There Goes the Neighborhood!
A Sound Installation: Voices From the Other Side of Brooklyn’s Real Estate Boom
on view: June 23 - July 15, 2007
Opening reception: Saturday, June 23, 4–7pm
“Since I’ve been in the neighborhood, you see more and more white people and less and less children. Back in South Carolina we used to call it Urban Removal. They would do a new neighborhood, people got removed, nobody knew where they went, and now its happening here.”
There Goes the Neighborhood has been organized at FiveMyles by local residents in our Crown Heights community, who are seeing their neighbors forced out or evicted without any housing to move to, and who live in daily fear of their own evictions. At the same time they watch expensive new co-ops and condominiums being built in their front yard, knowing full well these expensive new constructions have no room for the displaced families.
This African American neighborhood is rapidly becoming a white neighborhood, with local residents believing the city is systematically getting rid of its black and poor population, and that expensive new housing in a low income neighborhood is New York’s way of forcing people out.
The voices heard in the installation are those of neighbors from the community who have interviewed and recorded each other. Photographs of the neighborhood by local photographer Michael Britto are exhibited on the walls and a video is being shown by filmmaker Julia O’Farrow of new construction going up within a six block radius.
FiveMyles is a white-run gallery, a fact that contradicts this sound installation, but this project is the only voice the neighbors have to air their outrage and their sorrow at the destruction of their community.
DIRECTIONS:
Take 2, 3, or 4 trains to Franklin Avenue. Walk two blocks against the traffic on Franklin. Walk ¾ block to 558 St. Johns Place. FiveMyles is within easy walking distance from the Brooklyn Museum.
acknowledgments:
There Goes the Neighborhood is supported by the Independence Community Foundation.