Moore and More: Bushwick Life

It's occured to me on more than several occasions that I haven't let any of you in on the visual aspects of life in Bushwick.

Well, that was partially because I hadn't collected any photos and mostly because I couldn't deal with learning how to upload them... But praise be, the folks at Blogger have made it easier.

So here we go, on a virtual tour of the 'hood as Spooge and I now know it.

Here we are at dawn, last April, tripping on ecstacy and making sure our bladders have been emptied before we crash.

Bushwick's aesthetic is as close to LA's as any New York neighborhood can get. This isn't the Upper West Side. This isn't "the village" (either one). Nor is it any part of Brooklyn where you'll find blocks of brownstones. No, Bushwick is something else. Something different. It's a collage. The landscape turns from industrial to quaint row-houses within the space of a football field. There are recently renovated loft spaces next to empty lots, which are next to stray Edwardians and Victorians, which are next to bodegas and L-train subway stops.

We used to be the beer capitol of the country. Hence the reason there is so much industry and why we have "Knickerbocker Avenue."

Last summer, of '07, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Blackout of '77:

The subsequent riots affected this area and the Bronx the hardest. That's part of why we have so many empty lots...

What's happening now is, the real estate whoremongers are building ugly contemporary apartment buildings in many of those lots, some right next to the projects, filling the neighborhood with a visual mixture of past and present -- but not in any historically conscious sort of way. The result is slapdash; happenstance. Very much like Los Angeles. Except here very few of us have the privilege of being able to drive past any of it. The "collage" effect that makes LA tolerable by virtue of its being a car town is lost, unless, ironically, one is capable of standing still and taking it all in.