Bed-Stuy – buy or die?
As I approached the corner of Throop Avenue and Van Buren Street in early summer 2013, I couldn’t help but notice the giant “Murder — $50,000 Reward” sign that loomed over the intersection, emblazoned with the photo of a dead businessman. The New York City neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, I’d heard, was still a little “rough,” but the sign was unlike anything I’d seen outside of Wild West movies. Almost comically, the image was plastered with a blood-red ‘Solved’ caption, as though calling out a fatuous warning: attention, would-be Bed-Stuy murderers — you might, eventually, be caught.
Walking down Van Buren Street I passed a high, metal wall topped with barbed wire. The wall hid several dogs with big barks and cast a film noir-like glow over the entire block. Next to this mystery lot, I quickly realized, was my potential new home. As I toed my sandal against the pavement and wondered what to do, I saw that on the street out front kids were playing basketball in a normal, very human-like way that I hadn’t seen kids do since I’d moved to Manhattan three years prior. They bounced and passed the ball and didn’t appear to be spoiled or neurotic; they even cast smiles my way as I watched. A couple of women standing outside my new building, a five story walk up, greeted me with open faces and hellos. When I decided at last to go inside, they held the door open.
* * *
For New Yorkers who were around during the 1980s, Bed-Stuy was synonymous with gang violence, guns, crack and prostitution, and these associations still hold for many. Films like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing brought the area’s class and racial tensions into public consciousness while, some assert, simultaneously opening up discussions about race in America. Recent films perpetuate the crime stereotype. Broken City, a thriller released this year, opens with a murder in a New York City project modeled after Bedford-Stuyvesant. Bed-Stuy — Do or Die is a 2010 documentary that follows the efforts of a volunteer ambulance corps to service “the gritty streets of Bed-Stuy,” as the film’s PR describes. And Notorious, the 2009 film about the life of Christopher Wallace, aka rapper Biggie Smalls, provides a “flashback to an era of Walkmans, corner drug deals and rap duels,” as a New York Times profile recounts, rather than drawing on the “eclectic dining spots, wine shops and markets featuring organic items” that now pepper the area.