Gentrification Is Not Passive
The removal of a street sign in Brooklyn reveals how history gets erased.
Self-care. Triggered. Gaslit. Like a lot of people out there—especially fellow Gen Xers—I’ve become semi-desensitized to a lot of the buzzwords of the moment that I might, even philosophically, agree with. Given their ubiquity on the internet, in application to such a wild range of circumstances (people, film plots, books, Instagram posts, even this newsletter have all been called triggering, for instance), I find that these terms have lost a lot of the potency they held when they first came to dominate the popular vernacular. There is for me, however, one exception: erasure. It stings more painfully now than ever.
The term refers to the occasions in which a dominant culture and economic system forces a minority culture to adopt the prevailing customs and practices at the expense of their own. A very commonly cited and clear-cut historical example is the forcible removal of Native American children from their tribal communities. In a period that began in 1819 and ended in 1969, Native children in the U.S. were sent to federal boarding schools where they were compelled to change their names and manner of dress, and to abandon their languages. (They were also beaten and made to perform manual labor.) The aim was, to quote Captain Richard Henry Pratt, to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Or, put in 2023 terms, the erasure of Indigenous identity was in service of an “American” one.
I’m sure that erasure existed in academic circles before it began to make its way around the internet sometime in the last decade. The Social Justice Wiki updated its page for the term in 2014; it was entered into Urban Dictionary in the summer of 2020. But what it represents has been on my mind for much longer than that: A nagging feeling was planted way back in 1999, when I moved back to Brooklyn from college to find that Williamsburg had been “discovered” by “creatives,” and has grown into a more recent stomachache-inducing recognition that, yes, my home as I’d known it was actively and aggressively being dismantled.
Graham Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, runs through an area that was historically home to one of the oldest and largest Puerto Rican communities in New York. In 1982, in recognition of this history, one stretch of the avenue running from Grand Street to Broadway was rechristened Avenue of Puerto Rico. It’s a famous street with tremendous meaning in the Nuyorican community, especially in Brooklyn. (I have a T-shirt with an image of the street sign on it.)
Back in January, I was scrolling Instagram when I noticed a post by Nuevayorkinos, an archival account of Latino history in New York City co-run by the activist and archivist Djali Brown Cepeda. It included a video that made my heart plunge to my stomach: A New York City Department of Transportation worker on a cherry picker was removing the Avenue of Puerto Rico street signs and replacing them with plain old Graham Ave signs.
The online Nuyorican community is tight and closely connected. The outrage was quick and focused. (I personally reached out to a couple of state senators and city-council members to get to the bottom of this.) Everyone, it seemed, was taken by surprise. The DOT—a stand-in for the city—claimed ignorance. It was just a mistake! No one had any idea why or how or who ordered several new street signs with a new name to be produced, or who ordered the old signs to be removed and replaced with signs with a different name. Within a day Graham Avenue was Avenue of Puerto Rico once again. But the community—and me, personally—was rattled. The DOT later tweeted, “An overhead sign on Graham Ave in Brooklyn was mistakenly removed this morning. The proper Graham Ave-Ave of Puerto Rico sign has been reinstalled (photo taken this afternoon) and will remain. Thank you to the members of the community who brought this to our attention.”
But the damage had been done. The fragility of our position in the fiber and ecosystem of our home had been revealed, and chatter had begun on whether, and how, we could prevent this kind of thing from happening again.
“Often,” Brown Cepeda wrote on Instagram, “many of us native to gentrifying neighborhoods (in NYC and across the country) are asked why we oppose it so much. For us, it’s never been about the movement of people, as humans are migratory species by nature. It is, however, and always will be, about the colonialism that accompanies its ushering into our streets. Gentrification is cultural annihilation. Gentrification is the heartbreak that comes with seeing Graham Avenue, Avenida de Puerto Rico, have its sabrosura revoked.”
She added, in a pointed nod to similar ethnic signage on a separate stretch of Graham: “Will Via Vespucci and the neighborhood’s long-standing Italian heritage also be erased?”
How I, personally, would answer her rhetorical question: probably not. Developers think Little Italys have charm; Little Puerto Ricos, not so much. I know this because the city already said the quiet parts out loud. (A resident later told BK Reader that a Graham Ave–Via Vespucci sign was removed and reinstalled last fall.)
Even before last month’s debacle, the Avenue of Puerto Rico had been under fire for a while. Back in 2013, Gothamist reported on years-long murmurings about trying to get the name changed, but few people, including representatives of the DOT and municipal board at the time, would speak about it. An aggressive Brooklyn developer named Michael Schlegel, however, did. “It’s becoming a very hot area, and the people from Williamsburg are moving further out, and they don’t want it to be known as a Puerto Rican or Spanish area anymore,” Schlegel told Gothamist. “I think it would help the image of the area.”
And while that was the only other time the matter seems to have made the news, community reports and Google Maps records suggest there have been other attempts to remove the signs. As fewer and fewer outlets cover such hyperlocal stories—even in a city like New York—we shouldn’t take a lack of reporting as evidence that these conversations ever stopped. Maybe these discussions weren’t happening in town halls; from the way our local representatives seemed blindsided, perhaps they weren’t privy to them, either. But it’s hard not to wonder what was happening in certain back rooms—the kinds of spaces the general public doesn’t have access to, but developer donors do.
Just as we, the community, were recovering from the attempted removal of Puerto Ricans from Brooklyn’s history, Instagram provided another shocking blast of local news, once again involving New York City’s Department of Transportation. On Friday, January 20, across the East River in Washington Heights—a historically Latino and predominantly Afro-Dominican Manhattan neighborhood immortalized in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical In the Heights—the legendary tunnel at 191st Street, famous for its immersive graffiti art, had been whitewashed. Literally. The tunnel’s walls were painted over with a couple of coats of cheap, city-government-issue off-white paint.
Again, local elected officials were baffled, and the community was taken completely by surprise. The DOT, again, reacted to the outrage from behind, announcing the following Monday that the whitewashing had been part of a “multi-agency plan to restore the tunnel,” one that would include “new art.” Apparently no one had felt it was important to clue in either the neighborhood’s elected city-council representative or the executive director of the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, which had previously worked on a 2015 mural project in the tunnel with the community. And despite the one constant local complaint about the tunnel that had nothing to do with graffiti—drug use and homelessness—the plan didn’t seem to loop in any agencies or councils that dealt with those challenges, either.
It would be comedic if it didn’t feel so painful. It’s hard not to read these events as reflecting a clear-cut desire to remove one vibrant facet of the city’s culture—the overlay of Nuyorican culture, broader Latino culture, street culture, and hip-hop culture, once seen as integral in making New York what it was—in order to make a bland, blank canvas upon which a more “desirable” group of New Yorkers can see themselves. In many ways, there is nothing new about this, and certainly nothing new to me. (I literally wrote an entire novel about it.) What felt different, this time, was the overt aiding and abetting of these efforts by the city government itself.
The call, it turns out, is now coming from inside the house.
You don’t need to be a Law & Order detective to notice that both of these instances of radical and literal erasure came at the hands of the city’s Department of Transportation, a department run by a mayor-appointed commissioner. That this commissioner, Ydanis Rodriguez, is—as the city government’s website boasts in the first paragraph of his staff bio—“the first Latino and only the second person of color to serve in the position”—just makes the acts and the response more maddening. Rodriguez, who grew up in Washington Heights and once represented the area in the city council, has somehow morphed from an activist famous for occupying Wall Street to an establishment bureaucrat bobbing and weaving with the best of them. Rodriguez has been on the inside of the community for far too long to claim ignorance of how local politics or optics work. Ineptitude is one explanation, but perhaps Streetsblog’s Gersh Kuntsman put it best: “The rebel is now the Man.”
A few months ago, I wrote for The Atlantic about how the sound of gentrification is silence. It got under a lot of people’s skin; in emails and pissed-off tweets and frankly juvenile comments on my Instagram, people let me know how they felt. Most of the outrage came from white readers who prefer an aesthetic of quiet, and who refused to consider for a moment that there might be another ambience of value, or at least not demanding of disdain. This refusal to acknowledge that different cultural, class, racial, or ethnic groups might have tastes and preferences, period, let alone those of equal value to one's own, is the first way in which erasure happens. It creates the defense for the act: I didn’t destroy anything of value, anyway. Worse, it sets the stage for a savior narrative: There was nothing here when we moved here! Now look at it!
The second way erasure happens, it seems, is for those in positions of influence—either of the pocketbook, with the means to displace residents with new development, or of the political sort, who work not for constituents but to appease the former group—to press the nearly microscopic levers of power in such a way that the minority group’s existence is conveniently and quietly wiped away. Nobody needs to feel guilty about anything this way, I suppose. Displaced who?
Gentrification is not passive; it is an active effort. It is not just about real-estate transactions, and not even just about cultural displacement. It’s about cultural replacement.
It’s too easy an out to pretend that there is no aesthetic, no culture, of power and privilege. Too easy to rest on the idea that “cleaning up” graffiti or putting up fancy coffee shops equals “improvement.” Improvement to whom?
Gentrification means erasure. It means ousting one group’s cultural and aesthetic preferences, language, and street names in favor of alternatives that make the group with power—economic, political—more comfortable.
It has taken me weeks to bring myself to write this. Not because it isn’t important to me, but because it is so important to me that I can barely find the distance required to make sense of it—or even, at the most personal level, to know what to do. As Brown Cepeda said, the migration of people is inevitable. Change is inevitable. But respect for the past, and the people who made a place what it is, should mean something too.
Sometimes I feel that my home has changed so much, it doesn’t quite seem like home anymore. But where would I go? What’s the alternative? I stay in Brooklyn not so much as a matter of preference but because to leave would be to retreat. To give up. To cede the only home I’d ever known. To know there would be one less yard blasting salsa on a summer day, one less person screaming their friend’s name from the street to an open window.
I stay, because to go would be to erase my very self.