In My Father’s Footsteps

When I tell Americans that my father is from Brooklyn they nod. It makes sense – that’s where New York Jews of his generation grew up, if not on the Lower East Side. When I tell them that he was raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, they laugh. It is a deeply improbable place for him to be from.

The area achieved its notoriety because it is by far one of the most impoverished and troubled in the country. Only Los Angeles’ Watts ghetto could rival it for violence, drug crime and homicide. ‘Bed-Stuy – Do or Die’ has been the motto for many decades now. As early as the 1950s, its reputation was anything but salubrious and from then on it got worse, not better. Rappers such as Jay Z, brought up in Bed-Stuy’s infamous Marcy Houses, Busta Rhymes, Lil’ Kim and Mos Def have raised its profile in recent years. Notorious B.I.G. is another famous Bed-Stuy alumnus, and one of almost innumerable young men murdered in its gang rivalries. Through these artists and through Spike Lee’s iconic film Do the Right Thing, almost everyone in America has now heard of it. But it isn’t a place that five-foot-seven, Jewish, middle-class, romantic-novel-writing classicists are actually from.

In the 1980s, when I was growing up in London and innocently boasting of my own family history, Bed-Stuy was known as nothing but a vast and seething slum, a violent district rife with crack dens, whorehouses and crumbling abandoned buildings, a place where once-proud family homes were divided repeatedly until they became rabbit warrens; tiny rental properties that were still barely affordable to the transient and indigent population of hookers, dealers, pimps, illegal immigrants and the terrified elderly who had come to the area in the first half of the century in search of a better life and who were now just as frightened in Bed-Stuy as they’d been in Alabama.

The first public housing in Bedford-Stuyvesant was built in 1941 and throughout the 1960s enormous project towers were erected, an attempt to address the vast influx of low-income newcomers to the area and constructed in a way that, with hindsight, seems designed to maximize the dehumanization of their occupants. By the early 1970s, the majority of the reported rapes took place in the elevators and corridors of these projects – also a favoured haunt for robbers, muggers and murderers. Infant mortality, that most brutal index of social disadvantage, is more than double the national average in the district.

My parents settled in London, where I grew up, in 1984, and when we visited America, we spent our time on the West Coast. Though he has always been very much a New Yorker in both humour and character, my father seemed to feel no pull to return; no nostalgia whatsoever for the place where he grew up. On the contrary, we spent as little time there as possible, stopping only for a night, now and again, to break up the long flight to Los Angeles. He used to tell my mother that he couldn’t sleep in New York City. But before the onward flight to LA there was usually one free morning, just long enough to take us to his old neighbourhood, had he wanted to. He was always resolute, though – it was too dangerous, and in any case, even if he had agreed, no cab driver would be willing to make the journey.

And that was it. In the 1980s Bedford-Stuyvesant was forbidden and impossibly tantalizing – half an hour, but half a world, away. All I knew was that he’d grown up there and that it was too unsafe for us to visit. And so with no concept of eras, of demographic shifts or social change, I re-imagined my father’s life in the ’hood; gang wars raging in the street below as he sat in his room toiling over his Hebrew homework. I studded their middle-class brownstone with bullet holes; made paupers of my comfortable and successful immigrant family. It was a confusing and, as it would turn out, anachronistic fantasy. I had mangled history, combining the relative prosperity of the 1940s with the absolute brutality of the 1960s
into a nonsensical hybrid. The truth was that Bed-Stuy had begun its descent before my father was born, but it wasn’t until about the time he left for Manhattan in 1950 that it mutated, driven by a combination of civic neglect and racial prejudice, from a ghetto into a fully-fledged slum.

The first time I was in New York alone was in 1998. I was eighteen and I called my mother to ask for my father’s childhood address.

‘For God’s sake don’t tell her,’ I heard him say in the background, ‘or she’ll go.’

Until scuppered, that had of course been my plan. It seemed impossible to me that there was anywhere that you really, truly shouldn’t go. Maybe not at night, maybe not in a short skirt, maybe not wearing jewellery. But a no-go area was incomprehensible to me. I was an idiot. In 1990 there was a murder in Bedford-Stuyvesant every three days, a rape every two and a half days and ten robberies, six burglaries and four car thefts a day – and those are merely the reported crimes. By 1998 it was scarcely better. And so it wasn’t until 2004 that I finally got my wish. I was in New York catching up with old friends, and when it came up in conversation that my father was from Bed-Stuy they looked askance. Again.

‘But it’s getting better,’ Cassim assured me and, as he is an urban planner, I presumed he should know. ‘It’s not like it was. We could go now, if we don’t get out of the car.’

With that endorsement, I called my parents and was finally granted the classified information once I’d promised that I would be accompanied and that, in keeping with the traditions of the neighbourhood, we would merely do a drive-by.

Neither Cassim, an intrepid architecture enthusiast and long-time Brooklyn resident, nor Alex, a born-and-bred New Yorker, had ever been there. It was early evening but already deep in winter dark and, as we dug Cassim’s car out of a snowdrift, I was nervous with excitement. For a long time the car was stuck, ice clinging high around the wheel arches, but we persevered. It was now or never.

Do or Die. That first visit lasted seconds. We found the block on St Marks Avenue and we cruised down it slowly, blackened banks of ploughed snow standing high between street and sidewalk, thick, frozen mist hanging low in the air. We didn’t even stop, but it was enough for me then. The cold had chased people indoors and the block was empty, off duty. I had no sense of a neighbourhood, a culture, a community, just row after row of brownstones. But at least I’d finally been. And on the way back, Cassim told me its story.