WE OWN THE STREETS
Renaissance architects often described cities the way they functioned and how their individual elements connected to each other by using the human body as a metaphor. As such, an abandoned “dead” building can be considered both visually and conceptually as a wound or trauma, as a scar inflicted by a violent, sudden act on the city landscape. Perhaps, then, if an urban trauma remains exposed and unhealed long enough, it can even be transformed into a city’s icon, trapped in a state of impossible existence.
I never thought I would write this, but I’m sitting on a skateboard in a park on the corner of Macdougal and Houston, where about 300 skaters have taken over the park. But let me go back to the start of what I have felt like some of the two, well, now three, longest weeks in memory.
I flew back home to New York on Friday the 29th of May, on what still felt like the middle of the pandemic, George Floyd had been murdered four days before in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I landed on what seemed like a scene out of a movie, an eerily desolate JFK airport, the only thing open, during the middle of the day, was McDonald’s.
After a fairly quick Uber ride, I arrived at the apartment I’m staying in in Brooklyn, which is “conveniently” located across the street from the 84th precinct of the New York City police department. Upon arrival, I noticed that the side street was barricaded and lined up with police in riot gear; without putting much thought into it, there was a slight glitch of anger in my body.
I was so excited to finally be back home after a little over two months in Mexico, for sure the longest time period I hadn’t been on a plane in over 15 years; so ready to walk some of my favorite streets and ride my bicycle all over the city to see how it was handling this crazy situation.
I got into my car and drove across the Brooklyn bridge, had been thinking so much and imagining how the city felt like, how it looked, how much had it changed, shifted, transformed.
First stop my favorite magazine shop in Soho, wow, so good to be back, missed this. Next stop, Dante, time to have one of those famous negroni’s that I had been savoring for so many days. I had seen on pictures that restaurants, as well as selling food to go, were allowed to sell drinks, didn’t really know that you could actually drink them on the street and the effect that that would have on sidewalks. Friday night, and wouldn’t really want to be anywhere else, Negroni in hand, some music in the background and a lot of people really happy to be drinking out on the street on one of those beautiful summer nights. I was breathing in what felt like an immense amount of energy, pent up energy that for months had been waiting to be released, and boy, was I underestimating the amount of pent up energy in this city… and in this country. Driving back across the Manhattan bridge, top down, music up, perfect weather, could not be more excited to be back. So ready for a summer that felt like it was going to be one of the most laid back that this city had ever had.
On Saturday morning, while having my usual espresso, although this time sitting on a sidewalk in downtown Brooklyn, I started reading on twitter about the events that had transpired the night before. A peaceful protest to demand justice for the killing of George Floyd had turned very violent when police had started mercilessly attacking the crowd.
I saw that there would be another march that day, starting in Harlem, so I jumped on my car and went back to Manhattan. Driving along what is usually a gridlocked Canal street, heading to the west side highway, suddenly in the corner of my eye, I saw something I couldn’t believe. I parked on the first spot I could and walked back to the corner of Greenwich street, where some people had appropriated a police barricade, placed it in the middle of the street, and proceeded to play a leisurely round of tennis… In the middle of a Manhattan street, thought to myself, these are going to be some fucking fun days.
I left my car in the Upper West Side and rode my bicycle to Harlem, where the protest had started some hours earlier. By the time I got to 125th, the march had left, but I got to see hints of hope for our city after this pandemic. Remembered the reasons why I like Harlem so much, people out and about, sitting in plazas, enjoying the streets, listening to music, cooking on street corners and having parties on building stoops, owning their space.
After pedaling 49 blocks, I decided to make a pit stop at what for many years had been my local pub, Amsterdam Ale House. Halfway through my beer, standing on the sidewalk of this beautiful Upper West Side corner, looking at people so deeply enjoying their day and their city, and thinking of the implications not being able to publicly congregate indoors in the foreseeable future, I tweeted: We Own The Streets.
I read that the march was making it’s way downtown and decided to join them, got back on my bicycle and rode down Central Park West. As I rode past the Trump International Hotel on the corner of Central Park, I got a glimpse of what was to come. Dozens of police vans lined both sides of the street, while what must have been more than a hundred cops, some in riot gear, some in a white uniform, none in a face mask, stood behind a barricade.
Riding down 7th street, I caught up with the march at about 40th street. In reality, I only realized that was the march because of the amount of police there, way outnumbering the number of protestors, flanking them on both sides of the street. Within a few seconds of being there you could feel an incredible amount of tension between the protestors and the police. After walking for about a block, on what had been a peaceful protest, I suddenly started hearing on a speaker: “This is an unlawful assembly, disperse or you will be subject to arrest”.
Since when is congregating in a street a crime?
The next few hours became some kind of game, a push and pull in which the protest was given some leeway, we walked a few blocks, some people grabbed trash cans from corners, placed them on the center of the street, lit them on fire and then the police would charge into the crowd, hitting them and arresting a couple of people every time, as if to keep asserting some type of control.
As we kept making our way south, the crowd kept growing, so by that the point we reached 14th street, there must have been a couple hundred protesters. As the evening transpired, and the police kept upping their aggressive antics, tensions grew and the crowd started getting angrier by the minute. I kept getting angrier by the minute, it was very difficult to maintain any sense of calm when at such a critical moment in time, in which what people are asking is just not to be killed, you see so much hate from the people that are supposed to be protecting us.
At around 8:00 pm, just when the sun was setting, it created the Manhattanhenge effect, in which the sun aligns with the east-west axis of the city’s grid, radiating a beautiful vibrant orange hue from in between the skyscrapers. The protesters had put together enough trash cans, garbage and whatever they could find together in the middle of a street starting a huge fire. I think it has been one of the most powerful, beautiful and moving scenes my eyes have seen in this City, big POWERFUL flames engulfing the orange hued street over the chanting of the crowd demanding for justice.
A couple of weeks ago I had been thinking a lot about the effects that this pandemic would have in our society and I wrote a post stating that there was no doubt in my mind that a Renaissance was coming, well, had I underestimated it. I was witnessing right before my eyes a huge societal shift that should have happened decades ago.
-“What feels remarkable to those of us who lived through the devastating effects civil unrest had on cities in the sixties, recent protests seem only to have solidified the feelings of community and the embrace of diversity that come so much more naturally from city living. Clearly, many americans want to be a part of that. It points to a desire to lean in to city living rather than turn away from it”
-Carol Coletta
On Sunday, without having been able to sleep that much, I bought the NYT and headed to a coffee shop where I sat on the stoop to see what was happening. Spreading unrest leaves a nation on edge was the headline above a picture of a building burning down in Minneapolis.
And just like that, as Dane said, for a couple of days, Covid seemed to have been canceled.
I don’t even want to really go into much detail of what I witnessed in the next few days of protests, so much hate, so much fear, so much fucking impotency of having african american people arrested while I was standing right next to them, protesting with them.
The next day I joined another protest on the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan bridge. Shutting down the whole bridge and walking across as the sun went down, walking with such a passionate group of people that actually care about what is going on was very inspiring. The march was completely peaceful, with people being very careful as to not give the police any reasons for violence.
As we were making ourselves uptown, we reached a police barricade completely shutting down 6th Ave on the corner of Bryan Park. Within a minute of us stopping and them saying that this was an unlawful assembly, they charged the crowd, beating down as many people as they could and arresting everyone they could, from what were probably sixty year old women, teens and even an off-duty policewoman that was getting badly beaten, just for speaking her voice and being part of this movement.
With so much adrenaline in my body, I decided to make the 70 block run back towards the Manhattan bridge and back to Brooklyn. At that point, I had thought that the protest I was a part of that day was the only one, but that was very far from reality. A couple of blocks went by when I ran into an even bigger protest making their way uptown. A couple of more blocks and I ran past a Walgreens that had been completely looted. Two more blocks and then I started to feel like I was in a war zone, with groups of looters breaking every window they could find and starting fires everywhere. I don’t remember a moment when I was running so fast, I felt like I was flying across the Manhattan bridge, the anger was suppressing all physical feeling.
It had been a while since I had been so fucking angry, so fucking sad, feeling so helpless, seeing these scenes of so much injustice and understanding the fear that is a constant in some people’s lives made me relive the moments in my life when I feared for my life. For a couple of years, I had a permanent fear that I could be kidnapped every time I went to Tijuana. I remember that just by crossing the border my heart rate would jump precipitously, and for the few hours that I was there, there was an insane amount of paranoia, a sense that even time went by in a very different tempo.
After seeing what I had seen in those days of protests, and really understanding the pain and the suffering up-close, I can argue that this type of destruction and mayhem was probably the only way to make this the relevant issue it became in just a few days. It made me think that things should be destroyed up until the point that the only possible way to rebuild is to rebuild together.
After that, a curfew was instituted in NYC, the first one since second world war. And more and more people started taking over the streets in marches all over the city. What I was able to witness in terms of people self organizing and getting together to make their voice heard was just magical. I saw the moment that a movement was born, when Chef Orlando suddenly got a platform that kept growing up until the point that there was a 15,000 person bicycle protest, taking up literally half of Manhattan in one single group of people, with no police assisting whatsoever, just cyclists shutting down the streets. And that’s what they are for, they’re our streets!
A couple of weeks have gone by, and massive societal shifts have started. But this should just be the beginning, we have so much work to do.
In the weeks since the curfew was lifted, the protests have not stopped.
The City has an amazing energy to it nowadays, for me there was always this feeling regarding the pandemic, that we were all in this together. But here, it really does feel like we are all connected now. People have embraced people, people have embraced public space, people have embraced streets and taken them over.
Streets are shifting their use from an in-between space to more of a destination, less a space to pass through and more of a space to be in. Some of our streets now resemble a marketplace and we are learning to engage them in different manners. Wether sitting on a stoop, waiting in line outside a shop, eating, drinking, protesting, occupying or dancing in a block party. Everyone has access to the street, unlike when we were doing most of our activities indoors.
Cities, unlike suburbs, adapt in ways that can make them better or stronger. NYC has expanded the public realm by closing streets to vehicles and adding that surface to pedestrian territory, providing more space for people. Bicycles have taken over in a way that I would have never imagined. The bicycle is an emblem of freedom, mobility is freedom, but that is the subject of another post.
We are creatures of habit, but I truly believe that this was a tipping point. That the changes we are seeing nowadays are just the beginning and are part of a more permanent shift in the way that we treat each other, the things that we place value in on our lives and the ways we interact with our cities.
I was really wondering why I lived through a couple of months of quarantine as if nothing was happening, living every day pretty much as if it was any other day. There was absolutely no fear and no stress about the virus or even the long term economic implications of the pandemic. And now that I think about it, I feel like this is nothing next to the time when I was halfway through construction of my first larger scale development project and from one day to the next I had to put a lock on the gate and couldn’t go back to it for months, that was uncertainty, that was true fear.
In those years that Tijuana was almost a war zone, there was a massive exodus, most people that could afford it, left the city and moved to San Diego. Certain areas of the city felt desolate, with a lot of restaurants even shutting down, residential development basically came to a halt. But I decided to keep going, and kept building through those hard times, so for years I kind of lived in quarantine whenever I was there. Not setting a foot in a restaurant, a public space or even a coffee shop, we would just go back and forth between construction sites and the office.
These moments taught me so much. A city is a living organism, and after going through such challenging times as the ones that every city is going through right now, it needs to heal. And in general, cities come out on the other side much better, post-traumatic eras in cities all of the sudden release pent-up energy that for long periods had been suppressed and have their own unique renaissance, just like Berlin did, just like I experienced it in Tijuana.
This is an opportunity, this is the moment to dream and to do the work on the cities that we want to live in from this moment on. We should aim for more democratic neighborhoods and more democratic cities, the streets and the public space belongs to all of us, sometimes we just need to take it over.
