My Block

I've lived here for fourteen years, and I've lived in the neighborhood for twenty, with a brief break. Saturday afternoon was deadlier than usual, with two people shot and wounded in a drive-by shooting on my block. I was obliviously walking my dogs nearby at the time. Two nights ago, the street was lit up with klieg lights, as in the photo, as the cops tried to deter more violence. At the same time, I only found out about the shooting last night - which tells you something about the nature of urban crime. The atmosphere is certainly much, much better than when I first moved in, when it was crack-war central. And the neighborhood is now crammed with lofts, with a huge supermarket opening on one end of it, old warehouses now converted into yuppie housing, an after-school children's art center round the corner, and so on. Some of the new violence, I'm guessing, is a function of the gangs finally being pushed out - to conduct their deadly business elsewhere. Last throes, of something like that. Some might be accidental. But it's certainly not the suburbs where I live. Or somewhere tame and without edge, like Manhattan.