Stratified: A Tale of Neighbors In New York

By WYATT FRANK

Oct. 30, 2015

Chelsea Market on W 15th Street in Manhattan. Beyond it, the Robert Fulton Housing Projects.

Andys deli isnt quite the staple of W 17th street. It is by

no means eye candy; just a nook on Ninth Avenue, a
small business with cheap and convenient items on the
menu. At Andys, you can buy a soda for a dollar, or 50
cents, a real rarity in New York. A mediocre egg and
cheese costs $3.25. It caters to residents across Ninth
Avenue in the Robert Fulton Public Housing Projects.
Three blocks South of Andys Deli sits Chelsea Market. By
all means a staple of the neighborhood, Chelsea Market
sits prominently on W 15th Street, existing at the
boundary between Chelsea and the adjacent Meatpacking
District in New York. Chelsea Market has a diverse
selection of food and drinks to buy. You could stop by

a shop like Lucys Whey, Chelseas top purveyor of

artisanal cheese or The Green Table, and order a mac &
cheese for $16. There are plenty of options, but if youre
looking for a cheap meal or for many people, affordable
- this is not the place to go.
From the looks of things, between Andys Deli and
Chelsea Market, this neighborhood could be like any
clich pocket of New York: diverse and integrated. There
is more, however, than what meets the eye in one
sweeping glance. These few blocks, from W 14th Street to
W 19th Street on Ninth Avenue, are a microcosm of the
inequalities of lifestyle and opportunity that exist
oftentimes in startling proximity to each other and in
startling disguise. In New York City, and in Chelsea,
Manhattan, Andys Deli and Chelsea Market can begin to
tell us this tale of two neighborhoods

t s a cloudy Friday afternoon, and a young

family emerges out of the housing projects.
They are a stroller with a baby sleeping inside, a
young girl and a mom. They wear jeans, all of
them except the baby, and the mom and
daughter wear matching purple knock-o Ugg boots.
Theyre headed to the deli Andys Deli - to pick up
some convenience goods. Mom leaves the two
daughters outside while she goes in to buy her
necessities.

The girl tightly grips onto the stroller as her sister sleeps
peacefully. She is young, and visibly nervous as she
stands alone outside the store without her mother. A man
walks past the girl and into the Deli, saying something to
her as he passes, but she keeps her head up and focused
somewhere else so as not to hear him. The mother
returns from the store and they regroup. With other
chores to attend to, the family heads back into the
complex of large brown buildings they call home.
Two blocks to the south, a taxi stops and a family of four
gets out. Dressed in winter hats, jackets and gloves, two
boys hop out of the car first. Mom follows, and then Dad,
who stays behind a moment to tip the driver. They hold

hands and form a line, hastily making their way to the

three story Apple store on W 14th street. Its a cloudy
Friday afternoon and they need to stop in for repairs.
They climb the all glass winding staircase to the top floor,
where the kids can sit and play on iPads while Dad stops
by the Apple Genius Bar for his appointment. Mom stays
with the kids to watch them play. Later, they will have
lunch at Chelsea Market. They may choose to tour around
Chelsea, possibly through the Highline, an over ground
train track that was recently redone by the Parks
Department as a mile-long over-ground park.
These Chelsea staples -- Chelsea Market, the Highline,
and the Apple Store -- have emerged in abundance over
recent years, providing an attractive guise for the subtle
and not so subtle inequalities. While the surrounding
neighborhood has progressed around them, the projects
on W 17th Street have remained just about the same.
Fulton represents just how, in the cultural, economic,
and historical contexts of their existence, a neighborhood
in New York can slowly become the shadow of itself.

Andys Deli
Google
NYCHA Fulton Houses
Chelsea Market

Apple Store

Highline Park
Highline Park

Aerial shot of lower boundary of Chelsea. Pictured is a neighborhood which has changed over recent years.

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) was

created in 1931 under Mayor LaGuardia. In 1937, the
United States congress passed the Housing Act of 1937,
which authorized a federally aided housing rental system.
Under this new system, NYCHA began construction on
the Red Hook Housing, the first of many projects that
would bring thousands of new affordable rented units to
New Yorkers.
The Robert Fulton Housing projects were built as another
NYCHA projects in the 1960s, completed in 1965. Since
then, they have spanned three and a half blocks wide and
an avenue deep, from W 16th to 19th approximately, and
have contained 945 apartments ranging from studios to
three bedrooms. Today, 2,077 people live in Fulton,
making an average of under $20,000 a year, not enough
to afford the luxuries of time and material afforded to the
passersby who survey Chelseas newly renovated staples.
While average rent continues to skyrocket in New York
City, those living in the projects pay approximately 30%
of their income, or an average of $445 a month.
These newer establishments propose a visible
juxtaposition of lifestyles situated alongside the old brick
buildings of Fulton.
In Chelsea, the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom
apartment is about $1,500. The median income is
approximately $98,000.
As Chelsea has drawn in new developments like Google,
Apple, Chelsea Market, Wells Fargo and the Highline, the
projects have come to house a now atypical set of Chelsea
residents.
86.1% of Fulton residents are black or Hispanic, and just
4.9% are white. The projects lay within the jurisdiction of
Community Board 4, a panel of citizens tasked with
representing their communitys needs and comprised of
members appointed by local elected officials. Community
Board 4 has a different demographic: about 21% percent
black and Hispanic and 73% white. In the blocks
surrounding the projects, within the Community Boards
jurisdiction, the median income is $84,421 per
household, approximately four times that of the average
NYCHA or Fulton resident.

The North-most corner of the Robert Fulton Public Housing Projects. The buildings are stuck in time, a footprint of a
neighborhood that has seen rapid change in recent years.

ack on the street on this cloudy Friday

afternoon, three teenage, African
American boys walk slowly between
buildings in the Fulton houses. One of
them walks ahead, kicking up dirt from the
pavement beneath him. The projects house over 2,000
residents within just a few city blocks, and yet the boys
surroundings lay bare of any human. Walking slowly and
talking amongst themselves, they push deeper into the
housing complex.
Across the street, on the Northwest corner of W 16th
Street - at the boundary line and cross-street where two
neighborhoods meet - a group of young Caucasian
women stand huddled in a circle, talking quietly amongst
each other, arms crossed. It is a cold, Fall afternoon and
they stand in black dresses, hugging the corner.

They form a huddled but inward mass; not one of them

faces outwards as they wait for a car to come pick them
up.
There is a cyclicality to lifestyles in the projects that does
not exist in the areas surrounding it. It is day-to-day and
generational, as life is dictated more by necessity than
leisure. For this reason, a close-knit community was
built, comprised of residents and members of the greater
local community. As the cycle eludes those outside
federally protected public housing, communities like
Fulton become alienated, divided more severely in their
social and economic relations to the neighborhoods that
have transformed around them.
Within Fulton exists a shared physical community
identity. Residents share a name and a history; many of
them have grown up and have family members here.
In the context of such closely divided neighborhoods, the
practical consequences are the perpetuation of
inequalities through more than possessive opportunity:
through socialization, engagement with certain
institutions, family responsibilities growing up, and
exposure to role models with certain levels of success. As
the girl who grips the stroller has different family
responsibilities and social ties than the two boys who
await their father in the Apple store, so to do the teenage
boys pushing farther into the core of the projects and the
girls in black dresses awaiting their ride.
These shared identities are the foundations of
neighborhoods, built up through community and small
business. The dichotomous social identities, on the other
hand, have become dividers, although they hold the
potential to be integrators. Commercialization of a
neighborhood takes away the purchasing power from
those with less money, but it also takes away the sense of
community that was once held between local business
and members of the community.
In Fulton, new construction and dissipating ma and pa
neighborhood businesses for long time community
residents - mostly among the lower to middle classes have not just made access to resources more difficult for
those residents to obtain, but have taken away important
social ties and disrupted community fabric.

There is no protection for the ma and pa stores when

rent goes up 500% points out Miguel Acevedo, a
community organizer in Chelsea and president of the
Fulton Tenants Association, as well as a long-time Fulton
resident. Obviously, he points out, while many kids in the
neighborhood have the iPhone or devices like it, most
kids couldnt afford the iPhone [from the Apple store], at
least not in one shot. But, he elaborates that there is
more to it than that: its that we dont benefit from the
Apple Store in ways we need to benefit. This fact
underlies everything.
The local liquor store used to be on the corner where
Wells Fargo now sits. According to Mr. Acevedo, the
owner was a good friend of the many local parents and
families. When the teenagers of those local parents came
into his store, he would call their parents to let them
know. With those who replace the ma and pa stores, Mr.
Acevedo explains, we lose the relationships the
community.
As the turnover of small business in New York City has
mounted in recent years, the turnover rate in New York
City Public Housing is as low as 3.1%.
Chelsea may be getting nicer, but those long time
residents have slowly become the last of a forgotten
generation. Without the housing projects, most of them
would not find housing in Chelsea remotely affordable,
and so would have to find shelter and belonging
elsewhere.
Economically speaking, the city becomes richer through
commercialization and an increasingly valuable housing
market. Gentrification, in theory, can help everyone in a
given neighborhood achieve greater opportunity and
personal safety, as it helps clean up and make safer those
neighborhoods which have historically been dangerous
and avoided by the public.
Gentrification, however, treads a fine line, over which it is
possible to forget about those residents who have lived
there for many years, displacing poor or even middle
class families in place of commercial spaces and high-end
residential living. The citys poor are being pushed out, or
in select cases, forced to watch as their neighborhood is
slowly pulled from them.

Fulton provides a neighborhood in its own right of rentstabilized, affordable housing to those who have fallen
victim to cyclical poverty and constrained social mobility.
Within one neighborhood, Chelsea, there is a stark divide
between the members of subdivisions or subneighborhoods, if you will, and what is available in terms
of opportunity and access to resources to members of
either. From Andys Deli to Chelsea Market, inequalities
are historical, now reinforced in recent years.
As soaring developments burgeon, community leaders
must find ways to advocate their communities needs in
front of developers and Community Board meetings.
They find rare successes in fostering effective
partnerships with new commercial businesses, urging
them to give back to the neighborhood, and urging local
government to keep them accountable to it.
There are good neighbors in Chelsea, as Mr. Acevedo is
happy to recognize. Chelsea Market is one of them,
providing college scholarships, hosting the Fulton Block
Party and the Fulton Christmas Party, and even
employing 10-15 kids from the neighborhood each year.
Members of the community like Mr. Acevedo are
constantly pushing to bring resources and opportunities
to members of the Fulton houses, as payment for the
paving that has been done over their neighborhood roots.
We need to do pushing... but we get tired of the push.

This is not a real New York Times article and I, Wyatt Frank, am not
affiliated with the New York Times. This article has been formatted as
such for non-commercial and solely academic purposes.