When the Buildings Burned
Different Worlds
The above photo could be mistaken for bombed out cities in many countries, but it’s right here, the Lower East Side, probably early 80’s, during the years when the buildings burned, when there was a village, before your favorite bar closed, when there was an egg store, a pork store, fruit stands on every corner filled with MacIntosh apples and iceberg lettuce, when there was no word for “kale.” Before the buildings burned.
Today, June 23 2024, it’s hard to think about or write about anything but deployed missiles, demented ICE agents, the clown car of a White House, and burning buildings everywhere, burning children everywhere. And kale. We still have kale so this must be civilization.
I wasn’t going to write about the news today. It’s not my forte. I wanted to post old photos of Mermaid Parades I’ve attended and tell Coney Island stories, talk about how everything of any importance happened to me in Coney Island. But foreseeably, there will be other days to come.
When the Cuban Missile Crisis took place, I was too young to understand what was going on much less analyze it. The year was 1962, JFK had a year to live and there was a standoff between what were considered the two superpowers of the day, the United States and Russia. It lasted thirteen days and ended with an alleged negotiated settlement. Maybe Russia did remove its missiles, maybe the United States did not overtly invade Cuba, although I don’t know what you call it when you use the CIA, ICE agents in suits, to do your dirty work.
We still believed what we were told in our Brooklyn elementary schools. We stood to say the Pledge of Allegiance, rooted for the USA (more or less), and regularly crawled under our desks during replicas of bomb shelter warnings. I had trouble with that part. My ass never fit comfortably under my desk so I guess that’s where the bomb would have landed.
Today’s news puts a scare into people with its threat of nuclear war. On the ground level, in this country, we are already at war. I don’t know what else you call it when the president, without state request, deploys the National Guard and troops of Marines to quell protests in California, or when ICE agents invade schools and factories, when elected (Democratic) officials get knocked to the ground, handcuffed and arrested. So far, it’s still a ground war against the people, with only one side legally armed. And we all know there is no longer such a thing as a ground war between countries.
There are no school desks big enough to cover anyone’s fat ass. So, what do I do? Post a photo of a burnt-out street that I know I walked through because I walked through every burnt-out street, climbed staircases with no steps, cut through lots from 2nd Street to 14th without ever traversing a sidewalk and am here to tell the tale but unsure what tale to tell.
Our disasters were not far from our norms. Buildings burned every day. Families disintegrated every day in a neighborhood where your cousin lived around the corner and somebody’s Mom got lucky and moved into the Projects and somebody hit a number in the barbershop and then the buildings burned and all of a sudden the cops got interested in shutting down those long cop lines and Operation Pressure Point was born along with Federal Fridays or was it Tuesdays? There was still no kale. Not yet.
The commonality is that people didn’t matter then, and people don’t matter now, particularly people of color but poor whites backing T&$*p and ICE and bombs and the rest of it will get their rude awakening and they’re not even the ones buying kale. With enough money you might survive another day.
Unless it’s a nuclear one.
*I apologize that I do not know how or where I acquired that photo. If anyone recognizes it I will ask permission of the photographer and credit them.
**Apologizes also to kale. You never did me any harm, I just hate you.
This is a stunning and devastating piece of writing. Your voice moves with equal parts fury, memory, and mourning — and that last line about kale, both biting and humorous, underscores the unbearable absurdity of the moment we’re living in. You draw a through-line from the smoldering ruins of the Lower East Side to the hideous militarization and institutional collapse we’re witnessing now, and it hits hard: the neighborhoods may change, the language may shift, but the machinery of neglect and violence keeps rolling.
What stays with me is your honesty — the refusal to sanitize memory, the unflinching acknowledgment that even back then, people didn’t matter in the way they should have, and today, they still don’t. And yet, even amid so much loss, there's a kind of sacred witness here: someone who walked those streets, who climbed those skeletal staircases, who remembers when community thrived in the cracks.
Thank you for this. It's not the Mermaid Parade stories we maybe needed today, but it’s the truth we don’t get enough of.
Really well said! Another great piece Puma.