My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [19]
The first time artists, writers and activists started coming back to Boerum Hill was in the 1960s, as part of the so-called brownstoner movement. Not all of these people were trying to make a political point by moving to a “slum”; some were just looking for old, affordable apartment buildings with character where they could raise families. Nonetheless, the movement helped foster an image of the borough as a kind of ideal community where classes and races mixed. It was the dawn of a new era in urban living, exemplified by the appearance of Sesame Street, featuring a neighborhood that looked a lot like brownstone Brooklyn. This image depended on the brownstoner movement not being too successful, however. That is, it couldn’t attract so many middle-class newcomers that the old-timers, the working-class Puerto Ricans and blacks, were totally pushed out. And in fact it wasn’t too successful, thanks to the race riots, the crack epidemic and the sky-high homicide rate that characterized the County of Kings in the late seventies and eighties. The area around the Wyckoff Gardens and Gowanus housing projects became one of the most violent parts of the city. Much of Boerum Hill remained bombed out, and property values stayed relatively low.
But then The Big Change happened. New York as a whole saw crime plummet in the nineties, making neighborhoods like Boerum Hill ripe for another “discovery.” That’s when Gab and I moved to Fort Greene. As the second generation of brownstoners, we were attracted by the trees, the beautiful old buildings and the open skies—but also by that vision of Brooklyn as a place where people from different classes and backgrounds mixed. It was strange: even though I was a year or two out of college the first time I stepped foot in Kings County, I felt like I had been there many times before, and my experiences had always been pleasant, and I had friends waiting to see me. In fact, one weekend I was walking to the subway when I passed a group of children playing in Fort Greene Park. They were wearing cardboard hats and beating a piñata—it was a birthday party—and among them stood a special visitor whose presence made my heart surge, because everything then made sense. It was Big Bird, as comforting a sight as a doting uncle or beloved pet. I was in the land of Mr. Hooper, Guy Smiley and Snuffleupagus. And tonight as I walk through Boerum Hill’s streets I think, What bad could happen in a place where the solution to every problem is to sing a song, plant a vegetable garden or put on a puppet show?
OVER THE NEXT few days things gradually become more tense. Kay announces that she wants the store before Christmas so we can capitalize on holiday sales of beer and lottery tickets. This is impossible. Christmas week is less than a month away. Not only do we still have to convince Salim to sell us the store—to prove to him that we’re worthy—but then we have to agree on a price and a contract, get landlord approval, hammer out a payment schedule and so on, then get our licenses and insurance policies in order, and then, only then, after what I would imagine to be a lengthy period of renovations, move in.
Only I forgot one thing: this is a convenience store, and making money comes before anything as trivial as fixing a hole in the ceiling. Also, this is my mother-in-law talking, the most impatient person on the planet.
“If Salim not say yes before Christmas, then no deal,” she insists.
Kay also announces that she wants to underbid Salim by fifty thousand dollars, which, given how sensitive he appears, strikes me as unwise. But Kay has her own ideas about strategy. “I never pay full price,” she says, and it’s true: I’ve seen my mother-in-law try to bargain with everybody from car mechanics to waiters. She’s incorrigible—to her, price tags are mere starting points in a negotiation—and I suspect that more than half the time she does it just for fun. But this