here & now

Richard Price on Harlem, the setting for his next novel, and gentrification – excerpted from our new issue mono.kultur #45.

What’s your view on Harlem during the past ten years you have been living here? As with the Lower East Side, you are writing about Harlem at a time when it is undergoing a rapid transformation.

One of the detectives in the 32, the Harlem precinct, told me that the two greatest crime-fighters in this city are sheetrock and cranes. You have people living in Harlem all their lives, multi-generational, and all this new construction, all these new businesses—it’s not for them. Every time they see trees being planted, it’s not for them. It’s for the people who are coming. And they’ll be white, for the most part.

Michael Greenberg in the New York Review did interviews with a lot of tenants in Crown Heights, Brownsville, and East New York as the developers have been pouring in. And one woman who was getting forced out of her apartment on Schenectady Avenue told him, ‘We watched over this street, we cleaned it up. Why should we have to leave?’

In what city can you not give voice to that sentiment? There are homeowners who moved to Harlem at the worst of times, a black couple, say: their children are grown, they’re in retirement, and they live in a brownstone, yes—but they were here in the crack days. They were here in the heroin ‘70s. They were here through all of it and they held fast. And now they’re older, their children are gone, and they have less income. They might have bought that turn of the century brownstone for $30,000 in 1968 but now they can’t afford any more infrastructure repairs, so it’s probably in bad shape. Then someone knocks on your door and offers you a million bucks.

The buyers are mainly interested in the land rights so they’ll probably tear that place down—but how could you say no? The thing is, are they going to live in New York? Nope. They’re going to go back down south, because whatever they pay you to buy your place, that’s how much you have to get another. So everybody’s going back to Carolina. Virginia. Maryland. Harlem was enough of a moonscape during the very bad years, but these people kept it from being a complete moonscape. These are the people who kept churches in business and went to work every day. They were the stabilizers in a troubled, chaotic time. But real estate wants what it wants and that’s that.

Nobody I know who was living on the Lower East Side in 2005 could afford to live in it now. It was still a microclimate then. Starting in the 1970s, you had young people coming into a funky neighborhood because they’re young and want adventure in their life. They want to feel like they’re having an experience. They’re creative. And they enjoy the frisson of living in a down at the heels community. To walk down Orchard Street or Ludlow Street in 2003 or 2004 was really different; it was exciting because of the mix and match. Then when real estate people come in, they smell the espresso and it all goes to hell.

Original photography by Joseph Rodriguez

Richard Price on his idea of research for his forthcoming novel – excerpted from our new issue mono.kultur #45.

What kind of research have you been doing?

The research I do is the research I always do: I hang out. Every once in a while I want to talk to a particular individual, or to be present for a certain thing that’s happening. But basically it’s all about osmosis. I always quote Jimmy Breslin in his biography of Damon Runyon: ‘He did what all good reporters do. He hung out.’

In the late 1980s, when I wrote the screenplay for Sea of Love, I did ride-alongs with cops and I started seeing more of the world than I ever thought I would. Your first reaction is that your jaw drops. But then you need to get to that point where your jaw isn’t dropping anymore. In the beginning, everything you see is explosive. But you have to get past that until what you see becomes routine, and the nuances start to reveal themselves.

You lose that sense of wonder.

The sense of wonder never leaves me, but the truth of a place is in the small stuff, always the small stuff. So I’m out there with the neighbors, just hanging out, having conversations with people, seeing what pops for me.

Occasionally I’ll go to something I hadn’t planned on doing. It might be a church or a funeral service or a meeting open to the community. For example, I became friends with a guy, an ex-con, who runs a grassroots Stop the Violence organization. It puts together block rallies within a day or two on any street in Harlem or the Bronx where a shooting has gone down. He also has a contract with the city to conduct anti-violence workshops at the Bronx County probation office. I would go with him to both, again and again, until I had an understanding for the near hopelessness of his efforts. But I also gained an appreciation for the power of his optimism, in the face of the monumental personal despair and bureaucratic indifference he chose to confront. Talk about tilting at windmills. His relentless buoyancy was almost frightening.

For me, it’s all about discovering and understanding things that I wasn’t even looking for. But I recognize them when I see them, when I hear them. I need to be ever present. I love being out there more than anything else. At the end of the day I’m still writing fiction, but for me all the electricity is in the learning process.

Original photography by Joseph Rodriguez

A note from our stock keeping department: We are onto our last boxes of mono.kultur #33 with the mighty Kim Gordon. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.