New York – Car Alarm Protest Grows in Brooklyn

New York – It began with that most common of New York complaints: The car alarm that will not stop. But it quickly became about so much more, about unresolved issues of race and class in a neighborhood widely believed to be one of the most successfully mixed in the nation: Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Last week, Malik Lacey, 30, African-American, longtime resident, parks his car on Lafayette Avenue between Cumberland and Carlton. Lafayette is the main drag; buses and trucks roll by constantly. Lacey’s alarm is set off when they do. Some aggrieved residents leave notes on Lacey’s windshield, asking him to disable the alarm or move the car.

Lacey responds by leaving a note that says, “If my car alarm is bothering you, call me at 718-***-****.” No one does, but a couple of follow-up notes are duct-taped to the windshield, about as aggressive as anyone on this sophisticated stretch is willing to get.

Finally, on Tuesday, a neighbor calls local councilperson Letitia James, who calls Lacey. According to this neighbor — who is white, mid-30s, and requests anonymity — James tells her Lacey was “pretty angry” about the changing make-up of the neighborhood.

Lacey remembers differently:

James: “Can you move the car?”

Lacey: “There’s nowhere to move the car to.”

James: “Can you turn the alarm off?”

Lacey: “I’m not a car alarm expert. I don’t know how to turn it off.”

Lacey is elated by the uproar: “I’m glad that my car is the focus! Thank you! I know it’s Brooklyn and it’s on the move and it’s on the rise, but it’s still Brooklyn,” he says. “I don’t know what my fellow neighbors think goes on at night, but people come by and pillage vehicles! All of these little white people over here are not gonna dial 911 for a car alarm going off if it’s only once.”

The white resident who complained — and it’s key to note that neither of them knew the other’s race or class, though one can infer that someone with a car alarm that isn’t silent also isn’t rich — sees it quite the opposite: “It’s not our f – – – ing responsibility.”

*

Fort Greene has long been far ahead of the nation sociologically, considered one of the most successfully racially mixed areas in the United States since the 1900s. Walt Whitman lived here; so did John Steinbeck. Richard Wright wrote “Native Son” while living on Carlton Avenue. The poet Marianne Moore lived and worked on Cumberland Street.

The area began to fall into disrepair in the mid-1950s, after the wartime economy dropped off. Thus began a decades-long stretch of crime, poverty and drugs, with the crack epidemic hitting the area particularly hard in the mid-1980s. But then, in near synchronicity with SoHo, the area began gentrifying; still, today, many longtime African-American residents feel displaced.

In a recent essay, the author Nelson George wrote, “I’ve been gentrified, and while I’m not mad as hell, I’m not entirely comfortable as an artsy, graying black man of 51 when I walk the streets of the neighborhood where I’ve lived half my life . . . I walk past a bodega where the ‘clockers’ used to sell drugs by the pay phones. My friends and I used to joke that the presence of these crack dealers on select corners ‘protected’ us from real-estate speculators and home-hungry Manhattanites.”

“I understand being upset about gentrification,” says Carolyn Mayers-Williams, 70. She is African-American and has lived in a co-op on Lafayette, across the street from where Lacey’s car was parked, since 1985. She lived here when the building was decrepit; now newer, younger residents pay $700,000 for one small two-bedroom, then balk at the cost of improvements to the building. Also, she says, young mothers push wide-load strollers and refuse to move aside; young people walk their dogs on super-long leashes, “like they own the neighborhood.”

“It’s a class thing,” Mayers-Williams says. “I don’t know that it’s so much race.”

It’s the younger residents, actually, who think the divide is caused by both. “I feel like this neighborhood is gentrified, but it’s really racially segregated,” says another co-op resident, a 34-year-old stay-at-home mom, white, who asked not to be named and who says that “it blows my mind” that a neighbor would leave a car alarm on out of upset at gentrification. The whole subject makes her very uneasy: “I do think when you get into certain issues . . . how do I say this in a way that’s politically correct-ish?” Long pause. “I guess there’s some hostility.”

“On the surface we’re all very neighborly, but underneath there are tensions,” says 35-year-old Jason Morrow, who also lives in the co-op and is also white. He says Fort Greene “is the best example of racial integration in the world — it’s like an ‘Afterschool Special.’ ” He admits, though, to some trouble assimilating: “I wrote a tech piece about how social networking could be really beneficial to the neighborhood,” he says. “Such as, if there’s a shooting, people could tweet about it in real time. It would be really helpful.”

And the reactions? Among the more polite: “Why don’t you go back to Park Slope?”

He remains confused.

Lacey, however, remains convinced he’s in the right. He has no plans to modify or disable his alarm. He thinks his neighbors should consider themselves blessed that this kind of noise is now their biggest problem: “I’ve watched this neighborhood go from bad to good,” he says. “We could be hearing gunshots. But we’re not.”

Lacey finally moved his car on Wednesday morning, when alternate-side parking went back into effect. Joe Taluy, a 55-year-old African-American co-op resident who thinks the area’s mix of blacks and whites is “beautiful,” saw Lacey moving the car, and wishes he knew then that the car alarm going off for days on end wasn’t just a simple car alarm going off for days on end.

“If I had known that, I would have had a few choice words for him,” Taluy says. “A few choice words.”