lights had been strung up across the ceiling to light it and were held up with ugly duct tape. Still, the little girls were amazing: the older one was about 10 and absolutely beautiful, the younger about 6. They were both blonde and fair and angelic-looking, delicately hanging bulbs on the old tree as if doing it just right would determine whether or not Santa Claus would come. The older girl smiled at me. I couldn't help but to smile back.

The next thing I noticed was that every day or so the lobby would fill up with the most wonderful smell. Someone was baking and it smelled like bread. Homemade bread. My stomach would growl and my mouth water as I got my mail and headed into the elevator.

It turned out that Marco had a wife. It was a long time before I learned her name (Tone) but I would see her every day cleaning the building. She is a big woman with a loud voice and the persona of a gypsy. Her dark hair , always pulled back into a tight ponytail, hung below her waist, even when back. One of her front teeth is gold. The girls, I learned were his granddaughters and there was another woman, who I wasn't clear about. She was obviously the girls' mother, but she didn't speak English at all, so couldn't have been the daughter I'd spoken to on the phone. And there was a son, a big guy, early 20s. I nick-named him Stanley Kowalski.

The building suddenly got very clean. Tone scrubbed the floors and washed the windows daily. The garbage was sorted outside instead of piling up for days and days on end. No one could deny that was an improvement.

I soon learned that the girls' mother was the daughter-in-law, Flora. She and the girls were living there with Marco and Tone and the other son in the one-bedroom apartment given to the super instead of a salary. Her husband lived in the Bronx, but this neighborhood is a desirable school district and of course here she would have support from Tone. She soon started working at the laundromat across the street. I would see the girls come and go from school and soon the older girl's English was excellent and she was able to translate for her mother and grandparents. I also saw the whole family engaged in the practice of collecting cans and bottles to sell. In New York, there is a deposit on cans and bottles, maybe ten cents a can that can be redeemed. No one ever does though. They did. They took all of the recycling and also picked up trash off the street to redeem for cash. That got to me. I was definitely softening toward this hardworking family, but I still couldn't bring myself to engage them.

Then one day, Tone came out of her apartment as I was getting my mail. The heavenly smell wafted into my face and I said to her, "Do you bake bread?"

"Bread, yes," she said. "No store bread, no good for me."

"It smells so good," I said.

She looked at me for a minute and then went back into her apartment. I was waiting for the elevator when she came back, a warm loaf of round bread in her hand.

"Here," she said and handed it to me, kind-of shrugging.

"No, you don't have to do that..." I started.

"Take, take," she said.

"Well, thank you. Thank you very much." I knew accepting the offering was giving in, but I was ready to by then.

I took the bread upstairs. I got out the butter. It melted onto the warm golden crust. I ate almost half the loaf without stopping. It was without a doubt the best bread I've ever eaten.

The next day I happened to bake a cake--a rare occurrence. It wasn't that great, but I decided that I should reciprocate the gesture and I wrapped up a large chunk of it and took it downstairs. Tone objected but I gave her the cake and came back home. Soon there was a knock on the door. I opened it to Marco. He handed me another loaf of bread. "From wife," he said. I took the offering and thanked him. He walked away smiling and I couldn't help but think this probably wasn't the first time his wife's cooking had won someone over.

Some of the tenants still don't trust the Albanians, as most of us seem to refer to them. It's mainly because they suspect ties to the landlord beyond what is obvious. But the bread exchange was the beginning of a relationship with Tone that would prove crucial to me for the next few years. Because I was about to have a baby. And Tone knew everything about babies. And I knew absolutely nothing.

'Night 'night...

It began with itching. David was itching. I wasn’t too worried about it because we had been though this once before when he had been secretly using my shower gel. Eventually hives broke out all over his legs and torso and we discovered that he was allergic to vanilla. So, I thought we just had to figure out what David was allergic to this time.

Maybe the laundry detergent—but we hadn’t changed brands or anything. No new soaps or bath foams. Still, allergies can develop. We switched to hypo-allergenic everything. But he was still scratching. And then I started itching too. Surely it was just sympathetic allergies, or the power of suggestion getting the better of me. But no, there were little red bumps on my body and on his.

Fleas! Somehow our indoor cat must have gotten fleas. I gave the cat a bath, always a fun activity anyway. No fleas, just several new scratches on my hands and arms.  Mosquitos? But it was early Spring.

One night we were lying next to each other in the loft bed that he had built and that we shared. We were trying to sleep, but David, who is by nature a squirmy/twitchy kind of person was squirming and twitching way beyond what was normal for him--and I was getting itchier by the second. A little rhyme started going through my head: “ ‘Night ‘night, sleep tight…”

“David? Is there really such a thing as bedbugs?”

He sat up and turned on the light. “I think so.” He said.

We looked at each other for a moment and then immediately descended the ladder from the loft. We had always been able to think and act in unison. He went straight to the computer; I fixed us a drink and started pacing the floor.

“Go look and see if there are small black smears on the mattress,” he said after a few minutes of reading. I did. There were.

“We’ve got bedbugs.” He said.

Oh the shame and horror of that realization! Both of us came from homes where cleanliness is next to Godliness and a person could literally eat off the floor in either of our mothers’ kitchens. While we knew our home was nowhere near those standards—bedbugs! We’d both be disowned if anyone ever found out. We slept fitfully on the pull-out couch that night.

The next day we bought pesticides: sprays, bombs, powders, and a bottle of witch hazel for the itching and set to work treating our apartment according to instructions we found online. It didn’t work. A week later we were still being eaten alive.

“We’re going to have to call an exterminator,” I said. But we were so broke at the time. It was right after 9/11 and the newspaper that we published had taken a huge hit financially. I called a few places and was quoted prices of up to $600! But I also started to get some information.

“Last year, I did maybe five bedbug jobs,” one exterminator told me. “This year, I’ve already done 100. It’s an epidemic.”

That was somewhat comforting in a weird way—at least my housekeeping wasn’t completely to blame. Still, I thought surely we could solve this problem without spending $600.

“Let’s bomb again,” I said, and David, the cheapest man I have ever known, eagerly agreed.

Then one night we noticed that someone in our building had thrown out a mattress—and it had the same telling black smears that ours did. We asked our super, Jerry, if he knew who it belonged to.

“I think it is de guy on de 5th floor. Teacher guy.” He told us.

We knocked on the teacher guy’s door and he answered. It was an awkward question, but we asked it: “Do you have bedbugs?” His face turned a deep shade of red. “Because,” I continued quickly, “We do.”

It was like an AA meeting! Instantly, we bonded. We learned that we were not alone and that we were not to blame. We told him our story and he told us his: He had bought a brand new mattress and box springs, in an ill-fated effort to improve his sleep. That was where the bugs had come from. The same trucks that deliver new mattresses also haul away old infested ones. He said he had seen hundreds of them (many more than we had seen!) and had finally thrown away the mattress in desperation. But the bugs had already spread throughout the entire building.

“If the bugs are in the whole building—“ David started. I finished his sentence:

“Then the landlord has to send an exterminator!” We did a little victory dance fantasizing about a full night’s sleep. It would prove to be premature.

Knowing our landlord and his history of negligence, we should have known he would refuse to treat and he did. We ended up having to take him court to get him to do so. In the meantime, we hired, not the $600 exterminator that sounded like he knew what he was doing, but the same company the landlord usually employed. They agreed to do it for $290 and David, always penny-wise and pound foolish, insisted.  We paid them. It didn’t work. The bugs came back.

Eventually, we got rid of every piece of upholstered furniture in the house and all of our linens—nice things that I had scrimped and saved in order to buy slowly over the years.  I washed every single piece of clothing we owned and sent the nice stuff to the cleaners. After about a year, we won our court battle (David found the NYC Housing Code that plainly states landlords must provide extermination services for "vermin"; bedbugs are vermin.) and the landlord had to send the exterminator at his expense, but still, the bugs kept coming back. We were sleeping on the floor by this time and still unable to get any rest. We were also still keeping all of this a secret from our families and most of our friends, giving strange vague answers to questions about our lack of furniture. “Umm, yeah, we needed some space.” Our relationship, already suffering from unrelated problems began to sag under the strain of the added burden. David started not coming home at night. We were fighting a lot.

It was obvious the bugs were coming into the apartment through the cracks in the floors and the walls and so I spent an entire week by myself on my hands and knees sealing cracks in the wooden planks with caulk. That helped for awhile, but still the bastards still got back in.

When David and I broke up for good in 2004 I thought the bugs were vanquished and I bought a few pieces of furniture, a mattress for the loft bed and a new couch. I picked up sheets and things at street fairs, about all I could afford at the time. Eventually, I thought, I could replace my nice things. Turns out it was still premature and the bugs came back again. This time I hired the exterminator that sounded like he knew what he was doing and he did. He treated my apartment from top to bottom and brought his caulk gun to seal all the tiny cracks that I had not even dreamed existed.

By this time, the nasty little creatures had gotten a lot of press in New York, as they were apparently tormenting the well-heeled and affluent folks on Park Avenue as well as those of us on Amsterdam. The New Yorker ran a very funny piece about some pristine apartments being torn apart in an attempt to rid them of the vermin.

After all the public exposure, the shame of the whole situation went away and I was able to tell my friends and most of my family about what had happened. I still haven’t told my mother. Please, don’t tell my mother.

All told, I’d say the bedbug fiasco cost me about $7,000 and also dealt the final death blow to my marriage. I am certain I will always be hyper-vigilant about inspecting every mattress I ever sleep on and I still tend to overreact to the slightest itch on my body. After all, it all began with itching.

Liza Case
Copyright 2007
All Rights Reserved

Original Sin

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. --Sitting Bull

My living room windows face east. For years, my desk has been in the corner where I am fortunate enough to have two windows, one facing east, the other south. (Yes, the coveted southern exposure.) I sit there for hours and hours on end and have done so for years, writing mainly. David, my ex-husband of sorts, and I published our paper out of that room and would work for very long stretches without leaving the apartment. I was able to do that because of the light. I am absolutely flooded in sunlight here and it has always made me happy. When I count my blessings, which I do, that is always up there among them: I have a cheap apartment that is full of sunlight. In other words, a place where I can live happily and make a home.

It's not much of a view, mind you. I look out on the roof of the Stern Residence of the Jewish Home and Hospital (a nursing home), built to house their staff and retirees. By the looks of it, it went up sometime in the '60s; it's pretty ugly. And I can only see about 20 feet and then I am blocked by towers of some sort on their roof. But it's not about the view; it's about the sunlight.

A view is a luxury; sunlight is a necessity to human beings.

My apartment is on the top floor of my building and the apartments below mine on the same track look out onto a brick wall. They are blocked all the way around, with only one window providing any sunlight at all. I am friends with the man who lives in my track on the 3rd floor and his apartment feels nothing at all like mine. It's not a place where I could work for hours and hours without leaving the apartment. He, also a writer, in fact doesn't. He spends much time at the library because to stay inside that apartment all day would make a person crazy--crazier than those of us that choose to spend hours on end inside writing already are. His apartment is also not a place to raise a child. My son and I are able to stay inside on cold New York winter days and only get slightly agitated. It's the sunlight that makes it possible.

It wakes you up if you sleep in that room and I have to remind myself when I do, or when I have a guest, to pull down my dilapidated blinds. Otherwise, they are always open. David had never put up any kind of window coverings and I agreed with him. The light was just too pretty to block. But we finally put up blinds one hot summer and I even put sheer curtains in the bedroom. They blow in the breeze from the open windows and remind me of rooms in the old southern homes of my childhood.

But I spend most of my time in the living room, or the front room as I think of it, although the apartment is in the back. For years it was an office, and even now feels more like some other kind of room to me than a living room. But it is where I live. Where I write, eat, entertain, play games with my son, talk on the phone, play my guitar. It's all in the front room; in the back room, I sleep.

Carlos Casteneda, in his Don Juan books, writes of "finding one's spot". The apprentice character is instructed by Don Juan to find his spot on the porch and he spends hours doing so. It is supposedly a place where a person is safe and one needs to always find it wherever you go. Other spots can be deadly.

I found my spot; it is in front of those two windows. And now it is being threatened.

The Jewish Home and Hospital (which owns most of the block) plans to demolish all of their existing structures, sell half of their property to a private developer, and build a 16-story tower outside of my windows.

They will take away my sunlight. Think about that: they will take away the sun.

The Native Americans could not understand how the white man felt he had the right to own the land. That was (literally) a foreign concept to them. But now we have extended our ideas of ownership; we now believe that we can own the light and the air.

So, OK, I know, we're not Native Americans, we're Americans and we won that war. Besides, if God had been on their side, he wouldn't have let them die off, would he? So, we are thoroughly steeped and divinely guided in the idea of private property. How do you then justify taking away something of value from someone else with no compensation? The sunlight is valuable. Ask any doctor: better to live in a dark place with no natural sunlight, or one flooded with same? I have something of value, and they can take it from me for nothing. Free. Take away the sun. Why does this make sense? It should be one way or the other, right?

To what absurdity can we extend our idea of ownership next?

I keep hearing in my head a '70s pop song that goes, " All I need is the air that I breathe and to love you..." Only in my version, the guy starts making choking noises and suffocates in the middle of the chorus.  Ooops, there went the air. What about the love? Can we own that too?

So, I think now I am beginning to understand some of the resentment I felt from my neighbors when I first came here more than fifteen years ago. "White people make the rent go up." David used to say. Yes, we do. We have a long history of doing so.

 

Liza Case
Copyright 2007
All Rights Reserved

Gene

The last time I spoke to Gene we were in the stairwell of my building, four days after Thanksgiving 2002. The ancient elevator that should have carried him down from the 5th floor was out of service, as it often was for days or even months at a time. As tenants we had gotten used to walking the stairs. We had gotten used to a lot of things that were not as they should have been. But the negligence to which we had all adjusted was finally crossing the line of what is tolerable to what is not—even to residents with rent-stabilized (and in Gene’s case, I think, rent-controlled) leases. On that day, we had been without heat or hot water for six days, during what was to be one of the coldest periods of that winter, although it wasn’t even winter yet.

The building’s old (likely original) wiring made using an electric space heater impossible as it would cause a fuse to blow. The fuse box was in the basement, only easily accessible by the elevator. Those that had somewhere else to go stay had gone there. A few that could afford it were staying in hotels. Most of us were running our ovens and dressing in layers.

New York City’s housing laws are some of the strictest in the country. They require landlords to provide certain services (like heat) in every lease, and they require that landlords maintain any services originally provided under a lease (such as an elevator, if it goes out of service, it must be repaired, even if there are stairs). Under rent control and stabilization, rent increases are decided by a Rent Guidelines Board every year, and it is usually less than 10 percent. Tenants are further protected by the fact that they must be offered a renewal lease, unless they are in violation of it (as in rent arrears). In other words you can’t be evicted because the landlord doesn’t like you, or wants to rent to his nephew, or because you complained to the city about a lack of services.

Approximately 1 million apartments are regulated under Rent Stabilization or Rent Control. Getting one of these leases is no easy feat and tenants hold onto them for dear life. For working-class families, their ability to live in the city is dependent on having affordable housing in a city where a modest (read tiny) one-bedroom apartment can easily rent for $2,500 per month. My building is under Rent Stabilization.

Conditions in the building had been steadily deteriorating since the death of Mrs. G., the owner, a few years before. She and her husband, a retired cop, had run the place fairly well. There were a few problems, but the only major issue had been a dispute over rotted windows and I honestly don’t think they understood the severity of that situation. Once they did, the windows were replaced. They spent their winters in Florida, but when spring came around they would appear on the premises, access the damages that had occurred in their absence and begin making repairs.

My ex-boyfriend had moved into the apartment while attending Columbia University (at a time when the neighborhood was considered so undesirable it was difficult to even get the students to rent there) and had lived there for more than ten years when I moved in. He was not an easy tenant and was often late with the rent. Mrs. G. would call and give him a long lecture that began with, “David you’re like a son to me.”  I always thought she had meant that as a compliment—that is until I met her sons. Mrs. G. died of breast cancer in mid/late 1990s. I only saw Mr. G. once after that. His bulldog/cop posture was sunken and he looked frail. Like so many men who have been dominant in their marriages, I think he realized how much of his strength had come from his wife--he obviously missed her terribly.

After that we were told to deal with their sons, lawyers in practice as G. & G. The only contact we had for them was an answering service and calls were rarely, if ever, returned. Jerry, the super of many years, did his best to keep up with all the repairs in the aging building, but all he could really do without any resources was apply various forms of patches and band-aids. Major problems like the boiler, the wiring, and the elevator went unattended and hazards within individual apartments multiplied. Renewal leases never materialized or would finally be delivered by Jerry, more than a year late. Often our rent checks were held for months and months before the G’s cashed them—they just weren’t paying any attention. But this was (and is) a residential building where people make homes and live out their lives. Their lack of interest was creating havoc in those lives, including mine.

The make-up of the tenants had changed dramatically over the years that I had lived there. When I first arrived in 1992, virtually everyone was Latin American—Puerto Rican and Dominican. (Spanish was the official language of the neighborhood and it was sometimes difficult to find someone who actually spoke English well enough to communicate.) There was one old Irish woman who must have been left over from before the Puerto Ricans got there. She was tiny, not even five feet tall, and seemed terrified of everyone, including me, who towered over her. She moved out within a few months of my arrival.

By 2002, there were other white people in the building who had brought with them their middle-class ideas of “clean white living”. One woman in particular was constantly complaining to (and about) Jerry on issues that seemed rather superfluous in light of everything else he was trying to hold together with little more than wishes and spells. “OK,” he would say. “OK,” and laugh softly. Jerry was Haitian and had lived in poverty I find it difficult to even imagine. Everyone’s fussing merely seemed to amuse him.

Among the older tenants, there were a Puerto Rican couple and a widow on the third floor. On the fifth floor, in the building’s only track of two-bedrooms, was Gene.

Gene was a self-exiled Texan, and although he had been in New York for more than 30 years, still had the accent to prove it. He was older than 65, tall and thin, and he wore thick, black plastic glasses. He had eye problems (I think due to complications from Diabetes) and would often wear a patch of gauze over his left eye.

“My mother’s people are from Tennessee,” he had proudly told me, when our similar accents had prompted a conversation about our southern roots and I had told him that I grew up in Nashville.

From what I gathered of his story over the years, his father had been a prominent Southern Baptist theologian. Gene had followed in his father’s footsteps to a certain degree (I think he was a teacher), but had come to New York to work with poor children in Harlem. He was married when he first came here, but said that marriage had ended because he suffered from depression. He had no children. He lived alone. His health was not good. He used to go back to Texas once a year to visit his “mama,” until she died in either 2000 or 2001. His life seemed to center on the church that he attended (and I believe helped found, Metro Baptist in Time’s Square). He was always friendly and we would often stop and chat when we ran into each other in the building or on the street.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving that year I was leaving the building, suitcase packed, headed to Maryland to spend Thanksgiving with my parents. Gene was coming in as I was going out and I asked him about his holiday plans.

“Oh, I spend every Thanksgiving at my church,” he told me. “We do a big buffet for all the homeless people down there.” He seemed happy and in pretty good health, for Gene. I wished him a happy Thanksgiving and headed off on my trip.

David and I often spent holidays apart, usually with our respective families. We said it was because we lived and worked together in a tiny space and thus needed our “separate vacations.” I’m not sure now what reason there was (or wasn’t) for us being apart on this occasion, as he stayed in New York—likely working on the newspaper that we published together. On Thanksgiving Day I called to talk to him.

“It’s really cold here,” he said. “And the heat’s been out since yesterday.”

“Did you call?” I asked.

“Answering service.”

“Did you call the city?”

“Umm...”

I knew he hadn't. Calling the city would have been "complaining" in his world. David did not complain.

“What about the old people?” I asked. “Has anyone checked on them?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, go check on them.” I said.

“You want me to just go knock on their doors?”

“Yes!”

By “old people” I meant the couple and the widow on the third floor. I did not even think of Gene. I would later realize it was my own prejudice and sexism that kept him from my mind. I was concerned about the Puerto Ricans; they were so small. I was concerned about the widow; she was a woman alone. Surely the tall white man from Texas could take care of himself, although he was as old as they were and the only one of the group with obvious health problems. In fairness to myself, I think the fact that they did not speak English made them seem particularly vulnerable to me.

David assured me he would check on them, but I knew that he wouldn’t. It just wasn’t in his nature to extend himself in that way.

I returned to New York on Friday. Posted in the lobby of my building were two old and often used signs:

BOILER BROKEN
SERVICE CALLED

And

ELEVATOR OUT
SERVICE CALLED

My neighbors had begun to scrawl comments, all fairly polite, considering:

WHEN? WHAT SERVICE? HIGH TEMPERATURE THURSDAY 18º

Someone had posted instructions for calling the city’s heat emergency line, which claims to require landlords to fix major violations (like no heat in winter) within 48 hours.

Someone else had posted their solution:

RENT STRIKE NOW!!!

It was obvious people had reached the breaking point in their tolerance.

I lugged my suitcase up the five flights of stairs to my apartment. David was wearing long underwear and boiling water on the stove to keep from freezing. I called one of my neighbors who told me he had checked on the “old people” and they were OK. We discussed strategies for survival and promised to each keep calling the G. brothers and the city. David and I got back to work on our paper as best we could.

During the next six days I, and many of my neighbors called the city’s heat emergency line repeatedly. We received no response, and later found out that none of our calls were recorded. I know I personally called three times a day. We also called every “Shame on You” type of local news program and every journalist any of us had ever met. Nothing. No one responded to our crisis. The G.s remained absent. They did not return calls.

The signs in the lobby multiplied as each resident voiced his growing rage. Eventually the neighbor I had spoken to circulated a letter in English and Spanish, calling a meeting. That meeting was the beginning of an organization effort that would last for years.

On that Monday in December of 2002, I was climbing up the stairs as Gene was making his way down. He looked weak and frail.

“This cold has made me sick,” he said. “I’m gonna go down to my church and stay there ‘til they get the heat back on.”

We exchanged a few more words about the building and he went on. He apparently stayed at the church until Friday, but just continued to get worse. A member of the congregation brought him home that evening after learning that the heat was finally back on. They urged him to go to the ER, but Gene wanted to go home and promised them he would call his regular physician on Monday if he wasn’t feeling better. When he did not show up for services on Sunday someone came to check on him and discovered that Gene had died over the weekend. The coroner determined his death was from natural causes.

They held a memorial service for him at his church. David and I attended, along with another neighbor. We were the only “outsiders” there; Gene’s life had truly been the church. They seemed like nice people, but I thought it strange that they seemed to have no anger over what had happened. Maybe they did, but their faith demanded that they deal with it in a different way.

As he had no family, there was no one to bring wrongful death charges against the landlords or hold them accountable in any way. As tenants we explored every avenue we could think of to bring about some kind of “justice”. No one seemed to care. “Old people die,” a journalist told one of my neighbors. “Happens every day.”

His apartment remained sealed for more than a year as issues of his estate were processed. The minister from the church spent several weeks cleaning the place out finally last summer. He had a big job. Gene had a lifetime of books and papers accumulated and he had apparently never thrown anything away.

Our organizing efforts were somewhat fruitful (and perhaps it took a man’s death to alert our landlords to their responsibilities). We now have a new elevator, new wiring, and a functional boiler. The G’s hired a management company to collect rent and see to repairs. They also fired Jerry, our super of many years and installed a new family, younger and healthier to keep the place clean and running. I refused to speak to them for a long time, out of loyalty to Jerry, until I realized how ridiculous that was. They are nice people—from Albania. But it doesn't seem the same without Jerry standing outside the building late at night when I come home, keeping watch as he always did.

Gene’s old apartment was fully renovated, redone from top to bottom. I assumed the landlords were going to try and charge market rent for the place, but as it turned out, one of them moved his daughter into it. She lives there now, a young girl in her twenties. I get the feeling she’s been told a very different version of the events of that Thanksgiving.

I like to imagine Gene haunting the place, sending icy cold shivers down her father’s spine whenever he comes to visit, but I’m sure he wouldn’t do that. And I’m sure he wouldn’t approve of me holding all of this against the G. brothers. As a Christian, he would tell me to forgive and move on. I guess Gene is in Baptist heaven now, eyes restored, reading to his heart’s content. And the rest of us are still living on Amsterdam Avenue, a close-knit group of neighbors after what we went though together. I think most of us are still working on the forgiving part, but we are moving on.

Liza Case
Copyright 2006
All Rights Reserved

The Gods of Amsterdam

The West End Presbyterian Church, on the corner of 105th and Amsterdam, was built in 1891. From my bedroom window I can see its bell tower. The bells, which call the faithful to service on Sundays, chime the hour throughout the week, and play extended sets of "Ode to Joy" and "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" at noon and at six o'clock, can be heard throughout my building and for several blocks. People rely on them for various tasks that require timing: one of my neighbors refuses to leave his car on the side of the street that is legal at ten o'clock until he has heard the ten o'clock bells, no matter what anyone else's watch might say.

I loved them when I first moved into the neighborhood. I had never heard real church bells and they reminded me of a Michelle Shocked song, "5:00 a.m. in Amsterdam". The bells on Amsterdam Avenue didn't ring at 5:00 a.m., thank God, but they rang and still do from nine to nine. I found them romantic and wonderful.

"Wait until you are hungover and trying to sleep late on Sunday morning; they'll lose their charm," my boyfriend, David, told me. He had already lived in the place for more than ten years when I moved in.

"A small price to pay for the greater for glory of God," I said.

"The only god in this country is the god of commerce," he replied. "You're just talking about what people do on Sunday."

Oddly enough, years later when we were breaking up, it was the bells that I thought could be the final straw that would drive me to madness while I was deep in the clutches of my misery. I would wrap pillows around my head to try and shut them out, each and every hour bringing a new wave of despair as they ceaselessly reminded me of the sudden slowness of time.

It was shortly after that period, when I had mostly recovered and the bells had once again slipped into the familiar background of the soundtrack of my life that the video-game store that had operated for a couple of years next door to the church went of of business. The space stayed empty for a few motnhs. Then suddenly there appeared a sign:

                                                         COMING SOON
                                                        DUNKIN DONUTS

This announcement generated quite a bit of excitement of Amsterdam Avenue. This would be the first national franchise to open in the neighborhood, which was mainly full of bodegas and Dominican diners. The local residents seemed to feel honored as work began on the storefront.

I was not thrilled, for two reasons. One, I saw it as a harbinger of the dreaded "G" word: gentrification. (Turns out I was right about that one.) Two, I grew up in the south and was raised on Krispy Kremes; I find Dunkin Donuts to be a vastly inferior substitute, and I do take my donuts seriously. But a poor substitute is better than none at all and besides, their coffee is pretty good, so I reluctantly joined in the anticipation of the new store's arrival.

Before too long a pink and brown awning went up in front. I didn't like it. It was ugly and seemed so incongruous with the rest of the block--especially right next door to the old church. My newly found enthusiasm vanished.

"It's just wrong," I said to my new boyfriend, Peter. "It doesn't belong here. Why don't they open it on Broadway?"

"You just don't like change," he said. "I saw a guy that looks like the owner. He seems OK."

Indeed, I had seen him, too and he did look OK: youngish, blond and very enthusiastic. He drove a little VW convertible with a vanity plate that read: DONUTS. He was excitedly opening his new store and I found it hard not to root for him.

"I'll buy you a Boston creme and a cup of coffee when it opens. Bet you'll change your tune."

"Unngh...," I grumbled, but let it go. What could I do? "The neighborhood just isn't what it used to be."

A few days later Peter came to pick me up for a date. As I let him into the apartment he said, "That cup is the ugliest thing I've ever seen."

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"You haven't seen it?" he asked.

"What?"

"Uh-oh--you're not going to like this."

Out on the street, on top of the ugly pink and brown awning, a giant plastic cup (presumably of coffee) had been erected. Looking south from the corner, the enormous cup rose halfway up the bell tower of the church, completely destroying the view.

"NO!" I wailed. "I can't look at that every day of my life."

"It's pretty bad," Peter said.

"Will you help me destroy it?" I asked. "We could go up on my roof, climb down into the awning and knock it down."

"OK," he said.

"Do you promise?" I asked.

"No, but let's go now. Maybe the guy will realize how offensive it is and take it down."

The cup stayed. Not being a Presbyterian, I don't know how the church people felt about it. Perhaps they thought it was predestined to be there and so offered no resistance. In terms of the neighborhood, it didn't seem to bother anybody but me. No one that I complained about it to seemed to care. No one would join me in my sabotage fantasies, anyway. I cringed every time I walked by.

The store opened. To the owner's credit, he hired neighborhood kids to work there and let them play whatever kind of music they wanted to. There was usually a line during the morning rush hour. Peter made good on his promise for the Boston creme and coffee and eventually my boycott gave way and I would stop in for an afternoon treat occasionally. The owner would park his little VW in front and stand outside hosing down the sidewalk. He looked as out of place as his cup did, but he didn't seem to notice that either. He smiled at his customers as they came and went.

The one day, as suddenly as the first one, a new sign appeared in the window:

                                                           STORE CLOSED
                                              THANK YOU FOR YOUR BUSINESS

I guess the blond guy moved on. Maybe he has Subway franchise in Connecticut now and a vanity plate reading: HAMANDCHEESE. He was just slightly ahead of the curve on Amsterdam Avenue.

The shop was empty for more than six months before reopening again as a Dunkin Donuts. It's an Indian-looking man who runs the place now. He seems to be making a go of it and sells two-for-one donuts at closing time.

The cup still stands and the bells still chime on the hour--both I think, in the greater glory of their respective gods.

Liza Case
Copyright 2006
All Rights Reserved
Photo Credit: Juan Sagrera