Friends I've Made Who Don't Know Me

 
Lately, some of the most interesting people I've been getting to know are residents at Autumn Leaves, the dementia care facility here in Arlington, Texas, where my Dad spent the last ten months of his life.

And let me tell you, not all dementia patients are alike!  Within each of its victims, dementia manifests itself as uniquely as each of these dear folks were in their pre-dementia life.  For proof of this, consider the individuals I've already blogged about, like Miss Mary, Mr. Laurel, and Shirley, one of the most legendary residents ever at Autumn Leaves.

Let me introduce you to a few more of them here.  And, by the way, to respect the humanity each of these people still possess, and since they can't give their consent to me talking about them, their names have been changed.


Bob

Talk about the bizarre challenges of dementia care, and I give you Bob:  A short, emaciated, wiry little White geezer who, from what I learned of his stubborn pre-dementia days from his proud son, would likely approve of the term "geezer!"

Of all the disturbing behavior Bob displayed at Autumn Leaves, one of his most memorable was when he gummed the shear curtains in one of the facility's activity rooms.

He didn't eat them - he quietly gummed them and left strips of thread hanging from curtain rods. Caregivers had already taken away his dentures because he bit people. So without any teeth, just with his raw gums, he shredded the curtains one afternoon - we watched him, perched on the top of a sofa - no blood or anything. We don't know how he did it, but the staff just left him alone, since he seemed content, and wasn't hurting himself, or anybody else. 

And David, the maintenance guy, simply ordered another set of curtains when Bob was done.

In his dementia, Bob hated curtains. Before we arrived with my Dad, he'd ripped down EVERY set of curtains in the facility's public rooms. He kept pulling down curtains along a hallway leading to the two dining rooms (it's a hall of windows), so staffers finally stopped re-hanging them; David removed the curtain rods and spackled everything up to look like there had never been any curtains to begin with.

Once, Bob ripped out a fire alarm box with his bare hands - and those are bolted into studs, not simply affixed on drywall. He ripped out electrical sockets, completely immune to the shocks he'd get. His arms and legs were a patchwork of open sores (covered by bandages that caregivers could barely keep him from pulling off) and bruises in various stages of healing.

One day, there was a caregiver tasked with following him around the facility, cleaning whatever surfaces he touched (and left blood).

He was CONSTANTLY in and out of the hospital, mostly from his many falls. One time, his son (a police officer) told me that although Bob allowed himself to be placed on an ambulance stretcher calmly enough, an EMT was otherwise invading Bob's personal space a bit too much. The son had been called by Autumn Leaves staff, so he was on-site before the ambulance left, and Bob's son told the EMTs not to handle his father more than they needed to, and certainly not to get into his personal space, particularly around his face.

But one of the EMTs didn't obey.  And Bob, laying flat on the stretcher, limp and barely alert, somehow summoned enough strength to reach up and pop the EMT full in his face, knocking him out cold.

Did I mention Bob had been an amateur boxer in his younger days?

Miss Polly

Even when she's down, Miss Polly rarely seems to have a bad day.

She's one of the higher-functioning dementia residents where my Dad used to be.  A soft-spoken Black single woman, Miss Polly has a large extended family and, according to one of her nephews, used to love the color yellow.  When she first arrived, less than a year ago, she was walking, but now she needs a wheelchair most of the time. Yet she's always dressed smartly, in coordinated outfits, with either a wig or a Pocahontas head covering.  (I had to Google that!  My paternal grandmother in Brooklyn used to wear them when she hadn't had her hair styled).

She's exceptionally friendly, even though she has no idea who anybody is. And it's relatively easy to have a brief, reciprocal conversation with her.

One day, she was sitting with some other residents at a table of crafts, and she was quietly mumbling something to the woman sitting next to her. Miss Polly saw me, and she broke off what she was saying, looking up at me like she was Miss Innocent.

"Oh, Miss Polly!" I teased. "What were you gossiping about?"

Her face blanched, and she quickly drawled, "I wasn't gossiping. I was just telling it like it is."

Yesterday, during snack time, a caregiver wheeled her up to a tray displaying a variety of cookies.  The caregiver gave her one, and I commented, "Oh, it looks like white chocolate with Macadamia nuts!" Another caregiver glanced over and said, "No, I don't think those are nuts; we don't normally serve food with nuts to avoid any allergy problems."

But Miss Polly was too impatient. "Well, let's just see what it is," she interrupted, stuffing the cookie into her mouth. She chewed a couple of times, and confessed with her mouth full; "I'm a mess with sweets."


Sharon

Increasingly, Sharon is lost in her own fog that is dementia. Everything about her now seems to be quieter, dimmer, and a bit more disheveled than when she arrived at Autumn Leaves a couple of years ago. 

When I walked past a group of ladies at my father's dementia facility today, however, Sharon took full notice of me.

Although she is slowing down, Sharon remains the resident vamp of Autumn Leaves.  Tall, White, relatively slender, and relatively young (compared with most of the other residents), Sharon displays the classic dementia hallmark of an eroded social etiquette - particularly, um, when it comes to her feminine wiles.  If I told you some of the stuff she's done with a couple of the male residents in full view of many other people, let's just say that you would be incredulous.  Her son insists she was never that way in her pre-dementia life.  But today, her behavior is all part of the grim world of grown adults whose propriety filters have been destroyed by dementia.

And some of it simply ain't rated PG.

"WOW!" she exclaimed this morning, straightening her posture, and summoning from within herself a gusty enthusiasm that we haven't heard from her in a while. "Look at that MAN."

Have I ever mentioned that sometimes, dementia patients can be really good for your ego?  Of course, the other ladies sitting with Sharon - fellow residents of hers - merely looked at me with a mix of confusion and utter disinterest.

Which, frankly, is more the story of my life!


Flo

Flo is always a delight.

She's an even higher-functioning resident at Autumn Leaves than Miss Polly.  Slender, of average height, with dyed brown hair, some jewelry, and makeup applied appropriately, it took us a while before Mom and I realized Flo is a resident at Autumn Leaves, and not visiting a loved one like we do.

Many dementia victims develop a strange look in their eyes that seems to reflect their disconnection from reality, but Flo doesn't have that.  The only way I know Flo has dementia is that day after day, week after week, she can tolerate eating in dining rooms with other residents with dementia.  And let me tell you, watching a dementia patient eat is not for the faint of heart.

Well... I say Flo eats with the other residents... but there's a reason why she's so slender!

Last week, for example, it was lunchtime, and caregivers were helping residents into the dining rooms, but Flo just stood in the hallway, with her back literally towards the open French doors.  Actually, most of the residents have to be taken to eat - dementia somehow robs them of their ability to process hunger as their body's prompting for nourishment. So I encouraged Flo, "Hey, it's lunchtime! Time to get something to eat!"

Flo's face blanched. "I can't eat this food," she confided to me. "You know, I'm Italian, and the stuff they serve here just isn't any good."  And no, while I never ate any of the meals there, we'd been told that the cooks usually put some sugar into most of it, since sweetness is the last taste sensation to fade for dementia patients.  And the goal of mealtimes at a memory care facility is encouraging residents to eat for sustenance, not necessarily nutrition.

(I did once have a generous slice of fresh apple pie made from scratch by one of their cooks, and it was excellent... likely thanks to her liberal use of sugar!)

"Are you a good cook?" I asked Flo, fully aware that mine was a silly question to ask an Italian.

"Listen," Flo retorted, putting her well-groomed hand on my arm. "If I had cooked this, it would be FABULOUS!"

Today, Mom and I were visiting a resident at Autumn Leaves who is on hospice. We were chatting with the spouse of another resident in the main living room, and Flo strolled by. We welcomed her into our conversation, and then Madge trudged through, in her wheelchair, looking for trouble.

After angrily instructing us - pointed finger and all - that somebody had to get their act together (we don't know who, or what they'd done wrong), Madge started to wheel herself along again.

Looking at the departing Madge, Flo shook her head.

"With some people, I have to count to 30!" she muttered.

We all laughed, and I clarified, "you mean, to diffuse a situation, you normally count to ten before saying something, but with Madge it's thirty?"

"You got it, boy!" she affirmed heartily.

Flo usually carries a book around Autumn Leaves with her, even though it's usually the same one, and it's doubtful she remembers the plotline.  I once asked her what the book was about, and she gave me an uncharacteristically blank face, her wit apparently unable to make something up on the spot (which is a common tactic of dementia patients).

Today, however, Flo was sporting a new book.  "Such a suspenseful page-turner, you can't put it down," gushed a blurb on the bookjacket.

"So," I asked Flo. "Is it such a page-turner that you can't put it down?"

She looked at the book, sitting closed on the table, next to her cup of coffee.

"Not yet," she chuckled!


Mr. Zack

Technically, I broke the rules.

Miss Polly had one last cookie remaining after snack time this morning, and she told me she didn't want it.

Mr. Zack, on the other hand, still seemed hungry. He was sitting next to her, his head down, his eyes closed, like they always are.  I'm not sure how tall Mr. Zack really is; his chin always rests on his chest, even when the staff has him shuffling along with his walker, with his eyes still closed, his broad Black face seemly set in an oddly contented smirk no matter what he's doing.

His left hand was resting in his lap, but his right hand was still drawing circles on the table.  It was like his big hand was some sort of automated machine that hadn't been shut off.  Both his hand, and the spot on the table, were wet and sticky from him occasionally stuffing some fingers into his mouth, his "cookie-transfer system" from table to mouth missing a vital component: a cookie!

Mr. Zack doesn't talk.  Ever.  He'd lost that ability before I'd met him at Autumn Leaves, when we brought my father.  I've seen him during visits with his family, just sitting; eyes closed, chin down, those huge hands of his piled atop his knees, yet he'd somehow be transmitting an understanding that he was in the company of loved ones.

Dementia is strange, indeed.

So I suggested to Miss Polly that perhaps Mr. Zack would like her unwanted cookie. After all, the spot on the table being circled by his right hand wasn't going to generate a new cookie for him all by itself!

And, to my surprise, Mr. Zack grunted loudly at my suggestion!  It was an obvious affirmation that my idea sounded pretty good to him!  I confirmed with Miss Polly that it was OK to give her cookie to him, and she drawled, "well, if he wants it."

It was on a napkin, so I scooted the napkin and its sweet cargo over to the messy spot on the table, right underneath where Mr. Zack's right hand was now hovering.  He reached down and tried to pick up the cookie, but his big fingers don't move very well - those enormous hands - and the cookie slipped onto his lap.

Instantly, his left hand felt for it, found it, and grasped firmly onto it.  Eyes closed the whole time.  He reached up and stuffed the whole thing into his mouth, fingers and all, reminding me of Cookie Monster, from Sesame Street!

Technically, I'm not supposed to give food to any of the residents at Autumn Leaves, but Mr. Zack certainly won't report my misdeed!


Ricardo

Ricardo is a slim and dapper Hispanic gentleman. Quiet and reserved, he sports a well-trimmed white mustache and wears his graying hair slicked back in an elegant man-about-town fashion.

It's tough guessing the age of dementia patients, since the disease can wreak strange havoc on its victims' personal appearance, but I'd estimate that Ricardo is in his late 70's.

He prizes order and neatness, even in his dementia.  So the staff usually have a basket of fake "laundry" ready for him to fold.  Towels and washcloths in bold, bright colors, so residents with poor eyesight can sort and stack them and get a sense of accomplishment and worth.  Ricardo takes his time to make sure all the edges of each towel line up, and the stacks are neatly ordered on the table.  Frankly, such precision is remarkable among dementia patients, so we usually take the time to compliment him on his work.

Today, he was lounging in his wheelchair near a large window, our cheerful Texas sunlight washing across him. And a young, attractive, female caregiver was massaging his hands with lotion.  During wintertimes, especially, the staff rub lotion into residents' hands to help moisturize them, as dry skin can help spread germs.  Some dementia patients can't stand having their hands being gripped by another person, which obviously is what happens during a lotion massage, but most love the sensations of being rubbed and feeling their skin soften.

Ricardo clearly is one of the latter!

I leaned into him, and slyly whispered, "So, you're letting her hold your hand now, are you?"

And Ricardo, as if suddenly transported back to his prepubescent life, burst into goofy giggles that he couldn't stop!

Gentrification: Whither (or Wither) Community?

Navigating this 3-part series
- Part One  Gentrification: Some Background
- Part Two  Gentrification: Abandonment Issues
_____


Most people have one of three primal reactions to the word "gentrification."

One group gets excited by it, enthusiastic about new opportunities for redevelopment, money-making, and "new urbanism" usually afforded by gentrification.  Another group immediately recoils, angry about and afraid of the potential for deep population displacement typically caused by gentrification.  And yet another group - mostly middle-aged suburbanites - don't really care one way or another.  They have no immediate interest in living in a big city, and they can't see how the things that happen there directly affect them.

Older Suburbs May Not Be Immune

So, OK; maybe gentrification doesn't directly impact suburbanites.

But if you're a suburbanite living in an older, closer-in ring of suburbs, don't get too ambivalent.  The conventionally urban phenomenon of gentrification may, as you read this, be lapping at your subdivision's doorstep anyway.  After all, gentrification is a trend, just as suburbanization was a trend.  And trends exist by turning the status-quo upside down.  Or at least cross-ways.

And at its roots, gentrification involves simple supply and demand.  For cities that have been - and are currently - experiencing a robust overhaul thanks to gentrification, there may soon come a point at which the urban core will run out of neighborhoods economically eligible for a makeover.  And then, where will all of this renovation momentum turn?

Those folks interested in moving back to the city probably won't simply shrug their shoulders and say, "you know, that farm country in Nebraska looked pretty appealing after all."

Most probably, the folks who continue arriving at the urban party will start to take a new look at older, stale suburbs.  Back in the day, these towns were the first to be built around your closest big city.  By now, however, they are probably pretty dated, with a rapidly aging housing stock and shopping centers that are largely vacant, thanks to the big-box phenomenon which swept through newer suburbs a decade ago.  These aging suburbs may not have the grim sophistication that old cities have, but they likely have the one thing developers love:  under-utilized properties at relatively low prices.

How do I know that?  Simply by applying the basic corollary that motivates most Americans:  Whatever looks dated isn't trendy, and whatever isn't trendy is ripe for a makeover.

So, just because you may be blithely ensconced in suburbia right now, don't imagine that gentrification is something that will never impact you.  Unless, of course, you live in an affluent neighborhood with homes that consistently sell at the top of the market.  Like I said earlier, most wealthy neighborhoods that are immune to most other changes are also immune to phenomena like gentrification.

And no, the McMansion craze currently sweeping most American cities doesn't necessarily count as gentrification.  It just means that some people have more money than taste.

The New Urbanism Zeitgeist Shows No Sign of Stopping

Back in the mists of time, around 1990, I was a graduate student at the urban studies program at the University of Texas at Arlington, smack-dab between Fort Worth and Dallas, when even Arlington was a booming, fast-growing city in its own right.

I had thought that a master's degree in city planning would be an ideal synthesis of my undergraduate studies, first in architecture, and then sociology.  Yet in grad school, all the professors wanted to talk about was how many lanes of freeways were necessary to accommodate all of the explosive growth suburban Texas was experiencing.

That was the seminal issue of the day:  Getting drivers from one part of suburbia to office parks in other parts of suburbia, and back home again.  All while spending as little time as possible in the big, bad cities.

Today, however, freeways are what's big and bad.  Freeways are evil when it comes to city planning.  Freeways are what destroyed America's greatest old cities, and freeways are preventing America's newer cities from becoming fully-functioning urban centers.

New York City's controversial planner, Robert Moses, is the great satan of New Urbanism.  Moses is the demigod who bulldozed residential neighborhoods throughout Gotham for the construction of freeways that have never actually alleviated traffic congestion.

On the other side of America, and completely opposite of New York's design, Los Angeles literally built itself around freeways, yet today, LA can't shake its reputation as our country's most traffic-choked city.

You may be unaware of this, but New Urbanists have created a religion now followed by city leaders around the world, and this urban faith is placed not in the automobile, but in walking, bike lanes, mass transit, light rail, buses, and telecommuting.  New urbanism is all about environmentally sustainable connectivity and, ostensibly, community.  It's about sharing.  Reducing the individual human footprint (except when it comes to walkability).  It's about living as closely together as humanly possible, a concept for which high-density city life should be ideally-suited, right?

Meanwhile, the automobile is not about our environment, sustainability, high density, sharing, or community; it's about individuality.  One person ensconced in a multi-ton transportation pod is not community, not even if people are carpooling.  Community is everyone sweating it out in bike lanes, or sharing personal space on a sidewalk, or crammed into trains and buses to commute between centralized concentrations of shared activities.

Remember, all of this community is most easily accomplished with greater densities.  Greater densities of homes, businesses, schools, and people.  And guess what?  The older a city is, chances are it was built for greater population densities than almost any suburb, before the proliferation of the automobile.  Which means that the older an urban neighborhood is, the greater its chances that New Urbanists have already targeted it for gentrification, because that's the best way to evangelize for the progressive city.

Older urban residential lot sizes are generally smaller and closer together, most neighborhoods probably have sidewalks, and zoning probably still allows for mixed-use developments that have been anathema in suburbia.  Streetscapes are probably more grid-like, another feature that suburban developers sought to avoid, with their curving subdivision "drives" and cul-de-sacs.  The benefit of a grid-based street system is that mass transit is generally easier to deploy, and it's harder for pedestrians to get lost.

All of which is good news for cities that have been struggling to keep their oldest neighborhoods relevant and vibrant.

Yet...

Company's Coming, and It's Staying Beyond Dinner

Most old urban neighborhoods never were abandoned, remember?  And "relevance" is a relative concept.  Whites left them, yes, but people of other skin colors moved in.  These newer residents may be poorer, but we can't forget that these are their neighborhoods now.  Just as they were white neighborhoods in an earlier time.

It's not racist to acknowledge the reality of a community.  But we should be respectful all the same.

So how would you feel if a group of new people started coming into your community, and driving up the cost of living simply because they can afford to pay more for things, and they don't balk at doing so?  Maybe where you now live is where you've raised your family.  Maybe you own your home, but you can't afford to pay more taxes on it if its value suddenly increases.  Maybe your rent is currently the highest you can afford, but your landlord could get a lot more for the same space from newcomers.

Newcomers.  They're the folks who didn't stick it out all those hard years in your beleaguered neighborhood, like you did, when crime was at its worst.  Newcomers who act much differently than what you're used to, dress much differently, and seem to be flaunting their wealth in front of you, even if they don't mean to.  After all, in an urban environment, where privacy is scarcer than in the 'burbs, it's harder to just blend in, or disguise one's differences.

After all, that was part of what fueled white flight back in the day.

So, how would you feel?

If you can afford to make financial adjustments to accommodate such cost increases, maybe you'd actually be happy that your property values are appreciating, and that better restaurants are locating near your home.  And granted, not everybody in neighborhoods being gentrified are upset at all of the improvements taking place around them.  Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find anybody complaining about better street maintenance, cleaner parks, better litter control, better policing, better street lighting, fewer blighted properties, lower crime, and improved public schools.  Many urban neighborhoods that, for generations, have been "food deserts" are now welcoming brand-new, clean, full-service grocery stores.  Suburbanites rarely get excited about a new grocery store, but for the urban poor, fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats practically signify a revolution.  Their diets no longer consist mostly of processed foods or produce from local dingy bodegas, sold far beyond their suburban sell-by dates.

Without gentrification, it's unlikely that most major-chain grocery store companies would be investing in these neighborhoods.  The economics just didn't work before gentrification.  Fresh food is far costlier to stock than other basic commodities such as clothing, hardware, cell phones, and the like.

For the past couple of generations, urban dwellers were mostly dependent on government food stamps, which isn't much of a profit incentive compared with suburbanites with broader purchasing power.  In addition, urban crime rates posed significant profitability challenges to supermarket companies concerned about loss prevention and theft.  With gentrification, it's simply easier for retailers to make money, because more money is flowing into old urban neighborhoods.

You see, it's not that gentrification is a bad thing.  Gentrification actually pumps new resources into old neighborhoods and helps to iron-out some of the economic disparities that previous existed in urban centers.  Politics may have given the urban poor a feeling of power, but economic vitality is really the only thing that makes genuine, productive change happen.  Obviously, there are severe economic and social problems that gentrification itself cannot fix, but in the sense that a rising tide can lift all boats, gentrification represents just such an opportunity for both long-time residents and new ones.

At its best, gentrification is an expression of property rights, and the ability of people to get the fullest fair market value they can for properties into which they've dutifully invested.  Granted, the concept of "fair market value" is entirely subjective, depending more on what a person is willing to pay, rather than on what a property's materials and location are actually worth in raw figures.

How Can We Make Gentrification More People-Friendly?

Where things get bitter - and sometimes nasty - during gentrification is the speed with which it happens, or the degree of change it introduces, along with a corresponding lack of opportunity for input from long-time residents.

Oftentimes, developers assemble parcels of land subversively so that property owners don't realize that a new, game-changing project is being planned.  The reason for this is simple enough - if a developer announces their plans before purchasing the necessary property, land values would soar in anticipation of new development, cutting into the project's profitability.

Other times, individual newcomers with an adventurous spirit "discover" an older urban neighborhood at attractively low price points, at least compared with far more desirable and expensive neighborhoods.  If demand for in-town moderately-priced real estate is strong enough, other urban pioneers soon follow, combining to change the look and feel of an entire block, and eventually, even a neighborhood.

There's no set point at which newcomers switch from being urban pioneers to gentrifiers, but it usually happens around the time when long-time residents begin to notice that their neighborhood is fundamentally changing right in front of their eyes.  And that is when tempers begin to rise, anxiety begins to percolate, and even resentment begins to set in.

Then again, maybe all this sounds mostly esoteric to you.  Maybe even anti-capitalistic?  Maybe you've read this far and now you're angry, thinking that anything less than full-blown market-rate redevelopment is just socialism in disguise - not allowing free markets to work out for the most profit at the exploitation of opportunity?

If people can't afford to keep up with whatever changes are taking place in their neighborhood, they simply have to move out, right?  We can't guarantee a person the right to stay in their home if values rise to a point where they can't afford to.  If you want to live in a better neighborhood - even if it's your own - you need to work even harder and earn more money to do so.  That's the American way...

And, yeah... if you want to make this all about money, then the urban poor don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to gentrification.  And the raw capitalists have nothing standing in their way when it comes to redeveloping aging inner-city neighborhoods for wealthier newcomers.

So we just shrug our shoulders and, instead of "white flight," we call gentrification "white fight"?  Or "white bite"?

Or is there a way to better navigate urbanity's new zeitgeist without simply tolerating its pain?

For one thing, let's remember again that this isn't all about race.  New Urbanists aren't exclusively white, just as all the people who "abandoned" the inner city weren't exclusively white, either.  For another thing, plenty of non-white property owners of inner-city properties will make out quite handsomely by selling out to developers at prices that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

We need to look past skin color and focus on motives, and ways that change can respect both the people fearing it, and those pursuing it.

We can't forget that just because urban decay has happened, residents in these neighborhoods have no claim on their spirit of community.  Whites and the affluent don't have a corner on "community."  Remember that whole thing I discussed concerning rap music, and about how it's come to represent the poor, non-white culture of urban America?  I personally don't like rap, but neither do I like the non-gentrified "hoods" rap describes.  Few people do.  Indeed, there's no denying that rap effectively represents much of the ghetto culture experienced by America's minorities.  Which means that even though our ghettos are unpleasant places, they are still considered "home" by many people.

It's not that gentrification is something that must be stopped (even if it could be).  Instead, it's how we treat people during the process that affords the best chances for improving gentrification's results, after all of the upheaval, change, displacement, integration, newness, and learning curves have worn off.  It's how we handle the disparity between greed and need, not just the gaps between different levels of purchasing power.

Not because cities are worth the investment of our concern, patience, and congeniality.  But because our neighbors are.

Gentrification: Abandoment Issues

Navigating this 3-part series
- Part One  Gentrification: Some Background
- Part Three  Gentrification: Whither (or Wither) Community?
_____

 
Cities Were Never Abandoned

Generally speaking, gentrification is mostly about white people.  Yes, gentrification is social, political, and economic, but there's no getting around it:  If there hadn't been white flight, gentrification probably wouldn't be occurring today.

The extent to which white flight was not based on racism is the extent to which white families really did want to live in the new invention of suburbia, and to create new lives for themselves in some sort of mix of rural and urban, which the suburbs started off as being.  And it's not like the suburbs have never been populated by anybody but whites.  Blacks, too, who could afford to leave cities did so, and they were usually welcomed in suburbia with as much enthusiasm as they'd been welcomed in cities, when cities were still mostly white.

Racism was and is bad, but in terms of white flight, let's not give it more sway than it held.  In 1966, for example, my parents moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York.  My father's employer transferred him there to work with one of their important customers.  Dad had not asked for that transfer, but since, as a Brooklyn boy, he dreamed of owning his own home with its own yard and lawn, and since Mom was originally from rural Maine, they eagerly took the opportunity to leave the city behind.  And they'd been living in a desirable, almost-all-white neighborhood - Bay Ridge - which remains desirable and mostly white to this day.

Yet racism still haunts our discussion of urban America after white flight.  And of gentrification itself, since most of the people participating in the phenomenon of gentrification are white.  We whites tend to presume that once most whites left the inner cities, those neighborhoods became hollow shells of their former, bustling selves.  And, to be sure, for most cities, significant population declines did indeed began to be recorded, as early as the 1950's, for most of America's largest cities.  Declining population numbers persisted well into the 1990's, and even the 2000's, before stabilizing, and then beginning to turn around, and increase.

Thanks mostly to gentrification.

With population declines, property values suffered, which meant cities collected fewer taxes, which meant reductions in city services.  A housing stock that had been constructed for a bigger population now had excess inventory, some of which ended up staying vacant for long periods of time, which rendered them vulnerable to undesirable ends.  Some of the housing stock being vacated by whites fell into disrepair, and became either uninhabitable, or inhabitable only by squatters, the homeless, or drug dealers and users.

However, the common white misperception of America's old cities being abandoned is a false narrative.  It persists mostly because it was mostly whites who abandoned central cities in the first place.  In reality, though, for many neighborhoods, a new, browner and blacker population settled in to replace the exiting whites.  This new population was primarily African-American, or immigrants from other countries, here both legally and illegally.  In some cities, such as New York, and some West Coast cities, the replacements for whites included Asians.  In Texas and California, they included Hispanics.

The numbers of non-white "replacements" often failed to make up the net population losses being experienced by white flight, particularly in older, northern, rust-belt cities.  One of the reasons was that northern cities were rapidly losing good-paying manufacturing jobs, forcing both white and black workers with marketable skills to move generally south, and generally to the suburbs.  Another reason was that when census counts were taken, immigrants illegally in our country made themselves invisible, to avoid being counted, afraid of being found out and arrested.

Indeed, illegal immigration has been an unexplored enemy of urban areas.  Unscrupulous landlords would rent sub-standard housing to illegals, knowing that the official status of their tenants made them unlikely to complain about unkempt or dangerous living conditions.  Such landlords routinely violated city codes for protection against faulty wiring, plumbing, and gas lines.

Of course, such practices weren't limited to buildings housing illegal immigrants.  If you were poor, and desperate for housing, no matter your skin color or ethnicity, you didn't complain about what your landlord did - or didn't - do.  You just paid your rent as best you could, and hoped your home wouldn't blow up for lack of proper maintenance.

These are the types of buildings that are prime candidates for gentrification today, if they haven't been rendered so deteriorated that they aren't better suited for the wrecking ball.

Same Neighborhood, Different Community 

Much has been made of the puzzling social disparities that became evident as non-whites replaced whites in the same houses, apartment buildings, stores, and schools that remained in place during white flight.  While most neighborhoods - when they were white - tended to display a certain amount of cohesion, and a robust sense of community, the same couldn't always be said of the browner and blacker populations that struggled to thrive after whites left the same neighborhood.

It has been speculated that white communities may have enjoyed some shared heritage, such as a national culture salvaged from the "Old Country." This shared heritage helped to identify particular neighborhoods, such as "Little Italy," "Germantown," and the like.  And obviously, when these ethnic whites eventually dispersed into the suburbs, they took their culture with them. 

We now realize that most American blacks and other minorities who replaced whites probably didn't have the same familiar touchstones to help make living in close proximity - an inherent characteristic of urban life - especially easy.  American blacks, for example, generally couldn't gather around their ancestral culture, since most did not know their family's history beyond our country's regrettable slavery era.  And there is no culture of "Africa," since Africa is a continent, comprised of dozens of countries with hundreds of distinct indigenous people groups.

Economically, the whites who left also took their jobs with them, and minorities who moved in generally were poorer from working lower-paying jobs.  The housing stock was also aging, meaning that as repairs became more frequent, and more expensive, new homeowners couldn't keep them maintained as easily.

For a variety of reasons that are still debated today, marriage rates among non-white urbanites never managed to match those of the whites, when they had lived in the same cities.  Poverty was stronger among non-whites, education levels lowered, crime rates rose, and decay of all sorts - social, economic, physical infrastructure, etc. - set in.  Urban American may never have been Eden, but for a long while, it had been tolerable.

Until now.

Eventually, even among new minority residents of the inner city, the objective became getting out while a person could.  Impoverished minority parents struggled to put their kids through college and encouraged them to follow whites out to the 'burbs, where the good jobs and good housing were.  Cities were no longer seen as havens of opportunity, not even by the blacks, Hispanics, and other non-whites whose parents had come to the city in search of a better life.

Ironically, this type of turnstile effect ended up working against urban minorities.  You see, as older generations of replacement urbanites died, or moved out themselves, their more prosperous children weren't taking their place in the neighborhood either.  Many times, whenever any urbanite of any skin color, race, or ethnicity achieved the economic wherewithal to leave the city, they usually did.  The cumulative effect of this resulted in the deepening of poverty's downward cycle.  Cities became even less prosperous, more dangerous, and more undesirable.

Urban Blacks Find Their Populist Voice

From this dismal tableau, eventually, a new confection of cultural identity emerged.  Initially, it was primarily for urban blacks, but it spoke broadly to American urbanites who were generally minority, generally poor, and almost universally frustrated with the disparities they saw between their city lives and the lives of suburban whites.

Rap is reputed to have been invented early in the 1970's in New York City's teeming public housing projects (which, as public entities, are only part of the gentrification movement if these projects are sold on the open market for redevelopment).  And it quickly became an iconic cultural touchstone.  For the urban poor, rap represented a new type of community - that of the black ghetto.  The 'hood.  The street.  The thug culture, with its mechanical grit, darkness, raw survival instinct, the smell of death, the visceral sense of victimization.  While some people dispute the lumping-together of these terms, they do end up referring to the same disaffection, distress, dysfunction, and disenfranchisement that has come to characterize much of the urban minority experience in the United States.

So, in a way, black urban America eventually managed to craft a sort of community for itself, and a culture.  However, it was not a commemoration of glorious ancestry, or a fond perpetuation of venerated nostalgia, such as the white identities that preceded it among America's urban neighborhoods.  Instead, rap was a grim reflection of what inner city existence meant for one of our country's most marginalized people groups.

Before slavery, African Americans could see only ambiguity.  After slavery, there was little to be nostalgic over.  Left to their own devices in the 'hood, many black Americans, for various reasons, failed to become participants in the broader national narrative, which, for better or worse, centered mostly on suburban ideals.

For them, rap became that narrative.

Unfortunately, and I'll be blunt here, even though rap and its various corollaries have become popular across racial and socioeconomic lines, it has not proven to be a particularly ennobling ethos.  Rap's tendency to fixate on darkness, violence, guns, and misogyny is a frustrated and angst-ridden substitute to the more provincial and celebratory cultural touchstones of more conventional cultural expression, whether it be among Italians, Greeks, or even the Chinese and Vietnamese.  To the extent that rap is a language that reflects anger at what urban minorities have had to endure during America's long slog through suburbanization, despite its cultural solace to some of its fans, rap's broader narrative of discord can also be seen as a prelude to how today's poor minorities are being affected by gentrification.

You see, we cannot avoid the reality that gentrification is overwhelmingly being perpetuated by whites.  Yes, there are many blacks and other non-whites who are rediscovering the inner city from suburbia.  And yes, while this is an encouraging and welcome change, since it means that non-whites are steadily climbing America's socioeconomic ladder, the face of gentrification is still mostly white.

It's all the new white faces on the streets that mark the most immediate change urban America's long-time residents see.

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Up Next:  What All This Means For Gentrification

"White fight"?  "White bite"?  How can we best navigate urbanity's new zeitgeist without repeating past mistakes?  Or can we...?

Gentrification: Some Background

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.  My late aunt's longtime neighborhood.
This was just about the lowest that Brooklyn's Sunset Park ever got,
before the neighborhood began to stabilize in the 1990's, with a dramatic influx of Chinese immigrants.
However, the fingers of gentrification began to reach into Sunset Park only a few years ago.

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Navigating this 3-part series
- Part Two  Gentrification: Abandonment Issues
- Part Three  Gentrification: Whither (or Wither) Community?
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Let's talk gentrification.

It can be easy to understand, yet complex in its reality.

Gentrification is what many cities hope happens to their marginalized neighborhoods, yet what most folks living in those marginalized neighborhoods want to avoid.

Unless they own property there.

Indeed, with gentrification, the biggest winners are property owners, especially those who've owned property during a time when it was practically worthless - at least in comparison to what it's worth now, with gentrification taking hold in their neighborhood.

Those property battles can take on lives of their own, like they have in Los Angeles' Boyle Heights district, which has practically become a war zone; not between urban street gangs, however, but between affluent newcomers and advocates for the neighborhoods' longtime (and poor) Hispanic residents.

Gentrification is an urban phenomenon with economic, sociological, racial, and political characteristics.  It can also be caused by any or all of these characteristics, and create deep changes within any or all of these characteristics.  And just as many urban neighborhoods have been gentrified over the past few decades, the phenomenon is even beginning to impact older suburban areas in the United States; suburbs that comprise the earliest ring of development around urban cores, where many whites initially decamped after beginning their mass exodus from cities after World War II.

What is Gentrification?

Gentrification is the process by which neighborhoods that have been in decline are economically reinvigorated and socially re-populated.  It's not simply that property values increase, or that the demographics change, but both of these have to happen for a neighborhood's evolution to be considered gentrification.

Gentrification isn't so much about aesthetics, especially since the grunge look, based largely on the urban slum ethic from the latter half of the Twentieth Century, has become very trendy across the urbanized (and suburbanized) West.  But gentrification creates an environment where grunge exists because people want it to exist, not as a de-facto result of residents not being able to afford anything different.

As a process, when it happens, gentrification can make aging urban neighborhoods relevant again in terms of their ability to provide a relatively safe and robust social environment.  This environment nurtures a community in which people can enjoy many of the things we consider important components of a desirable lifestyle.  Things like clean stores that sell a variety of healthy items, restaurants that aren't just fast-food outlets, schools where students can learn in physically safe environments, and homes that meet and exceed all building codes.

Of course, gentrification occurs where there has recently been a decay in these desirable lifestyle standards.  By contrast, gentrification doesn't happen in neighborhoods that have always been wealthy or socially stable.  Just because a luxury home experiences a rapid rise in its value doesn't mean that gentrification is happening.  However, gentrification in neighborhoods near traditionally affluent ones can drive up prices in long-desirable neighborhoods, further expanding the economic benefits of urban revitalization.

America's Post-War Urban Experience

It's the neighborhoods that experienced white flight after World War II that are the most obvious candidates for gentrification.  Today, in neighborhoods that were initially built for whites, but are now owned or rented by minorities, housing costs are typically the lowest in the city.

By the way, very few cities - particularly in the North - have neighborhoods that were built for blacks.  There are cities in the South that have traditionally been neighborhoods where blacks have lived, but their housing stock has never been considered as desirable as the better-built housing for whites.  Many black neighborhoods in the South had to struggle for the same water and sanitation systems that cities were expected to construct and maintain in whiter neighborhoods.

Yet although racism has played a role in urban blight, a blight which is now being rehabilitated with gentrification, other factors were at play in post-war America that laid the groundwork for today's gentrification.

And please be forewarned:  while an overview of a topic like gentrification can seem overly-dependent on simplifications and generalizations, be aware that to almost every facet of gentrification, there are exceptions depending on the city, the state, and the part of the country where gentrification is taking place. 

Nevertheless, it's a proven fact that across America, many whites moved out of inner cities during the 1950's through the 1980's because suburbanization was considered more desirable than city life.  For one thing, young post-war parents didn't want to raise their children in the same cramped, congested, dirty cities in which they themselves had grown up.  And developers were happy to oblige, buying up farmland and building sprawling new subdivisions with relatively roomy houses and big yards.  American industry was also happy to oblige, offering even more automobiles so suburbanites could put even more miles between their families and the big, bad cities.

Indeed, cities have historically been places of noise, congestion, and filth, where privacy was rare, congestion was commonplace, sanitation was dubious, illnesses could spread quickly, and corruption was rampant.  It's easy for us today to forget how attractive suburbia was when it was invented. 

Unfortunately, another reason suburbanization was considered more desirable rested in the fact that blacks were disproportionately moving into inner cities, making city whites uncomfortable.  Ever since the end of the Civil War, during America's booming Industrial Age, blacks had been migrating to big northern cities in search of work.  And if blacks weren't going north, they were moving from the South's old plantations to southern cities, where work was more abundant. 

For decades, before World War II, there was deep segregation between the races in virtually all American cities.  Because of a variety of factors, including racial prejudice in the job market and in public schools, a significant number of African-Americans were never able to latch onto the rising economic tide that was lifting white boats across American society.  Although big cities have always struggled with poverty, especially among ethnic whites (Irish, Poles, etc.), it was just as noticeable when blacks began populating public housing as when more affluent blacks began moving into formerly white middle-class neighborhoods.  The specter of black crime became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially when poverty rates among blacks began to increase as factories began moving out of their old, outdated urban facilities... and to the suburbs, where their white employees were already moving anyway.

Back in the cities, remaining whites were growing increasingly restless, as property values began to plummet on their block, the more black families moved in.  Banks started redlining entire neighborhoods in racist attempts to preserve housing values so white mortgage-holders wouldn't become "upside-down" in what they owed banks.  Rising crime rates occurred at a suspiciously similar time to what whites saw as a black infiltration into their neighborhoods, and for many whites, it sure seemed like all the street thugs were black.  Of course, as urban black populations grew, and white populations declined, more blacks were being arrested.  Criminologists debate whether that was because so many more blacks were criminals, or whether there were so fewer white criminals, thanks to suburbanization.  It's like a "which came first" game.  But when it comes to urban blight, whites decided that that last one out of the old neighborhood was the rotten egg.

So they kept leaving.

The Tide Turned

This went on unabated across North America until sometime during mid-1990's, when Generation X began to wonder if their parents, the so-called "Greatest Generation," the people who'd left the inner cities decades ago, hadn't given urban America enough of a chance.

You see, to the extent that suburbanization was a trend, we all know what happens to trends:  they change!  And although there's little scientific proof, it's surely no coincidence that after the phenomenal popularity of Gen-X-era television sitcoms set in cities, such as "Seinfeld," "Friends," and even "Cosby Show," a new generation of young people began to rediscover city life.  It looked so cool, so fun, so convenient - everything suburban America no longer was.  The old architecture was intriguing again, as urban buildings suddenly seemed to have more character than the shoddily-built suburban stuff.  So what if cities were noisier than the 'burbs?  America's newest trend-setters were young, and they liked noise.  Suddenly, the bohemian asymmetry that many poorly-maintained urban streetscapes now boasted, after years of make-do budgets and little new construction in financially-stressed cities, was hip, not horrible.

And there it was.  Suburbs had lost their trendy edge.  They were no longer fashionable.  All at once, it seemed, everybody realized they could tell how easy it is to quickly identify when a tract house had been built - simply from looking at its facade.  Suburbs had also lost their ability to fascinate, since by now, suburban life was so ubiquitously American.  And convenience was a rapidly disappearing feature of suburbia, since you needed a car to get anyplace, and traffic congestion was always increasing.

Suddenly, living within blocks of one's work, and hip restaurants, and museums, and not always needing to drive to all of those places - it was like a whole new world was opening up to young people eager to leave their parents' lifestyle behind.  So they did. 

Of course, by now, most inner-city school districts had gotten so bad, that many Gen-X'ers still decided to decamp back to the 'burbs when their own progeny hit the pre-K stage.

But the suburbanization trend had definitely been reversed.  Sure, some hard-core suburbanites continued to press outward, past the older ring of dated suburbs, to the exurbs, even further away from the city.  But America's return to its cities, which were now seen as desirable places to live and work, has been a surprising and welcome change for many long-beleaguered city halls.

Property values have risen in old cities, banks are now lending and offering market-rate mortgages in some admittedly decrepit neighborhoods.  Indeed, if there are red lines today, they're around neighborhoods bankers see as ripe for redevelopment opportunities.  Builders are constructing new apartment complexes and office buildings on previously discarded or under-utilized land, and new mass transit projects are trying to help new urbanites secure as much of that walkability factor as possible.

This all means that cities are collecting more in taxes, "brownfield" land has been re-purposed, crime rates are lower, and even if some suburbanites still don't want to live downtown, they're now far more willing to go there for pricey dinners and entertainment options.

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Next Up:  Cities Were Never Abandoned
Only white people have considered cities to have been abandoned.  But that's because it's been mostly whites who abandoned urban America (to be continued...)

Bill, the Lillie of the Valley

Bill was a tiny spitfire of a woman.

She never much cared for her given name, Lillie, so she went by “Bill.”  However, my brother and I  always called her "Mrs. Watson."  Even our parents did.  It confused us greatly when Mrs. Watson signed her first Christmas card to my family with “Bill."  Back in 1978, at least, seeing “J.C. and Bill Watson” on a Christmas card seemed so odd.

J.C. was her husband, a taller, portly man who always wore a black suit and a white shirt.  Back in the day, he and his brother owned a small chain of department stores across a few then-small towns between Fort Worth and Dallas, at a time when “main streets” really were main streets, and townspeople did all their shopping along them.

Mr. and Mrs. Watson made for a study in contrasts – with him taller and stocky, and Bill so short – incredibly short – and petite.  And their personalities didn't seem terribly similar, either.  He was quiet and unassuming; she was not loud either, but she talked more, and had definite ideas about things, and knew how to advance those ideas firmly yet graciously.

She was always a traditionalist, while at the same time, she could defy convention.  She personally designed their beautiful yet unpretentious home, and acted as general contractor during its construction, which was indeed an unusual thing for a woman in the 1960's, in provincial Texas.  Her design is simple and elegant - a long, low-slung one-story home, based on the type of farmhouses that were typical of her growing-up years in far south Texas.  Her parents had owned fertile acreage in what Texans call "the Valley," near Texas' southernmost border with Mexico, a region particularly famous for its ruby-red grapefruit.  She incorporated a full-length covered porch on the front, and another long porch on the back, all with Saltillo tile flooring she'd personally selected from a tile factory in Mexico.  The tan-colored hand-made bricks sheathing her home she'd also selected in Mexico.

The Watson house; image from Google Maps

It's a theme you'll notice often in Bill's life:  her love of hand-crafted things.  Their intrinsic uniqueness seemed to speak to her.

She installed hand-made front doors from Spain, and while their wood is beautifully fashioned in a classic Spanish style, she'd specified the wood to be of a particular variety.  A variety that, even today, has some sort of wormy, gooey fungus that, from time to time, oozes out of the wood.  It's as gross as it sounds, and the first time I saw it, I feared Mrs. Watson's doors were woefully flawed. 

"Mrs. Watson!" I remember exclaiming, "You have puss oozing from your doors!"  It looked like a case of really bad acne.  Oh, it was so gross.

Yet the ever-proper Mrs. Watson was mostly surprised that I was unfamiliar with this species of wood (I can't remember what she called it; I researched it for this essay, but can't find anything like it on the Internet).  Apparently, she'd chosen it because it helps to keep the wood moist, which is technically a feature to accommodate Texas' often-arid summers.

The more I've thought about it, her front entry doors contribute a great deal to understanding Bill Watson's character. On the one hand, viewed from the street, they look attractive, but not particularly exceptional. Yet upon closer inspection, they were obviously constructed with extraordinary craftsmanship, each piece of wood still solidly in place, as if straight out of an old-world carpenter's shop.  And they possess that secret, intrinsic ability to provide for their own maintenance; a quality even a botanist friend of mine was entirely unfamiliar with when I asked for her input.

Once behind these doors, those pink-hued Saltillo tile floors extend throughout the home's main rooms.  So although Mrs. Watson had plush Aubusson rugs on her floors, sounds do tend to echo a bit.  And her crisp voice tended to predominate in those echoes, while her husband’s was far more muted.  Not that she ever yelled, of course.  Bill was a genteel Southern lady, with a lilting laugh and a poised diction that disguised her humble roots from “the Valley.”

Almost certainly, it was those humble roots, during the Great Depression, with little money available for travel, and little opportunity for cultural enrichment beyond "the Valley's" Tex-Mex pluralism, that helped push Bill towards something different.  Something beyond the miles and miles of fields and placid agriculture in which the inquisitive and gregarious little woman had grown up.  After graduating from high school, Bill went on to college, which was a rarity for women in those days.  She ventured into office work for large oil companies in New Orleans and Los Angeles, and joined the foreign service to help with America's rebuilding of Japan after World War II.

In photos from her time in Tokyo, Bill looks exceedingly comfortable, especially for a small-town Texas farm girl, in the cosmopolitan culture of a capitol city, in a country that had been a bitter enemy of the United States just a few years earlier.  Her incredibly short stature helped her fit in physically with the Japanese.  She loved the propriety of their culture, the proud nature of the people, and their fastidious industriousness.  Their wartime allegiances aside, the Japanese were just like her.  Which, for Bill, seemed to affirm not only the similarities that can be found across humanity, but also her own enthusiasm for her country, since the United States was participating in a vast humanitarian exercise to rehabilitate a nation it had just defeated.  There was a virtue in America's civilized response to victory that energized Bill's patriotism, and continued throughout the rest of her storied life.

I’m actually fairly uncomfortable referring to her as “Bill,” since when I met her, I was 13; an age at which I was expected to politely refrain from calling my elders by their first names.   She was Mrs. Watson to me then, and she’s Mrs. Watson to me now.

My brother met her first, shortly after we’d moved to Arlington, Texas, from upstate New York.  He’d been riding his bike around our new neighborhood, and Mrs. Watson had been in her front yard, tending to her immaculate landscaping.  She saw a young boy riding down the street – the Watson’s lived at the top of a hill, which was a fun spot for young bike riders, as you might imagine – but she didn’t recognize him, since we were brand-new to the neighborhood.  And being an outgoing person, she introduced herself.  And my brother came home, remarking on how friendly one of our new neighbors was… and about how fun that hill was in front of her house.

She was in her mid-sixties by then, her husband’s business was slowing down thanks to America’s newfound preoccupation with regional shopping malls, and she was about to become a grandmother for the first time.  Much of her days was spent on what had become her favorite hobby - her yard.  She used to have turf grass as her lawn, the type you see on golf courses, and she owned a lawnmower specifically designed to cut it.  She clipped the edges of her lawn as precisely as any groundskeeper at any prestigious country club would, and she kept her shrubs trimmed to within an inch of their lives.  It wasn’t until she developed skin cancer from being outside so much – despite always wearing a huge, floppy hat – that she finally hired a yard crew… which she supervised like a mother hen.

And the stories she’d tell, as she'd take breaks in her yard chores!  At first, I struggled to understand why a young woman would go to Japan to work so enthusiastically in a nation we’d just defeated in war.  I’ve never liked traveling, and foreign cultures are… well, foreign to me!  But Mrs. Watson would almost glow, regaling me with anecdotes of her time in Japan… or about the time when she wanted to see the Caribbean, and somehow ended up as the only paying passenger on a freighter sailing to Barbados.

Not that she was a loose woman by any means – she was utterly moral.  She wasn’t exactly the type of woman who’d risk her virtue by sailing on a ship populated only by burly men.  Yet she ended up subduing those mariners and earning their respect at a time in history when women typically weren’t widely successful in that regard.

Her son-in-law reminisced with me recently about how she used to drive - well, "fly" would be a more accurate term!  She drove like a bat-outta-you-know-where, and she always drove silver luxury cars.  We could have called her a silver bullet, I guess.  And she was so short, in a couple of the cars she drove, they had to pay to have the driver’s seat removed from its factory-installed track, and re-bolted into place even closer to the steering wheel, so she could see over the dashboard to pilot her cruiser.  Her husband couldn’t drive her cars, because he was so much bigger than she, and the seat couldn’t be moved to accommodate anybody else but her.

I’ve never enjoyed driving into Dallas, which is about half an hour away from us, but Mrs. Watson treated Big D like it was her backyard.  She had friends from around the world, thanks to her many travels. She also enjoyed maps, and would study up on places she was planning to visit in such detail that one time, after flying into a city she’d never been to before, she accurately instructed her cab driver on how to get to her hotel.

Over the years, she stayed abreast of many details related to her husband’s business, and after he died, when their store in Arlington was finally shuttered and the property sold, she was indignant at its selling price.

“J.C. purposely built that store with a reinforced sub-basement and elevator shaft that could support several additional stories, so it could be re-purposed into an office building,” she sputtered to me.  “From day one, he knew that building probably wouldn’t always be a department store.”  And Mr. Watson was correct.  Today, it’s an office building for the University of Texas at Arlington.

Over the years, Mrs. Watson’s health would have its ups and downs, but the only reason we ever knew she had skin cancer came when she hired that outside crew to begin doing her landscaping.  She never complained about her health, except when her failing eyesight kept her from enjoying television and reading.  Eventually, those prized Saltillo tile floors came back to haunt her, when she fell on them more than once, but even then, she kept her stints in the hospital shrouded in secrecy.  Not because she was afraid of getting older, but because she didn’t want to burden other people with her problems.  She knew how fortunate she’d been in her life, and she knew that other people had things far worse than she did.

I did know about one of her surgeries, but not from Mrs. Watson herself.  Her beloved daughter told me – or, at least, told me when Mrs. Watson was due back home from the hospital!  The next day, as I was on my usual evening walk, before the sun set, I went by Mrs. Watson’s house, and down that hill into the cul-de-sac, and I saw her daughter leave in her own silver Cadillac.

I didn’t think anything of it until I began to hear some rustling and banging going on in the toolshed attached to Mrs. Watson's backyard carport.

“Who would have the audacity to break into Mrs. Watson’s toolshed at this hour, with the sun still out, and her daughter having just left?” I wondered as I rounded the cul-de-sac.  The odd noises continued, so when I reached her driveway on my way back up the hill, I simply strode down it to the end of her driveway, where her carport and toolshed were.  And through the open door of the toolshed, I saw Mrs. Watson, not yet a full day home from the hospital, in her housedress, fussing with that cumbersome turf grass mower of hers.

She looked up and saw me coming.  And with a stiff index finger pointed swiftly at me, she sternly ordered, “Don’t tell my daughter!  She thinks I’ve gone to bed.”

Instead, Mrs. Watson had been hoping her daughter would leave while it was still daylight, so she could fiddle with that turf mower, an apparently cantankerous machine that she didn’t entirely trust to her yard crew.

So I obeyed her command.  Until last week, that is, as I talked with her daughter, who was planning Mrs. Watson’s funeral.  She died two Fridays ago, after a three-year struggle with all sorts of ailments; quietly, in the house she’d designed herself, with her family around her bedside.  Elegantly, in full command of her family’s affections, and a nurse hovering next to her; well into her nineties, having outlived everybody else of her generation in her family.

I figured it was now safe to tell her daughter about the turf mower.

And she laughed.

It was so Bill... the Lillie of the Valley.

My Family's Illegal Immigrant

I have an illegal immigrant in my family.

Well, at least one, anyway... that we know about.

He isn't Latino, or Asian.  He didn't smuggle his way here.  Nor did he pay some human traffickers thousands of dollars to get here.

In fact, we're not completely sure of how he got to America.  But according to family lore, at least as far as my aunt Helena is concerned, what we think we know tends to make sense, and the dates seem to work.  But we don't know definitively, because our family's illegal immigrant died in the 1950's.  As an alcoholic.  And because he was an alcoholic, he was not fondly remembered by his children when they'd recount their childhood stories to us.

My aunt, who died last year, and my Dad, who died the year before that, were his children.  So the illegal immigrant was my paternal grandfather.  My grandfather died before my own parents ever met.  And for years, Mom didn't know much about him either, because Dad, my aunt, and their mother never talked about him, since his life with them had been so miserable.  Eventually, Dad told us about the time he got home from work, as a college student back in Brooklyn, and opened the door to the apartment he shared with his family.  And there was his mother, and Helena, standing on the other side of a short, portly figure on the floor of their apartment's foyer.

It was my grandfather.  Dead.  My grandmother had arrived home first, and then shortly thereafter, my aunt.  And then Dad.  Dad closed the door, and the three of them stood silently, looking down at the man whose drunken stupors had become legendary in their Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park.  Dad recalled to us that his sister and mother and he were numbed by a mixture of relief and grief - but not grief that he was gone.  It was grief about how much the family had suffered, living with such a hardened alcoholic all those years.

Finally, if only to break the heavy silence, Dad asked out loud, "Well, who do we call to take the body away?  Will Halversen's do it?"

Halversen's is the name of a long-time Norwegian funeral home on Sunset Park's 8th Avenue.  But I'm not even sure there was a funeral.  Nobody ever talked about there being one.

My grandfather was born in Finland, in a sliver of the Nordic country that ended up being invaded by Russia in the Winter War of 1939, about two decades after my grandfather ended up in America.  My Mom has two silver spoons with which my grandfather's sister was able to escape as their family's home in Viipuri faced imminent danger from the Russian invasion.  The town of Viipuri, still in Russian hands, is today called Vyborg.

As a young man, my grandfather set off from Viipuri as a sailor, or seaman, or deckhand, working on trans-Atlantic steamships and freighters.  We have records of him attending the venerable Seamen's Church Institute on South Street in Lower Manhattan, along the docks that used to spike outwards from the Financial District.  At the Seamen's Church, worship services were geared to maritime workers from around the world, working odd shifts, and lonely from months-long stints at sea.

On one of the voyages my grandfather worked, a freshly-loaded freighter from the Caribbean headed towards Europe, the deckhands were strictly instructed to stay away from a locked portion of the ship's hold, below deck.  Which, of course, was like telling a bunch of teenaged boys not to do something.  Before too long, my grandfather and some of his shipmates had broken into that forbidden part of the ship.  And what they saw deeply distressed my grandfather.

There, in the locked part of the hold, were men.  

Black men, in shackles.

We believe this was sometime around 1916*, which used to make me dubious.  Slavery was still a thing, that long after America's Civil War?

Apparently, an illicit fragment of it was, since it was a topic of grave concern for the League of Nations during the 1920's.  Somehow, the ship's owners had arranged for these men to be smuggled aboard without the crew knowing of it, and somehow, ostensibly in Europe, they were going to be off-loaded, probably to be shipped to yet another destination.

We don't know many details about that discovery, but back then, my grandfather knew exactly what was going on.  And he wanted to be no part of it.  Absolutely not.

The ship's next port of call was New York City, with which we believe my grandfather was already familiar from previous visits.  He likely knew there was a vibrant Finnish community in Brooklyn, and that he could become culturally absorbed there without attracting much attention.  So when they docked in New York, my grandfather jumped ship - literally - forfeiting his pay in the process.  And he walked away from those caged human beings, off of the pier, out onto the streets of New York, never to work on ships again.

My father took this photo of his father - the older man at left, and again in the reflection top right -
in their Sunset Park apartment in the mid-1950's.  It's one of the few photos of my grandfather,
and we believe it was his last.  Nobody can remember who the other two men are.

Eventually, after he'd married and become a father, my grandfather obtained his United States citizenship.

My grandmother, who arrived in the United States years later, spent a night on Ellis Island because her American sponsor didn't show up to claim her.  That was one of the legal ways people got into the country back then - by having a sponsor in America vouch for you.  Officials on Ellis Island herded those migrants whose sponsors hadn't claimed them into a large cage with iron bars for the night.  My grandmother could hardly sleep, what with the utter lack of privacy, and worrying about what would happen to her.  Turned out, she made sure she was at the front of the cage the next morning - this big cage, probably similar to what my grandfather saw those slaves inside of - her face pressed against the bars.  Eventually, a sternly-dressed woman strode into the immigration hall at Ellis Island, having just gotten off of the boat from Manhattan.  She walked right up to my grandmother, and asked her in perfect Finnish if she wanted to get off that island.

"Of course I do," my grandmother eagerly replied.

"Well then, just follow my lead," the anonymous woman ordered.  She turned to an immigration clerk, and said she'd come to claim my grandmother, and had a job immediately for her in Manhattan.

"Is this true?" the dubious clerk half-motioned, half asked in broken Finnish to my grandmother.

"Of course it is!" my grandmother retorted, completely unaware of what that job was.

My grandmother Laitinen's first US employer
lived in this townhouse, 60 W. 11th Street
in Greenwich Village. I took this photo in 1986.
Historians call it "the 1843* Samuel Cooke
House", built by Andrew Lockwood and first
occupied by a ship captain named Samuel Bourne.
Lockwood was one of the developers of 11th Street,
which at the time was at the city's northern reaches.
The property's first auspicious owner had been
Cooke, who was rector at New York's famed
St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church.
Other owners would later rent it out
to various occupants, so we don't know who my
grandmother's celebrity employer was.
Among the home's worst tenants was a secret
abortion clinic, years before it was legalized.
More recent owners have included the son
of the late publisher Malcomb Forbes.
(*The historical plaque affixed to the
home's façade says it was built in 1842)

The two woman left the hall and got on the next boat to Manhattan as soon as possible.  And that night, my grandmother found herself working as a maid at a party at a townhouse in Greenwich Village that was rented at the time by a well-known silent movie producer.

As they say, "only in New York," right?

At some point, obviously, my grandparents met in Brooklyn, got married, and had children.  My grandfather never seems to have held down a steady job, and eventually came to be known mostly for his prodigious drinking, and for writing a regular column for the local Finnish newspaper, New Yorkin Uutiset.  He wrote pieces about current events, philosophy, and life on the sea under the pen name "X Seaman," since that's what he was.  Years later, my aunt learned that the prestigious New York Public Library had some of his articles on file as part of their cultural heritage department. 

Family friends who knew my grandfather in Brooklyn's old Finntown have told us that he wasn't as entirely horrible as his family remembered him as being.  And it's been suggested that one of the reasons for his drinking - despite the fact that Finns are notorious for their alcohol consumption - might have stemmed from his disturbing experience on that trans-Atlantic ship.  As a Finn, back in the days when Finland was virtually 100% Caucasian, my grandfather would have barely known about slavery, and to him it likely would have been something that horrible people had done back in another time and place.  Not on board a ship he was working!

So for all the agony my grandfather gave his family through his drinking, I've come to value his distress over having the concept of human slavery break into his reality.  I sometimes wonder if, today, we whites would do well to let ourselves be a bit more agitated over something we figure only happened to somebody else back in another time and place.

Because while it may not be our reality now, it remains part of family lore for many African Americans.


* Thanks to research my Mother has been doing in 2021, with help from Finnish cousins on both my paternal and maternal sides, we've learned that Walter had established mailing addresses for himself in Brooklyn as early as 1913.  So it's logical to assume 1913 is a more accurate date for his ship-jumping.

Lee Statue Removal Happens in Dallas

By the time you read this, Dallas will have one less statue of Civil War general Robert E. Lee on public display.

Currently, the city owns two Lee statues; one towers over a small park downtown near city hall and the convention center, and another commands - or, commanded - a prominent knoll overlooking a swanky boulevard known as Turtle Creek, near some of the priciest neighborhoods in the entire state of Texas.

Even Lee's detractors can't deny that the statue in his honor along Turtle Creek, in a public park named after the general, is a fine piece of art.  At least, in terms of its workmanship and aesthetics.  But with America's current fixation on commemorations of Civil War leaders - at least, leaders from the losing side - Dallas city councilmembers have voted to remove the two Lee statues from city property.  And the first one they chose to have removed from public viewing wasn't the one downtown, within blocks of the city's historically black-majority neighborhoods.

It was the one along Turtle Creek, named after a real creek that winds its way through some of the whitest districts in Dallas' northern neighborhoods.

This particular piece of artwork is actually composed of two elements; an over-sized depiction of a caped General Lee on his horse, and then another horse of a slightly smaller stature with a young, anonymous man (ostensibly one of Lee's soldiers) riding it.  Some folks defending this statue say the young man supposedly represents an African-American teenager, but its anglicized facial features in no way convey such an interpretation, at least in the obvious sense.

One person has already died in Dallas's push to remove Turtle Creek's Lee statue.  Last Wednesday was the council's vote to remove it, and work began immediately, which surprised many Dallasites, used to a far less efficient city hall.  A small crowd hurriedly gathered in Lee Park to either protest or celebrate the historic occasion.  But then the city's more commonplace tendency for lousing things up kicked back into gear.  The first crane hired for the job proved unable to handle the 6-ton bronze piece, which is - sorry, "was" - affixed to a handsome granite base.  The second crane brought to town for the job was hit by a red-light-running tractor-trailer truck this past weekend, and the 18-wheeler's driver was killed.  Even as late as last night, city leaders were guessing - at least to the media - as to when the statue could be removed.  A non-profit group sympathetic to keeping the statue intact had booked a protest at Lee Park for this coming Saturday, and it looked inevitable that the general would indeed be present during the protest to serve as a backdrop to the group's rallying cry.

Initially, Dallas budgeted over $400,000 for removing the Lee Park statue, and currently, it's unknown how much extra these delays have added to that budget.

Then, this afternoon, Dallasites were again caught by surprise at the sight of a new crane heading for Lee Park under a police escort.  And all during the statue's removal, police officers in body armor, with rifles in hand, stood guard around the perimeter of the work site.  The six-lane Turtle Creek Boulevard was closed to vehicular traffic, allowing bystanders a relatively unobstructed view of the proceedings.  And sure enough, by seven o'clock, the statue was down, without incident.

Of course, to some folks, the entire removal of Lee's statue is more than an incident - it's a travesty of justice and a refutation of history.  By now, we're all familiar with the arguments against removing statues such as this one in Lee Park  - a park that will likely soon revert to its original name, Oak Lawn Park, which it held before the Lee statue was erected in 1936.  Incidentally, it was then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat, who dedicated the statue, which kinda flies in the face of a more modern narrative that only right-wing conservatives value the historicity of figures like General Lee.

In fact, history can be a complicated thing, as our bickering over America's Civil War proves.  Even Abraham Lincoln, long heralded as a hero for African Americans, did not consider blacks equal with whites.  It is now known that although Lincoln lead the Union in its quest to abolish the institution of slavery, at the same time, he was quietly negotiating to expel freed blacks from the continental United States after the war, to islands in the Caribbean.*  That inconvenient reality hardly fits seamlessly into the historical narrative most people want to believe about our national heroes, so it is not widely taught, or discussed.  I also knew a black woman whose family - in Mississippi, if I remember correctly - actually owned slaves as well, although it was a factoid of which she wasn't proud.  Still, she told me it was part of the reality of Southern economics at the time - if you owned a lot of farmland, it was cheaper to purchase workers to help with the crops rather than employ them, whether the landowner was black or white.

So is there really much of the Old South that's worth venerating, as many Southerners nostalgically claim there is?  Southern gentility is a concept that may have a romantic component, both now in the imaginations of people who never actually lived it, and back then, if you were wealthy enough to benefit from it.  But since it was largely based on an economic system sustained by slave labor, the gentility factor is corrupt in its practice, if not in its theory.  The plantation system was mostly a hold-over of the baronial British aristocratic system, which kept poorly-paid workers in perpetual servitude, subject to the whims of feudal honor, which itself is mostly derided in modern Britain today.

Then there's the question of modern America honoring a traitor to the republic such as Lee was, if you want to consider the literal definition of the term and its application to military justice.  Granted, none of the Confederacy's generals were ever tried for treason, mostly because Union lawmakers were afraid about how the public, deeply wounded and raw after such a bloody war, would react to a verdict one way or the other.  The overarching sentiment at the time was a desire to move forward as best as possible for the cause of national healing, but even that noble goal was eventually thwarted by unresolved issues over how freed blacks should be treated on either side of the Mason-Dixon line.

You see, racism was never defeated.  The Civil War didn't so much end because right had might; it ended because the South ran out of soldiers first.

That was back in 1865, but as we all know, the Civil War ain't over.  When my family moved to Texas in 1978, we were called "Yankees" by many native Texans, and kids in our neighborhood played "North against the South" - something my brother and I had never heard of up in rural Cleveland, New York.  Cops and Robbers?  Yes.  Cowboys and Indians?  Yes.  But I didn't even know what the Mason-Dixon line was until we moved to Texas.

Even today, the rebel flag - the "Stars and Bars" - is deeply revered by many as a symbol of not just the Confederacy, but the whole idealized notion of whatever the antebellum South was supposed to be.  "The South's gonna rise again" is a phrase that isn't entirely obsolete in the Southern lexicon.  And opposition to the removal of statues honoring Confederacy heroes such as Lee and Stonewall Jackson, just to name two, is potent here.

With all this in mind, if Dallas leaders wanted to make a statement against the Confederacy and its connotation with racism, why remove the Lee statue in Turtle Creek first?  Remember that other memorial here in Dallas?  It doesn't have only General Lee in it.  Lee is just one of four Confederacy heroes celebrated by this far more imposing structure, which consists of a main 60-foot pillar surrounded by four shorter ones, made of granite and marble.  It's called the Confederate War Memorial, it was dedicated in 1896, and it's considered the oldest public artwork in the city.

And the inscriptions on it? 

• “The brazen lips of Southern cannon thundered an unanswered anthem to the God of Battle.” 
• “It was given the genius and valor of Confederate seamen to revolutionize naval warfare over the earth.” 
• "This stone shall crumble into dust ere the deathless devotion of Southern women be forgotten.” 
• “The Confederate sabreur kissed his blade homeward riding on into the mouth of hell.” 
• “Confederate infantry drove bayonets through columns that never before reeled to the shock of battle.”

I guess such romanticized notions as these are part of that Southern gentility thing.  But don't their contrived notions of valor - at the unmentioned expense of slavery - make the Confederacy memorial downtown worthy of more attention than what Dallas' city council paid to the Lee statue?

Meanwhile, this is what President Roosevelt had to say when he dedicated Lee's newer statue along Turtle Creek:

"I am very happy to take part in this unveiling of the statue of General Robert E. Lee.  All over the United States we recognize him as a great leader of men, as a great general.  But, also, all over the United States I believe that we recognize him as something much more important than that.  We recognize Robert E. Lee as one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen."

Hmm.

At the end of the day, much of our perception of the past depends on the rhetoric that tends to fit our worldview, doesn't it?  In other words, if you really want to believe Lee was as hateful a Southerner as his detractors claim him to have been, you will support the narrative that memorials to him must be obliterated from our country.  On the other hand, however, if you really want to cling to the notion that being a "great American gentleman" (whatever that means) should lead us to venerate people like Lee, you probably will be angry that Dallas removed a statue of him today.

So what do I think?  Personally, I neither believe Lee was personally as hateful towards blacks as he's been portrayed as being.  I suspect he was a flawed product of his time who couldn't see past the Southern economic model of slavery.  Does that make him a racist?  Yes, but then again, many folks today are racists; they're just not defined as one the way Lee has been.

Nobody can argue that we don't still have a problem with race relations in our country.  And it's past time for us to admit that we need to work harder at overcoming the prejudices that have sabotaged racial harmony since before were were a nation.  So to that end, I think the magnanimous thing to do would be to remove from public land icons to the Confederacy that likely are misinterpreted and misrepresented today by people with various motives.  If there are historical organizations that want to house these icons on private land, then they should be allowed to do so, but the best memorials will be those that portray a broader and more wholistic representation of the Civil War, the Confederacy, and the Union, warts and all.

I can understand why taxpayers who aren't white don't want their tax dollars used to maintain statues that could be used to celebrate a way of life that mistreated people.  But more than that, since Lee is - to put the best possible spin on it - associated with a culture that sought to perpetuate the ownership of human beings, is that really something for us to so conspicuously celebrate?  After all, do we celebrate the owners of brothels?  Do we celebrate Aaron Burr, who was the third person to be vice-president of our fledgling United States, but was put on trial for treason?

What's the harm in removing statues to Lee and other Confederate legends?  Who's going to forget about those men?  Certainly not all of the Southerners who insist that "the South shall rise again"!  And the Civil War isn't going to fade away from our national consciousness anytime soon.  So what's the big deal?

Part of me wonders if the agitation so many people feel at the removal of Confederacy statuary reflects not simply frustration at the changing political and social landscape of America, but also a shadow of some latent racial issues that folks don't want to admit exists inside of them.

If I touched a nerve with that, then maybe I've got a point?

And if you agree with me, don't gloat.  No matter how you look at it, this should be a somber time for America, since we all have things to learn from it.
_____

* What preserves Lincoln's reputation is the fact that he was assassinated before ever being able to implement any part of any plan to deport newly-freed slaves.  Educators and historians like to assume that by the war's gruesome end, Lincoln's mindset had changed enough so that he would not have pursued the re-colonization idea. 
_____
Update - June 7, 2019:  A Dallas lawyer purchased the Lee statue at auction for $1.43 million.  A condition of the sale is that the statue can no longer be displayed within view of any public property.