This was seen at 8:45 in the morning on Buswick Ave and Johnson right next to the Khim’s Millennium Market.
If those two things correlating isn’t a sign of GENTRIFICATION then check this out:
So I moved to Bushwick Brooklyn almost about a year ago. I thought to myself that the police presence was reassuring compared to what that neighborhood’s history will have you think of it. I was wrong. The following is an anecdote that will make you cringe at the ever present problem/unifying social experience of GENTRIFICATION.
I’m sitting in my apartment wolfing down a dinner that I made with suspicious meat from the cheap C-Town supermarket down the block. Adjacent to a barbershop as well as a Chinese restaurant located right next to Spanish owned deli. There are usually crews of vagrants who stain that part of the sidewalk with urine when they’ve been standing outside for long enough. They weren’t there this evening, so I made it back home pretty quick to cook during the end of Fully Flared and pop in Office Space once I sat down to eat. I’d been debating calling back a beautiful girl who I just recently got re-acquainted with and thought to do so during the after dinner cigarette. I went out to my deli after I put the plate in the sink to make the extravagant purchase of two looseys, as I’m broker than broke at the moment, (packing lunch before evening class). I start to call her from the deli while he’s looking for the pack. He gives me a pack with just two cigarettes in it while I’m listening to the first ring. She picks up at the crosswalk. All the rudimentary greetings are exchanged and I invited her out to a bar where I might be getting free drinks later, didn’t tell her that. She tells me that she’s sick by the time the light changes and I’m on the other side of the crosswalk. I’m trying to figure out how to make a terse salutation so as to seem not to care to much about drinking by myself that night. While I’m searching for the words two dorky looking people jump out of an unmarked van and proceed to shine a flashlight in my face. They tell me to get off the phone and stay still—that was easy saying goodbye. When I hang up I immediately ask for a badge, one guy is wearing a DC fitted! The other cop is a short woman with her hair pulled back; she’s the one that offered me a glance at her hip for confirmation. They then proceed to give me all the usual bullshit. “You know they sell drugs in that deli right?”, “No I don’t!” “Don’t get smart with me”, “Whatever man”. Case and point because I was wearing a black leather members only jacket, dark jeans, and was black . I took one for the dealers on my block. There are at least 30 dealers in the two block vicinity and a handful of coked out hipsters hopping out of tinted Impala’s they could’ve bagged. No way. These recent academy graduates took the easy way out with racial profiling. Welcome to a page dedicated to the oddities of GENTRIFICATION.
