Hot Times in the Hood

I moved to the neighborhood in the first week of July, which means that I've only been in New York for a little over a month. Although I have yet to witness a fatality (knock on wood), I have seen two rainstorms that were massive enough to flood out the subways, a tornado that chewed up Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, an underground explosion that blew off two manhole covers and took out a car, a shooting, and an apartment fire in Harlem. Worst of all, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority has decided to refurbish all the Bronx stations on the 4 line and is completely restoring the B and D lines.

Gentrification, I fear, may be on the way.

My biggest problem with this massive improvement program is that I feel a little responsible. The facts are on the table: shortly after my wife and I arrived here, the City of New York began spending millions of dollars to greatly improve the aging infrastructure of the Bronx. Personally, I think that someone told them we were coming. The trouble is that neither I nor my wife wants to be an agent of gentrification; frankly, we moved here to get away from annoying white people, not blaze a trail for them. I have nightmares about a Starbucks moving into the area. As it stands, I get my cafe con leche (dos azucares) from the grocery store on the corner, where it costs fifty cents and is prepared by a psychotically grinning Dominican who can't quite get over the crazy gringo and his freakish tendency to tip. I don't know if I could handle a double decaf half caf caramel macchiato with two percent milk, easy on the whipped cream. I think my head might explode.

If they start improving the schools, we're hitting the bricks.

One weird thing is the huge number of police in my neighborhood. While I'm glad that they're here, I'm a little disheartened by the fact that they need to be here. Also, I'm not too excited about the condescending attitude that they adopt when wandering through my neighborhood. This, combined with the fact that they tend to move in packs of two to five and all dress in blue, makes them seem like a gang. Well, a gang that has the ability to leave parking tickets. I've already gotten two, and am keeping them in the hopes of building a collection of origami ticket terns.

One bright side to the explosion in my neighborhood is that it has given me a great excuse to take pictures of my street. Since my friend Alex has been asking me to show him where I live, I am hereby proud to offer a glimpse of Bainbridge Avenue and 194th Street!

The first two pictures are establishing shots of the flaming manholes (I just realized how gay that sounds). In the pictures, you can see the front of my building and a few of my neighbors, who congregated outside to watch the fireworks.





And here are a few other pictures of the fire. As you can see, it created quite a traffic jam. I particularly like the one of the female firefighter standing underneath a "Drugs Crucify" sign:







And here's a little movie of it that I shot on my digital camera. There isn't any sound, and I apologize for the shaky camera work.



Later that night, as I walked down to the grocery store for some milk, I passed two young policemen who were standing on the corner, watching ConEd workmen fixing the problem. I asked them what had happened and one, an excitable irish kid who couldn't have been more than 22 or 23 told me that the heat set off one of the manholes, which made a car explode, and consequently set off the "secondary." He then went on to tell me that it was "really cool." When I raised my eyebrows, smirked, and said "really cool?," he put on his game face and told me that it was "um...really terrifying." His partner laughed loudly and I wished them a good evening.