Us vs. Them World
In 1942, Virginia Burton wrote a children’s book called The Little House about a tiny country house whose original owner wisely built into the deed a clause that said the house could “never be sold for gold or silver.” Over the years, a city much like Manhattan built up around it, overshadowing it and clogging the little house with smog as it dreamed of the countryside and the long-ago smell of flowers and fresh air. Leila and I rescue the book from the trash after some upstairs neighbors decide they’re done with it, and from time to time as we read its pro-suburb mantra, I wonder where my daughter would be happier, and how vastly things will change for us when the City begins re-zoning our neighborhood, bringing in an additional 20,000 people to occupy the 30-story apartment complexes they’re planning to build where the concrete factory and metal scrapyard have quietly labored for decades.
At an open hearing in a public school auditorium, City planners hand out “Net Incremental Peak Hour Subway Trip” projections estimating that the F/G Carroll Street station can handle a Weekday Peak Hour increase of 1,479 people, when as it stands we can barely squeeze ourselves onto the already crowded trains. And then they follow this commutation study with thought-provoking shadow analysis that purports to prove they care about the way “sunlight can… entice outdoor activities [and] support vegetation” and that they will be be vigilant about the way shadows “can affect the growth cycle and sustainability of natural features….” A paltry group of neighbors is scattered across the seats, each of us struggling to understand the acronyms being thrown at us without explanation and to locate his or her home on the zoning maps as the ghost of Robert Moses whispers “eminent domain” in our ears. After all, that’s how the government took the land away from the Ferrara Bros. concrete company in the 1970s and then rented it back to them.
“There we are,” Josh tells Leila, having identified our building on the grid. There don’t appear to be plans to construct anything directly on Third Street, but a total of 60 development sites of varying heights are shown springing up all around us, and there’s no way to measure by how many decibels of noise or gradations of light or instances of crime our lives will change when this “Neighborhood Study” comes to fruition. Leila doesn’t understand why we’re here—why anyone would be upset at the prospect of having more neighbors.
“It means there will be more kids,” she points out, “and more’s better,” shaming us into silence. If this is our first attempt to introduce her to activism, it feels like activism of the weakest sort—the kind of NIMBYism that makes liberals blush, even more so when, a few days after we meet as a neighborhood to discuss how to organize our resistance, white nationalists rallying against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville drive a car into a human chain of peaceful counter-protesters and Donald Trump makes one of his most sickening racist statements as president.
More kids, more people, more brown people, more black people: in an us vs. them world, the conflict over space and money and traditions seems inescapable, so how do you teach tolerance? And in our case, how do we reconcile the instincts for neighborhood preservation with the need for expansion and change? On the radio, they describe the anti-immigration stance of the “Unite the Right” movement and play on repeat Trump’s statement about there being “very fine people on both sides” of the protest. We could let this remain above Leila’s head, as I did once when babysitting for a college professor’s son who thought he heard students shouting “Stop Right Now” during a campus protest. Who was I, at 17, to explain rape to a six-year-old, especially one who wasn’t my child? On a night that wasn’t Halloween, I had enough trouble getting him into bed in his red devil costume, trident and all. But in this case, Josh and I keep the radio on until reporters begin to describe how a car can be turned into a weapon. A healthy respect for the dangers of cars is one thing, but as with 9/11, what good would it do to instill a fear of transportation in her at this age? In the silence that falls when we turn the dial, we make our choice instead to introduce our daughter to a moral failing, and admit it’s one of the ugly and embarrassing truths about this country.
