Pyrrhic Victories on Prospect Avenue
Out in the South Bronx, on the corner of Prospect Avenue and East 161st Street, are two adjacent low-key storefronts occupied by the Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association. It may not look like much, but it’s the home of an organization that helped transform the neighborhood. By the late seventies swaths of the Bronx looked like they’d been subject to saturation bombing. Now they’re more and more saturated by investment. Whether that should be chalked up as a victory isn’t as clear as many might think.
Late on a Sunday morning one of those storefronts is shuttered entirely and the gate over the other is rolled about two-thirds of the way up. I ring the buzzer and after a minute or so of shuffling in the cold Harold DeRienzo emerges from inside and lets me in.
Harry is one of the founders of Banana Kelly, and after the organization went through a difficult period he has once again assumed its presidency. He goes back a long way on these streets. In 1975 he’d just graduated from the borough’s Manhattan College and had been volunteering for the Northwest Bronx Community Clergy Coalition and the Simpson Street settlement house. They both offered him jobs, and he signed on at Simpson Street. “My mother’s from Brooklyn, Brooklyn’s a beautiful borough,” he says with the grudging deference of an old school New Yorker. “I like the Bronx.”
The settlement house movement began in Chicago at the end of the 19th century and arrived in New York not long after. The houses were dedicated to the spirit of progressive reform and worked to lift the poor out of poverty, offering an array of community services. Harry started working with kids from the neighborhood.
“That was around the time the fires started going crazy,” he remembers. “Between 1975 and 1980 it seemed like the entire neighborhood was on fire.” An epidemic of arson swept through the Bronx as landlords calculated it was more profitable to collect insurance on their buildings than to rent them out. As building after building went up in flames, neighborhoods deteriorated.
Harry found that the kids whom he was trying to help get through high school were getting burned out of their apartments — some of them as many as three times in 18 months. “I don’t care who you are,” he says. “You could be Einstein, if you have to relocate three times in a short period of time you’re not going to have a very stable educational experience.”
So he started organizing. The community center operated by the settlement house was closed to adults during the day. But a night or two every week Harry would open it up to them for late-night hoops. After playing ball, they’d sit around and drink and smoke and talk about the neighborhood.
That’s how he heard about a group of tenants over on Washington Street who’d seized control of their building as it disintegrated around them. Now they were rehabilitating it on their own.
Harry and a few others “liberated” three buildings over on Kelly Street — which curves like a banana off Rainey Park, not far from the association’s current offices — and Banana Kelly was born. He “got phone calls from the owner telling me I was a communist and stuff for taking his buildings,” Harry recalls. “But by and large nobody really cared about the buildings, the area, the people.”
Over the years, Banana Kelly steadily expanded. ‘Don’t move, improve’ went the slogan. “It was a very interesting and difficult period of time,” Harry says. Kids scampered among the smithereens; he remembers seeing some guy with a pulley hauling a bucket of water from the fire hydrant up to his window several storeys above the street because the building didn’t have running water.
Then President Carter passed through the Bronx, and the sort of sweat equity that Banana Kelly and the residents who had inspired it were sinking into their buildings became the flavor of the month. They were able to secure grants and expand. At its peak, the association had redeveloped 2,000 units of affordable housing, 1,000 of which it directly managed. The vast majority of those units were transferred to the association by the city after their owners failed to make good on their taxes. Its portfolio has been pared down today, but rents in Banana Kelly developments are significantly less than what they can be elsewhere in the Bronx.
These days data suggests rents in the Bronx are rising faster than anywhere else in New York. “And this is the Bronx,” Harry laments, “the cheapest borough in the city.”
“So I don’t really view that as a success,” Harry says. “We’ve lost ground. The place looks a lot better. You wouldn’t recognize the place if you were walking around in 1979, 1980, ’81. But it’s not about — anybody can build a building.”
Most people, looking at the Bronx before and after, would probably disagree. Harry’s insistence otherwise is bracing. “In the 60s and 70s, things were bad. But people could afford to live. Now, things are better, and people can’t afford to live. So what’s worse? I don’t know what’s worse. I feel like we have not really succeeded,” he says. “To me community development is not about building a physical building, it’s about building and uplifting a community, which is a community of people. And if we can’t make investment work for the people that are here then we’re failing. And I think we have failed.”
The doorbell rings, signaling the end of our meeting. Harry has to head out to a panel discussion on gentrification at the Bronx Documentary Center. Before he takes off, he introduces me to Tahica with-a-soft-‘c’ Fredericks, one of Banana Kelly’s residential council leaders. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, mostly in Crown Heights and Fort Greene, and was forced out of one home after another as the rents crept inexorably up.
“Now I’m here in the Bronx,” she says. “This is like the last stand. That’s how it feels to me. Being uprooted, no mater how many extra hours I work, how much more money I make, the floor underneath me was still shaking. And it scares the hell out of you, especially when you’ve got children.”
“The sink keeps changing but the plumbing is the same. Nothing is changing — they’re just making it prettier and adding sugar so that people will swallow it,” she says. “If these are the seeds that they’re planting, what kind of trees are you going to get? Bad trees can’t produce good fruit.”
