Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog

Fighting the Power of Greed with Poetry: Poetic People Power’s “Closed: NYC Shuts its Doors to Artists”

Poetry readings are a decidedly mixed bag: they can be interminable snooze-fests, or, like Wednesday night’s show by the folks from Poetic People Power, exciting, engaging, and inspirational.  In the show, seven New York area poets took on the topic of the ongoing gentrification of New York and how the increasing rent and destruction of community space is making it impossible for artists to live here anymore.

The seven poets—Shetal Shah, Pamela Sneed, Justin Woo, Scottt Raven, Tara Bracco (who also produced and hosted), Andy Emeritz, Vaimoana Niumeitolo were all highly competent and energetic, reading poems commissioned especially for the show.  

Shetal Shah sang/read a wonderfully evocative poem about how when she was young New York City used to hum.  She loved the grit and grime, and wandered through the city deliriously, her heart about to  
explode.  But now that they’ve scrubbed the sidewalk down to sterility, she goes out looking for just a little bit of that authenticity.  She seeks out the places that still hold the magic, little corners forgotten by Starbucks.  (Please excuse the paraphrase of Shah’s poem.  I was taking notes in the dark.  The real thing is great, I assure you.)  (Image by Mark Rywelski, White | Hutch | Productions.)

Pamela Sneed declares that “Brooklyn is the New Rwanda,” and tells us that when she gets mad about people of color being displaced from their longtime neighborhoods, she’s often told that she shouldn’t take it personally, that it’s just about money, or business, or whatever.  But, she replies, when
people like her, lesbians and people of color, are always on the receiving end, somehow it doesn’t seem so arbitrary.  How can she help but take it personally?!

Andy Emiritz, of Field Theory fame, provided a welcome musical interlude.  Finally, Vaimoana Niumeitolo read a very funny poem about “crois-nuts,” those mutant treats which are, or should become, some sort of symbol of the banality and vapidity of the people who are taking over New York.  Have a regular doughnut at the Donut Pub on 14^th St. in Chelsea, a neighborhood institution, before it goes the way of so many other great places before it.

The readings of the various poets were informed by a sense of urgency because, in addition to the
pressures that all creative people face in their struggle to stay true to their own individual visions in a rapidly transforming city, their group, Poetic People Power, which has been presenting political poetry for 12 years, recently lost its funding and was only able to put on this year’s show due to a fortuitous, last minute donation from a private source.  Even worse, the venue, Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place, a family business that’s been in the building since 1963, may soon be in imminent danger.  Both recent mayors—Bloomberg and Di Blasio—raised the building’s property taxes, which climbed in recent years from $50,000 to $130,000 a year.  Needless to say, if places like this go, then so does the theatre scene.

Far from simply bemoaning the situation, Poetic People’s Power does indeed seek solutions to the problems it poses.  In response to a show about the water crisis in a previous year, producer Tara Bracco co-founded the Project Solution, which funds infrastructure projects in 11 developing countries.  Bracco also put in a plug for Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, and I’d like to second that: it’s a great website documenting the ongoing decimation of old New York.  Hopefully Jeremiah won’t be covering the demise of Theatre 80 anytime soon.  Hopefully, too, Poetic People Power will be around for another show next year—perhaps about the triumph of art and the human spirit over the obscene greed of capitalism!  As Andy Emeritz (once again, in my blind-as-a-bat paraphrase) says: The stream of art will not be stopped.  Diversity of novel thought bubbles up from below, always making rivers, flowing from the New York underground. . . . - Ed Hamilton
(Images by Mark Rywelski, White | Hutch | Productions.)

 

Brooklyn Artist Appeals for Selfies for Anti-Gentrification Documentary Project

As Brooklyn social worker and performer Imani Henry points out, and as most of us are seeing first hand, “rents are increasing while incomes are decreasing.”  In a recent article in The Guardian, Chris Toenes, a social worker who supports Henry's program, relates an anecdote about an older man who is astonished to find out that the old African American neighborhood of Braggtown, North Carolina, has now been rechristened as “Colonial Heights”, by developers hoping to attract a more well-to-do class of residents.

The neighborhood’s new name, of course, betrays an ominous significance.  Gentrification is completely out of hand, not only in New York and San Francisco, but in cities large and small all across the country.  Is it a vast social engineering project, or merely a confluence of many and disparate forces such as real estate speculation, privatization of resources, the weakening of unions, globalization, political corruption, etc. etc.?

It’s hard to say.  But the important thing is to fight back on a local level in whatever small way we can.  To this end, Henry has developed a web-based art project called “Before it’s Gone—Take it Back”, to have residents document neighborhood life in Brooklyn—“weddings, backyard barbecues, quinceaneras, bar/bat mitzvahs,” etc.—and to tie it to the history of their neighborhoods.  It’s important to connect what’s happening today to the history of a place, because history is one of the main things that these developers want to expunge—or rather, to sanitize in order to present their own more palatable, squeaky-clean vanilla version of the past.  Such an whitewash makes it that much easier to ignore the cries of the working and middle class people that gentrification displaces.

            Help Imani Henry thwart the developers Orwellian intentions.  To learn more about his project, to perhaps kick in a few dollars, send a selfie, or even to be inspired to start your own local project, go to "Before it's Gone - Take it Back". -- Ed Hamilton

(Photo: New York Post - )

Between Riverside and Crazy: One Man’s Struggle to Keep His Rent-Stabilized Apartment

With their backs to the wall, creative artists are struggling to come to terms with the forces of gentrification that are altering their lives beyond recognition.  So, in a sense, it’s no surprise to find a playwright wrestling with this subject, which after all, touches many of them personally.  On the other hand, probably
due to the complexities of the issues surrounding rent control, eviction proceedings, social engineering, city corruption, etc., there haven’t been many attempts.  That’s why Between Riverside and Crazy, a new play by the Atlantic Theatre Company, represents a real act of courage by playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis.  Handily defeating the dark, depressing nature of the subject matter, the play was hilariously funny, poignant, and infinitely enjoyable.  Clocking in at just under two hours, the time went by in a flash.  After the intermission, as an attempt is made to move the plot forward, the play becomes both less funny and less believable at the same time.  However, the first act alone is well worth the price of admission.

The play opens in the kitchen of the rent stabilized apartment of the main character, “Pops,” an elderly retired cop played by Stephen McKinley Henderson.  Having lost his wife a year ago, Pops is in poor health, he drinks a lot, and he’s fallen prey to his middle-aged son and his son’s no-account friends, an air-headed prostitute and a drug-addled thug who live in the apartment rent-free.  Ominously, Pops has been ignoring court summonses from his landlord.  To further complicate matters, Pops’s old NYPD partner and her corrupt upper-brass fiancé arrive to try to talk Pops into accepting a settlement in his lawsuit against the city.  For Pops, it turns out, was disabled when a white cop, in an apparently racist incident, shot him in a bar eight years before.

            The actors are uniformly good, especially Stephen McKinley Henderson who, as Pops, an irascible, Fred Sanford-like old curmudgeon, ranges from mirth to righteous anger,  dominating the play seemingly effortlessly—scarcely moving from his dead wife’s wheelchair—and is a joy to behold.  Hopefully we’ll be seeing a lot more of him.  Michael Rispoli, of Sopranos fame, gave a typically fine performance.  Victor Almanzar as Oswaldo the confused drug addict, and Rosal Colon as the chipper, dippy prostitute, also excelled in their roles.

            The set, by designer Walt Spangler, is impressive: with the high ceilings, the ornate moldings, the tubular steel table and chairs, the accumulation of bric-a-brac, it really looked like an old pre-war apartment that someone had been living in for decades.  My favorite touch is the apparently authentic glass-fronted art deco kitchen cabinets.

One of my few quibbles with the play is that, while admittedly still in previews, the plot is a bit convoluted, requiring some contortionists tricks at the end to pull all the elements together and then to tie up the loose ends.  The reasons for Pops’s eviction aren’t really well spelled out, either.  It’s suggested that he is being accused of violating the terms of his lease by harboring criminals engaged in shady enterprises—but whether this would be enough to evict an elderly, disabled former cop from a rent stabilized apartment that he had occupied for three decades, is open to debate.  There’s also a few vague hints that the police, who want Pops to settle his lawsuit, may be colluding with the landlord in some way.  And maybe that happens sometimes.  But they’d also have to fix things with the courts and the various housing agencies.  The logic of gentrification and eviction sometimes seems so arbitrary, so unfair, and so counterproductive and absurd that, for anyone not well up on the issues, it probably does just seem like it’s all controlled by the fiat of “The City”—or by some vast conspiracy of corrupt politicians and greedy developers.

In any event, everyone who cares about the state of our nation’s great cities, and in particular New York, should see this play, if for no other reason than to laugh in order to keep from crying.  -- Ed Hamilton

Opening July 31, 2014.

Limited Engagement through August 16, 2014

Atlantic Theater Company at the Linda Gross Theater (336 West 20th Street)