Editor's Message
NEXT STOP: ALBANY
The atmosphere was electric last Thursday night at the swinging '60s Senior Center in Greenpoint. “Old ladies never die, they just play bingo”, read a sign at one end of the meeting room, while a large American flag hung from the other. In between, an overflow crowd of angry artists submitted 5 and ½ hours of testimony to the receptive ears of a State Assembly panel chaired by Vito Lopez. Dispossessed, but prepared to fight back, North Brooklyn artists facing eviction came from the hearing knowing that their voices were indeed heard.
Such a mobilization stems precisely from two sources: the rapacious actions of commercial landlords, and the counter- organizing of the Brooklyn LiveWork coalition. As amply reported at the hearing, countless owners of warehouse spaces eagerly rent to artists, knowing full well that their skills will improve the property. Once the building has been renovated, and a neighborhood consequently starts to become more desirable, the owner then smells paydirt. One need not be an Oliver Stone to smell collusion between the developers and various city and state agencies from here to Albany.
The LiveWork coalition has grown like wildfire since the December evictions in DUMBO. It now represents over 60 buildings and more than 2000 tenants, the latter resolute in their determination to maintain the fruits of their toil. Many tenants who testified last week spoke passionately about the time and money they put into making their previously uninhabited buildings livable. And they detailed the changes they have helped make in their neighborhoods, from general cleaning up to improving community safety (without relying solely on the police). The LiveWork coalition is also well aware of the need for North Brooklyn artists to work directly with the existing local communities in the area, which are also suffering eviction, but fighting with less economic resources. Coming issues of The Rail will keep readers posted on LiveWork’s outreach efforts.
In the meantime, State Housing Committee Chair Lopez vows to submit loft law legislation covering Brooklyn to the Assembly. There he predicts passage, but making it through the Republican Senate and past the Governor is a “100-1 shot”, Lopez says. Nevertheless, he vows that we will win…provided we stay unified.” Such legislation is crucial to the survival of the arts in Brooklyn and across the city, meaning it’s a fight effecting more than just those facing immediate eviction. Even with the recent success in DUMBO, the fight has only just begun!
For now, I hope you enjoy the Rail’s travels across the bridges, tunnels, and various waterways that connect Brooklyn to the rest of the world…
-T.H
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
97. Greenpoint
By Raphael RubinsteinAPRIL 2022 | The Miraculous
An artist who grew up not far from Disneyland moves from Southern California to New York where he finds a cheap apartment in Greenpoint and a job at a framing shop. It’s the mid-1980s and the city seems like a rough place filled with a lot of obnoxious people. He wonders whether the problem is that New Yorkers never get to see the night sky.
70. (Corner Lispenard & Church Streets, North Tower of the World Trade Center)
By Raphael RubinsteinSEPT 2021 | The Miraculous
It’s early on a Tuesday autumn morning and a sixty-two-year-old painter is standing in front of his home conversing with a neighbor and some firemen who have arrived to investigate a reported gas leak on the block. About a mile away a thirty eight-year-old sculptor who was working so late the day before he decided to spend the night in his studio on the ninety-second floor of a skyscraper is probably still asleep.
In Judy’s Room
By Ben GoldsteinMARCH 2022 | Fiction
When we first meet Michael, the narrator of "In Judy’s Room" by Ben Goldstein, he has just arrived at a hospital in the Berkshires to receive treatment for an unspecified mental illness. We learn that, to Micheal, the onset of his illness is inextricably entangled with both love and heartbreak, a memory of a violent sexual rejection that he believes led him to commit his own monstrous act. The story's tension comes from Michael's journey between the past and present, his struggle to decipher the real from the unreal. One of the pleasures of reading this story for me came from Goldstein's gorgeous descriptions of the natural world and the town itself. As we navigate Michael's emotional landscape, he simultaneously moves through a setting so idyllical that it too feels dreamlike and magical—a place where the townspeople have a “yearly tradition of recreating a famous Norman Rockwell painting” and where Judy Garland “once dressed up in a gleaming ball gown and heels right out of The Wizard of Oz.”
Interspecies Futures, Veiled Taxonomies, and Lights, Tunnels, Passages, and Shadows
at Center for Book Arts
By Amber Jamilla Musser
JUNE 2021 | Art Books
All three exhibitions manifest theorist Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis and use the forms of the book to enlarge what constitutes knowledge and being together. In these profound (and profoundly different) engagements with sensing, we realize that the book not only contains knowledge, but also invites ethics—how can and should humans engage?
