Gentrification Heats Up in Bushwick
On September 20th a three-alarm fire engulfed an abandoned apartment building at 1138 Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn. The fire started at approximately 6 p.m. and quickly spread to the two neighboring apartment buildings. All three buildings suffered severe damage, destroying some personal property as well as leaving two firefighters with minor injuries. FDNY Deputy Chief James Smithwick deemed the fire “suspicious” and also reported that there were a people outside the building at the time that the fire started and that they “probably know what happened.”
This fire happened to take place right next to my apartment building and I was interested in exactly how the fire was caused. By having a quick chat with some of the bystanders outside the building I discovered that two of the buildings that were damaged had the same owner. Apparently the owner wanted to renovate these buildings for a long time according to the neighboring landlords. This raises questions about whether or not the fire was started to claim insurance money. I began to keep tabs on the buildings to possibly gather some further information on the fire.
The two apartments that border the burned buildings are both newly renovated and are currently occupied by mostly white 20-somethings (one of which is my apartment) in an otherwise Black and Hispanic neighborhood. This is no surprise to this area of Bushwick due to increasing gentrification that has completely taken over Williamsburg and is slowly working it’s way farther out into Brooklyn. Because of the spread, more and more apartments are receiving gut renovations to house the new demographics flocking to Bushwick.
As you can see from the map above, property value in Brooklyn is quickly on the rise, up 24% and even 63% in the Bushwick area alone. It could be that the owner of the two abandoned buildings possibly feared property value rising making them unable to make the renovations they want. So a possible theory is that the owners set the buildings on fire to recieve insurance money, enabling them to make the renovations they need to keep up with the changing landscape of Bushwick.
The idea seems to lean a bit too much on speculation at first, but this is not a first time accusation for this kind of renovation tactic in Brooklyn. New York Magazine published a piece chronicling more than 13 fires that all took place around Prospect Park in 2005–2006. The story goes on to say:
“Paranoia — accompanied by myriad conspiracy theories — is striking deep in what is now routinely called “the Brooklyn burndown zone.” You hear assertions that the fix is in, that the city and developers have entered into some unholy, unspoken Katrina-esque bargain to clear out those in the way of ever-higher rises and rents.”
June Davis, a Trinidadian child-care worker, was also interviewed in the NY Mag article stating that she was a victim of a fire in her building as well. Located just a little farther beyond Prospect Park at 1299 Eastern Parkway, Davis’ area was next in line for massive gentrification in 2006. But what I found most interesting about her story was the type of fire and how it started. The article states that “the three-alarm blaze that required the services of 138 firefighters and rousted some 30 families started near the roof.” This description had almost the exact same statistics as the Bushwick fire next to my apartment: a three-alarm fire that required 130 firefighters. I then visited the FDNY headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn to obtain the fire incident report from the blaze on my block. Sure enough the fire was also started near the roof. There were no other defining characteristics except for labeling the fire “suspicious.”
It has been seven months since the fire occured and renovations have slowly been taking place on the two main buildings burned. While the owner and construction workers declined to comment on any aspect of the fire, the appearance of the buildings already look much nicer than they ever have before. I then began to interview multiple residents in the neighborhood; some who have been living in Bushwick for 10 years, and some that are newcomers to the neighborhood.
Manuel Hernandez is a Dominican-American that owns and operates Hernandez Mini Market. His establishment is connected to the corner of my building, less than half a block away from where the three-alarm blaze started. I first asked Hernandez about the current state of Bushwick, specifically this area off of the J train Gates Avenue stop, and how the demographic climate has changed. “It wasn’t always like this,” he states, “Before you moved in, [your] building was mostly Black. More and more kids have been moving here, I see them come into the store. They look like you,” he laughed, referring to my Caucasian complexion. I then asked him what he thought of the fire that took place down the block only months ago, “Same thing [as your bulding], it was much worse,” commenting on the condition of the building. “I don’t know, accidents happen. But I bet [the landlord] is glad it happened.”
Hernandez was a bit reserved when talking about the fire, with very little speculation. But as he said his last comment about the landlord being “glad it happened,” the Spanish-spoken consensus around the store was exchanged with suspicious looks from his fellow employees, implying that they thought it was more than just a mere accident.
My next interviewee was an African-American man named Rodney; he declined to give his last name. Rodney has been a fixture in this part of Bushwick since late 2005 and is usually seen outside of Hernandez politely asking for change. Our apartment has come to know Rodney well over the past few months; we even paid him to help us move our furniture in. Rodney has been homeless for about 15 years, squatting in different places all over Brooklyn. While we have had some candid conversations in the past, this was the first time I was able to find out Rodney’s background, “Williamsburg used to be my neighborhood but I don’t go there no more. There’s nothing there for me, nothing I can afford.” He then went on to say how he got to Bushwick, “I [squatted] in Prospect Park in 2000. I lived there for a while until my building burned down, one of our guys died in there too. After that I came here and been here ever since.”
I then asked him to give me more details on the fire where he squatted, immediately thinking back to the New York Magazine article specifically talking about Prospect Park fires. It turns out his fire was covered in that exact article; fire #3 in the image below. The descriptions of fire #3 in the New York Magazine article states that “An all-hands fire kills Aubrey Mack, a 48-year-old homeless squatter. The cause is not ascertained.” Mack was who Rodney was referring to as “one of our guys.” He states that he was also not sure how his fire was started, but that he was aware of the other suspicious fires in Prospect Park at the time. I asked his opinion on the fire that happened a few months ago here in Bushwick to which he said, “Could be the same shit. This hood is changing too, wouldn’t be surprised if more buildings go down.”
I was very surprised to find out how revealing Rodney’s interview had been, and how coincidental it had been to my previous research. He seems to put a face to trend of gentrification pushing back minorities farther from Manhattan. Rodney’s journey follows that exact path of progression, first from Williamsburg to Prospect Park, and now to Bushwick. But Rodney is not the only person that puts a face to this issue of gentrification. Rallys against gentrification have been going on in Bushwick since early October of this year. These protests were mainly dominated by Spanish-speaking residents claiming that their neighborhood is “not a new frontier,” a quote taken from Bruno Daniel of Churches United For Fair Housing in a Gothamist article. In the same piece Maria Contez, a supporter of keeping Bushwick for the locals, describes the exact path that Rodney has traveled in his years of being pushed out of neighborhoods, “I’m here now because I suffer from gentrification. We lost Bedford-Stuyvesant, we lost Williamsburg, and now I am fighting for the people in Bushwick. We are low-income people, and we have rights. But they do the law for rich people.”
Perhaps this law Contez is speaking to could include supporting building owners and their insurance claims with these recent fires. This so called abuse of the law could be what the people of Bushwick are fighting so passionately against. But the change is happening and my building is certainly a part of it. I turned to the neighbors in my building to get their opinions and accounts of the fires, and I found out a lot more than I expected. My next door neighbor Caroline B had her own perspective on the Bushwick fire that very same day.
Caroline is a Caucasian Comparative Literature major that goes to NYU. She just moved to Bushwick last summer because of the cheap rent in our newly renovated bulding. Caroline says she does the best she can to be “respectful of the local community,” and realizes that she “is not always welcome with open arms.” She has struggled with her own finances after she started recieving bills for her upcoming student loans. “I needed a place to live so that I can go to school, work, pay my student loans, and still pay my rent,” she said. She went on to say that she wishes “there was a way to live in a place that was safe and affordable, without changing the cultural and demographical landscape, but unfortunately it’s just not realistic.”
Caroline lives on the same floor as me, but her apartment has windows facing the back courtyard that is shared with the buildings that were burned. She has an extremely well-framed view from her bedroom to the back of the burned buildings and has a shocking account from the day of the fire, “I remember seeing a man, a Black man in cargo pants climbing the fire escape [of the pre-burned building]. He stayed on the roof for a little bit and came back down and left. I couldn’t see exactly what he was doing up there. I thought it was odd, but didn’t think much of it. Less than an hour later we saw fire coming from the same building.” This account was exactly what she told FDNY Deputy Chief James Smithwick and was apparently a main testimony in his decision to deem the fire “suspicious”. In Caroline’s candid conversation with the Chief, he revealed that he though it was probably insurance fraud and that he’s seen things like this before.
While I can’t confirm the statements Caroline told me with the FDNY, or know for a fact that the building next door was burned for insurance fraud, there is plenty of evidence for reasonable speculation. These trends of gentrification have been gradually moving deeper and deeper into Brooklyn, and with them comes more and more apartment fires. A quote from a fire activist interviewed in the New York Magazine article sums up this trend well, “The buildings burn down and the rents go up.” While I have yet to hear about more fires in the Bushwick area, it is still early in the gentrification process here. Gentrification is inevitable, and it is unclear what other possibly life-threating occurrences will take place in response to the changing neighborhood.
