Eat the City by Robin Shulman
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I began gathering material for this book in 2005, and worked intensively from January 2010 to December 2011. I was not present for all of the events I describe. Interviews, published and unpublished letters, journals, reports and minutes of meetings, newspaper and magazine stories, census and other government records, maps, talks, and historians’ accounts all helped to reconstruct events that happened long ago. For more recent events, I also interviewed multiple participants, visited sites, and viewed television stories, videos, social-media sites, and blogs.
One name in this book, a child’s, has been changed, to protect her privacy.
Where a quote is not from my own interviews, I have included sources in the Notes at the end of the book.
While conducting research, I interviewed hundreds of people and read hundreds of books. For complete information on sources, see my website, www.robinshulman.com.
INTRODUCTION
ONE DAY WHEN I was seventeen, I turned onto my Manhattan block to see a man sitting on my stoop, his stringy brown hair falling into his face as he leaned forward to focus on the needle he was sticking into his arm. He was blocking the entrance to my building. I slowed my pace, so he could finish before I arrived.
“Um, excuse me,” I said, pausing in front of the stoop. The man courteously took the syringe out of his bruised, punctured forearm and stood to the side. I turned my key in the lock, pushed inside, and pulled the door shut tight behind me. This was what my neighbors were complaining about at building meetings. This was the overflow from the drug mart on the vacant land next door.
It was 1993, and I was new to New York, attending college, and living during the summer on Fourth Street between Avenues C and D. On my block in that far east of Manhattan, buildings were black with char, windows punched out, and sidewalks were tilted and overgrown with weeds. Vacant lots were piled with household detritus and scraps of wood and steel from tenements that had burned and been demolished. There was always a salesman standing in some shadow chanting the names of heroin brands like an incantation: “Roadrunner, Roadrunner, Roadrunner,” or “Satan, Satan, Satan.” Gunshots and sirens sounded almost every night. Video stores sold nothing but action and porn. Enormous portraits adorned with doves and flourishes were spray-painted onto brick walls to memorialize dead kids my own age.
The action took place beneath my bedroom window, where the demolition of twelve-odd adjacent buildings had created a grassy plain, stretching the whole depth of the block from Fourth to Fifth streets. I would peer out as people traded wads of cash for vials, or poked through the rubble before nodding off in the trash. Sometimes a regular would disappear, and I’d wonder if he or she was still alive.
Kids in my building knew not to even look as they walked around grown women and men passed out still clutching a syringe on the sidewalk outside the vacant land. The kids certainly knew not to venture into the no-man’s-land of a yard.
Their childhood was unfathomably different from my own, in a small farming town where we picked wild blackberries and rhubarb and mint in the depths of unmowed backyards and swam in clay-bottomed ponds. Here in New York, I began to wonder how a whole society had allowed this wilderness of human neglect.
But one day, I noticed a dozen of my neighbors at work, shoveling up the vacant land. Venturing into the yard, I smelled earth, along with stale, spilt beer, and felt the high grasses brush against my calves, prickling like needles.
“We’re going to clean the place up, fence it off, and plant it,” said my neighbor, sweating and leaning on his rake. “Want to help?” I put on thick gloves to shovel loads of vials and syringes and broken glass into heavy-duty green garbage bags.
It took my neighbors all spring and most of the summer to clear the space. When clean, the landscape, with its frayed, overgrown grasses and enormous size, had a weirdly bucolic look, like an unevenly balding country heath. New people started to venture in—a lady knelt in the dirt to plant seedlings, little kids kicked around a luminous blue ball, and a group of guys with guitars and drums played bomba y plena late into the night, their songs carrying on the breeze and lulling me to sleep. There was something savory about a slow, hot midsummer evening when the kids ran through the garden long past dark while their parents laughed around a card table. In a place surrounded by violence, taking up space with regular life seemed like an act of defiance.
Soon, I found myself waking up to the creaky call of a black-eyed, red-wattled rooster. I would see him strutting around the garden, his tough, reptilian talons navigating the broken glass around the central pathway and the soft black earth of the raised vegetable beds. My neighbors fed him kitchen scraps and regarded him lovingly—until one day he fell silent.
“Chicken soup,” explained my seven-year-old neighbor, Carolina, cheerfully. Her dad had wrung the rooster’s neck and followed a family recipe, adding cilantro from the herb beds. “He was delicious,” she said.
Only when Carolina pointed out that the rooster had never been a pet did I realize that most of the people I saw in the garden were not planting decorative flowers, but engaged in the serious work of tending vegetables and livestock. In a few years, the far east of Fourth Street had gone from buildings to prairie to a small working farm.
All through the neighborhood, wherever people could find an empty patch of ground, they were planting tomatoes, squashes, and greens, raising chickens and rabbits and turkeys and ducks, living off the fat of the urban landscape. Just about every block had some kind of chicken, many of them strange, spiky-feathered exotics from Japan, their owners would tell you, or birds that laid blue or green eggs like Easter specials. The chicken keepers ranged from sentimentalists to casual slaughterers, variously interested in eggs, meat, cockfighting, and company.