Reflecting On Home
The Importance of Documenting Your Life.
For many of us, home is where we feel safest. It is more than the place we lay our heads at night. Home is a feeling deeply embedded in our consciousness, that when we are not “home” we feel like foreigners just passing through. It is the place we long to be and what informs our identity. It is our community, our neighborhood, our culture, our traditions, our family and friends. No matter where in the world I live, I will always be a Brooklyn born Boricua.
My first home was 454 Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. I grew up in Los Sures, before gentrification bulldozed its way in and began pushing people out with exorbitant rents & replacing them with Midwest transplants who never would have lived there in the 80s. With it’s burned down buildings and empty lots you couldn’t pay people to live there back then.
The ash brown tenement building I lived in was sandwiched between Fidel’s bodega and Johnny’s tire shop. On the corner of South 10th street and Bedford was an empty lot filled with abandoned cars that was home to the neighborhood stray, Blackie. Down the block in front of Blanco’s nightclub, old men slapped fichas on makeshift tables yelling capicu while sitting on milk crates. El Gran Combo’s Un Verano en Nueva York could be heard blasting from someone’s open window or a passing car. On the…
