Mott Haven

I live in the Bronx. Well, I live in Mott Haven. Somehow saying “Mott Haven” makes me feel as though that I have class; like where I live actually isn’t the southernmost part of the South Bronx, but somewhere fancy and exclusive, and superior. I live in a neighborhood, not a borough.  Perhaps it’s the Princeton in me that makes me an uppity Negro when it comes to things like this. The overwhelming desire to make yourself appear something greater than you are is an Ivy League trope that I think permeates my being in ways that I’m not even fully cognizant of sometimes. Well, truth be told, I’m pretty aware of it, but to SAY so would mean that you’re somehow not quite playing the game right. Guess I suck at this.

New York snobbery became real for me in my first moments in New York, 3 years ago. I was starting as a graduate student at Columbia, and didn’t know too many people in the city yet.  My buddy, who had graduated a year before me at Princeton and somehow managed to hold onto his finance job a Barclays despite the financial crash, texted me:

Friend: Hey, welcome to the city! Let’s get drinks!

Me: Awesome! Any place in mind?

Friend: Shit, man, lets go to village man. There are a couple of hot bars down there.

Me: Oh, ok…wait, so, what train do I take to get there?

Friend: Where do you live again?

Me: Oh, I live right near Columbia. In Harlem.   

Friend: Oh wow…good for you, good for you…that’s FAR!

It was a 15-minute trip, which isn’t bad at all. But the dripping judgment that seeped through his written words was enough for me to understand that I was going to need to get creative about saying where I resided. By the time we had sipped through our beers that evening, the word “Harlem” had altogether been erased from my vocabulary. Oh no, I lived and went to school in Morningside.  (Not Morningside Heights, mind you.  That would suggest that I lived even further uptown in the 140s, gasp.)

But that was then. As I said, I now live in Mott Haven. The industrial area is pretty cleaned up, and is slowly but surely yuppifying (shit, I’M here, right?). If you’ve never been out here, you’re missing something…well…very unique. We live adjacent to the Third Avenue Bridge that goes into East Harlem. If you look south on a clear day, you can see the Freedom Tower stretching to the sky.  The building we live in is owned by an Israeli man who lives with a harem of women 5 to 15 years his junior (his girlfriends? daughters? both?), and the building certainly isn’t zoned for apartments. It means that we don’t have a lease and could technically disappear at any time (though my brother and other roommate assure me that he DID collect a security deposit). 

There’s quite an eclectic group that traffics in and out of this building.   In fact, upstairs from us, I’m told there is a vibrant cocaine racket going on, and the whistles and shouts that happen here at all times of day and night belie the heavy business that goes on as people come to get their product.  

But Mott Haven enterprise isn’t just about the drugs. There are also a lot of auto shops. “Tire Zone,”  “Break Avenue,” “Torch of the Road” are just a few, and I can’t help but wonder how any of these businesses stay in business. Surely demand isn’t so great that all 205250285 of them need to exist. Then again, there ARE an awful lot of drivers around here.

One business I find particularly peculiar is the doughnut store down the street from my building. Now, let’s be clear. There are some housing projects not too far from here, on 138^th street. And, of course there’s my building and a building perpendicular to us.  Nonetheless, this area feels very isolated, and almost remote. 

Sooo…who is this doughnut shop selling to?  There are rarely more than 2 or three people in there at a time.  AND, they’re practically GIVING away that stuff, too, at outrageously low prices ($.30 per item, what?!). How do they make money?

It’s a drug front.  It’s just too ridiculous NOT to be. Tire shop. Tire shop. Tire shop Tire shop. Doughnut shop. I should say that there is also a beer distributor and liquor store down the street but somehow, in the Bronx, that sounds about right. A store whose main commodity is doughnuts though? Here? Mmhm.  It would be like having a store that exclusively sells 40s of malt liquor open on 72^nd street and Lexington; ABSURD!  I imagine a “Breaking Bad” type scenario where underneath the doughnut place, there is a high tech multi-million dollar meth lab or something.  

I cannot lie though…the doughnuts are pretty good, and the store makes a mean breakfast sandwich. For $2.50, you get egg and cheese on a roll, and a (watered down) free coffee.

Note: The shop is operated by Dominicans, and if they feel like they can, they WILL cheat you.  I saw them charge a white guy $4 for the sandwich and coffee combo, and they’ve definitely tried to jack up the price to $3.50 on me once. Of course there is no written menu.

You getting this? Mott Haven. Budding Yuppification.  Israeli property owners with dark curly haired groupies (yes, they’re very attractive). Cocaine upstairs. Tire shops.  Doughnut Drug fronts. Scheming Dominicans. Bridge(s). Cars. And…artists. .

Two men live above us (I guess NEXT to the cocaine dealers?). They’ve been together for more than 20 years, and we affectionately call them “the bears”. Mike used to be a break-dancer but now, in his 50s, he’s become a bit arthritic (and beer bellied). He dyes his hair blue, and has some of the coolest sneakers I’ve ever seen.  His partner Aaron walks with a cane and, with his long beard, he seems like some sort of Confucius sage…he’s a painter. They moved in shortly before I got to the building and have taken a vested interest in my brother and me, (maybe they think we’re cute, our other roommate suggests). One cool late summer night, when they were barbequing on the communal pit outside the building, they caught my brother and I as we were coming home from a music recording session we’d had downtown.

Mike is a white Puerto Rican and this we learned is a cause of some unease for him. He tells us that he had been on the bus earlier that day when some black youths had openly made fun of him because of his ostentatiously colored hair.  Mike is a pacifist who, through art, is looking to “end the artificial differences that divide us” (Hmm, written down it sounds very Obama, but in person it was somehow much more cloying than presidential.) On the bus, Mike became so upset that he found himself wanting to shout racial slurs, and was ashamed that he even considered it. He told us that, as a Puerto Rican, he feels that he IS a person of color, so the feelings he was having were even more problematic for him. 

With tears in his eyes, he told us that we had the agency to change things through our art, and that we had to work hard to ignore petty differences. He said that we had the power to discourse about what really mattered and change things for the better. In fact, he took it a step further.

“We are GODS!” he blurted passionately. As artists we had seraphic powers that could somehow truly move heaven and earth. As my brother and I stared at him, made uneasy by the sheer magnitude of his passion, I noted that his schema had not included his partner, who silently tended the grill and intermittently stroked his beard. “We”, my brother, Mike and me, were gods, but not Aaron?

Ahhh, Mott Haven. Neighborhood of Gods.  There are other musicians in my building. People assiduously practicing the alto saxophone and the piano and the bass and whatever else. My brother diligently mixes music on huge stereo monitors that can be heard from across the universe, and I add lyrics and vocal melody down. More bass. Less auto tune. Side chain. Louder guitar. Different synth. Try the reverb. How about echo? Eh, that lyric sucks. Start over. Less bass. More auto tune…

 I’m a writer too, but I haven’t met too many other writers here…I guess they’re just quieter than the rest. These apartments, this neighborhood…it’s my muse. It’s my place, it’s my New York. Yea, I guess its home.