[Note: Blog posts are an ongoing series in which EEMA members explore their personal views and experiences relating to issues of development and community organizing. While the general spirit of the postings may reflect the opinions and work of EEMA the views expressed have not been reviewed or agreed to by the group as a whole.]
How people define what constitutes an eye sore, litter, pollution, and graffiti, often speaks to their political perspectives and economic interests. There is an effort by institutions to obscure the contested political nature of these questions by promoting universal definitions that only fit into their narrative view.
I was reminded of this by three seemingly disparate recent incidents; the April Unblurred on Penn Avenue, the continual eyesore of the month profiles in the Bulletin, and an upcoming neighborhood cleanup day in Bloomfield.
To advertise the Geek Art /Green Innovators festival during the April Unblurred, event organizers put up dozens, perhaps hundreds, of 11×17 posters all along Penn Ave. The posters were hardly visually appealing to start with, constituting a simple marketing meme of repeating the GA/GI name. The posters are now all rust colored from sun and soggy from rain, ripped and hanging off every other utility pole. No one has bothered to take them down, and nary has a peep been heard from the same organizations that rail against the evils of graffiti and wheatpasting on public property.
The Bloomfield Garfield Corporation (BGC) newspaper, the Bulletin, has a regular feature called “eyesore of the month” in which different local properties are highlighted as contributing to blight and jeopardizing neighbor’s safety. Each report gives a recent history of the space and their group’s efforts to track down and question the property owner.
Read it long enough and it’s hard not to conclude that who gets targeted is also about politics and self interest. It hardly seems like an unbiased look at what’s ugly and falling apart in the area.
They never seem to nominate themselves despite the poor maintenance of BGC-owned property on Kincaid and elsewhere. Similarly, you’ll never see similar language condemning the Friendship Development Association for the embarrassment that is its large space on Penn Ave. My own sore rump can attest to the poor attention they paid to clearing the ice sheet, aka the sidewalk, this past winter, to say nothing of the broken glass and trash that continually piles up around its deteriorated sides.
Given what they paid for the space, the years they’ve been holding it, and what it’s expected to go for on the market, it’s hard to see the purchase as anything but a speculative market play in which the losers have been everyone else.
An upcoming neighborhood cleanup day in Bloomfield was advertised as such: “Help us clean up our neighborhood streets, focusing on Liberty Avenue and beyond! Join us at 9 a.m. in front of Starbucks for coffee, a light breakfast, brooms, dustpans, bags and gloves. Let’s beautify Bloomfield!”
Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with picking up trash on the streets, but these regular clean up days do speak to how some view what is desirable and undesirable in the area. Beautifying the neighborhood means little if it’s only about picking up small pieces of trash underneath the trash that is yet another sexually suggestive 30ft advertisement for another corporate chain product.
In my view chain stores such as Starbucks degrade the appeal of the neighborhood and constitute a continuing eyesore on the community’s visual landscape.
The draw of Bloomfield is as an affordable, stable, conveniently located, relatively safe, tight knit community that is rich in goods and services available from mostly locally run independent businesses.
Bloomfield isn’t the Southside or Oakland, and that is what makes it likable to those families sticking around and new transplants that call it home.
Some may argue this is just falling into a trap of simplistically believing corporate = bad. Far from it. For-profits all share some characteristics but will differ greatly in many ways. Crazy Mocha is also a chain, but its feel, perception, and utilization by the community differs greatly from that of Starbucks. The clientele is different, and for good and bad (depending on perspective) Starbucks lacks the local character/s and personality. The larger the corporate chain, the more conformity and uniformity is enforced, in dress codes, behavior, employee rules, and sterile environments.
Crazy mocha is a space where people from the neighborhood gather and engage, alongside working and buying things. Starbucks is a place of silence where employees are seemingly never allowed to leave their posts or sit down no matter how empty the space, and upscale-dressed consumers labor in dimly lit silence.
The same goes for other corporate stores. Places where money is spent and goods acquired are one component of an area’s character. Businesses such as BFG, Dreaming Ant, Spak, the Sandwich Shop, Paul’s, Angelo’s, Donatelli’s, Quiet Storm, BBT, Grasso Roberto, Nico’s Recovery Room, are all part of what defines the appeal of the Bloomfield-Garfield area.
In this larger picture, residents are rightfully skeptical of calls for economic development. For economically distressed areas such language is often a euphemism for bringing in outside art galleries and pursuing other trickle-down schemes. In economically stable areas it usually means more and more corporate stores to inevitably replace and drive out many independent shops.
What then is needed in our community? The self-organization of residents who are interested in holding onto what has traditionally made this area great, nurturing the kind of new initiatives that will serve glaring needs, and promoting the importance of dignity and collective betterment over the narrow profit interests of certain special interests.
