Spike Lee‘s obscenity-filled tirade about the gentrification of inner-city neighborhoods — caught on tape and posted online in all its mother-effing glory — perfectly captured the bitterness, confusion and circular logic that sends most conversations about New York’s ever-changing neighborhoods down a blind alley.
Lee’s torrent of cussing and complaints mostly focused on how well-heeled white newcomers have allegedly ruined Fort Greene, where he grew up. Much of what he said was hilarious (“Have you seen Fort Greene Park in the morning? It’s like the mother-effing Westminster Dog Show!”). But some of it was downright offensive (“You can’t just come in the neighborhood and start bogarting and say, like you’re mother-effing Columbus and kill off the Native Americans.”)
It’s the sacred right of every New Yorker to bewail, blame and bemoan the arrival of the folks who arrive in the neighborhood five minutes after we do, but somebody has to call bull on Lee’s complaints about gentrification. This is a man who has made epic contributions to the phenomenon he finds so troubling.
Start with Hatch House, Lee’s 9,000-square-foot palace on East 63rd Street — complete with internal courtyard — which he bought from artist Jasper Johns for $16 million in 2006 and recently put on the market with an asking price of $32 million. My friends in nearby Yorkville have been gnashing their teeth for years, complaining about how rents have risen to insane levels, thanks in part to owners buying and flipping high-end properties.
Before leaving Brooklyn, Lee did more did more than his share when it came to goosing the changes to Fort Greene he now laments. According to the Wall Street Journal, Lee bought a townhouse on Washington Park for $650,000 in 1990, around the time he was soaring to stardom, cranking out films like “Malcolm X” and “Clockers.” In 1999, he sold the place to a couple (a banker married to an attorney) for about $1 million and moved to the Upper East Side.
A decade later, the house was back on the market with a $2.75 million asking price, more than quadruple what Lee paid in 1990. And why not? Fort Greene started sizzling in the 1990s and never stopped, thanks in no small part to the area’s international reputation as a mini-bohemia, home to a colony of talented, ambitious black artists.
Writer Nelson George, painter Leroy Campbell, musicians Noel Pointer, Steve Coleman and Erykah Badu, rappers Notorious B.I.G., Mos Def and Chubb Rock and actor Chris Rock were all there, alongside an older generation of jazz greats including Betty Carter, Cecil Taylor and Lee’s own father, bassist Bill Lee.
Spike, the most commercially successful of the bunch, used some of his earnings to become a significant property owner in the area, buying and renting out residential and commercial properties and marketing the neighborhood with gusto. As recently as 2010, he partnered with Pernod Ricard, a French vodka company, to create Absolut Brooklyn, a booze drink sold, according to marketing materials, “in a specially-designed bottle reminiscent of the ubiquitous Brooklyn Stoop Life,” complete with a label depicting a brownstone bearing the number 165, the address of Lee’s old home.
By this time, of course, Lee had been living in Hatch House for years, and had long since put his famous 40 Acres headquarters, a converted former firehouse, up for sale (asking price: $6 million). That is what happens when the efforts of a marketing genius like Lee add rocket fuel to the blazing fire of gentrification.
There’s nothing wrong with Lee’s real estate adventures: He, like every New Yorker, has the right to buy, hold or sell whatever property he can afford, and try to get rich in the process. But it’s not okay when the language of complaint sours into one of exclusion, or even menace. (“You can’t just come in the neighborhood”).
That attitude undergirds the city’s stubborn racially segregated housing patterns and ignores the reality that longtime black homeowners in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant actually end up earning life-changing levels of wealth when gentrification drives up the value of their property.
Sooner or later, we all end up mourning the disappearance of our favorite dive bar, or roller rink or coffee shop. And it’s always painful to see friends uprooted and forced to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
But turbulence and transition come with the city’s exhilarating pace — and all the cussing in the world won’t change that. Better to build and savor one’s corner of the city before the next bittersweet turn of the wheel.
Louis is political anchor at NY1 News.
