A Successful talk about renters rights in the wake of Gentrification

Before the event (I'll post a better photo later)

Last night's talk about Gentrification was better than I'd hoped. The organizer of the meeting Neta Alexander screened two films "Rent Freeze" which documented the struggle to install a five year rent rate freeze for all stabilized and rent controlled apartments in New York City. And "A Snowboarding Day in Brooklyn" by Jason Scott Jones, which captured a moment of bless ruined by the inequity certain New Yorkers often face.

The event was well attended with an active audience and four guest speakers Donna Rachel and the filmmakers. Topics of renters rights were heavily discussed. I met great people and came away more optimistic and with specific ideas on what we can all do to increase the sustainability of longstanding communities while uniting with new comers to the neighborhood to make Crown Heights in particular and the once neglected neighborhoods of New York city as a whole, vibrant functioning places again.

I'll post more about the discussion event, and some inspired thoughts that came out of it, and hopefully some new ongoing reporting that may be featured on this blog.

TOMORROW PUBLIC TALK ABOUT GENTRIFICATION IN CROWN HEIGHTS - ALL INVITED

TOMORROW -  SATURDAY 9/27 7:30pm a public talk about Gentrification - Rent Controls & Resistance - will take place at the FiveMyles Gallery at 558 St. Johns Place in Crown Heights. 

Everyone is invited to come down and join in. Two short films on the topic as it relates to Brooklyn will be shown, come down and meet the contributors to the Brooklyn Born blog as well as the filmmakers and Rachel Godsil, Director of NYC's Rent Guideline Board, and lenders of the Crown Heights Tenants Union.

Details on the flyer for more information contact Neta Alexander (NA889@nyu.edu)

The Lords of Flatbush 35 years later

Okay I see the Fonz and Rocky, but who are those other guys?
Lenny and Squiggy?

It was the late movie on Channel 7 here in New York that introduced me to "The Lords of Flatbush" a film released in 1973 the celebrated the rough and tumble always edgy lives of leather jacketed teens in the 1950's. yeah.

As I was want to do then (and am now) I leaped on to anything in the culture that referenced things I was familiar with. So a movie with "Flatbush" in the title was so provocative even for my then preschool-self, that I can still remember peppering my grandmother with questions about the movie that she couldn't answer.

To make it more interesting for me the movie had the Fonz in it, in fact there is the suggestion that Henry Winkler's turn on happy days had a alot to do with his casting in this tribute to urban American 50's youth culture.

My then teenaged aunt was as excited to see Sylvester Stallone in the movie.

Years later I was on the high school year book committee (nerd) and it was the 60th anniversary of Samuel J. Tilden High School out in East Flatbush. We were creating one of those oh-so-cheesy photo-collages of all things good about our high school and lo and behold, there was a still from the Lords of Flatbush. Turns out the film had scenes shot out in front of the very High School I was attending (duhn Dunnn!).

It's late so just imagine a better ending, one in which I stumble into the forgotten teacher's lounge and find, behind a paneled wall, a leather jacket, caked with blood and surrounded by still burning candles, that NEVER MELT, or imagine your own better twisted ending...

Anyway. It's 35 years later and courtesy of the Wall Street Journal there is an article about Hollywood's interest in the film all these years later.

The book reveals how everyone involved went on to become legends in their fields: From Sylvester Stallone who went on to become Rocky to Henry Winkler who became the Fonz, from Richard Gere who was cast as the original lead to Bette Midler whose manager pulled her out at the last minute...from composer Joe Brooks who won an Academy Award for "You Light Up My Life" to Paul Jabara who won an Oscar for Donna Summer's "Last Dance"...add to the list the names of Perry King, Armand Assante, Ray Sharkey and Susan Blakely and the impact of this picture in Hollywood is more than evident.

This film started a cultural revolution with the TV shows that it inspired. Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and Welcome Back Kotter all found their inspiration in "Flatbush." It was the beginning of Hollywood's ongoing strolls down memory lane that account for some of its biggest hits...The Wonder Years, That '70s Show, Mad Men...because sometimes it's just more fun to look back.

Here's a pict of the Samuel J. Tilden High School which you can slightly see in the background of the photo at the top:

Photo Wednesdays will resume in two weeks....