They won't go: Tenants Nereida Sanes and Gladys Melendez are fighting eviction and demanding repairs at 1430 Putnam avenue. photo: Filip Kwiatkowsi This story was reported by students in a class on urban investigative reporting at Hunter College inspired by the work of longtime Voice writer and Hunter alumnus Jack Newfield. The reporters are: Tony Antoniadis, Elizabeth Bieber, Robert Cruse, Ruben Gonzalez, Johanna Gustavsson, Miyako Hannan, Iesha Irish, Kelle Jacob, Alex Neustein, Tamaki Ondo, and Steven Rummer. The story was co-written by Voice staff writer Tom Robbins, who served as the Jack Newfield Visiting Professor of Journalism at Hunter, with assistance by Anna Lenzer. Tune in: Tom Robbins on the New Battle of Bushwick more news most popular most commented Liberty: A New Comic Strip Liberty by Aram Sinnreich Home Alone—With Medicaid Fraudsters by Tom Robbins Keeping Jazz Makers Alive by Nat Hentoff The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker City Still Hassles '04 RNC Protesters Runnin' Scared by Graham Rayman Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

This is the Brooklyn neighborhood's first major luxury residential construction project, but the marketers of the 59 condominium units for sale here steer clear of the name Bushwick as much as possible. Promotional materials aimed at luring hipsters with the means to buy a one-bedroom for $270,000, or a three-bedroom penthouse for $682,000 refer to "ever-expanding Williamsburg" or "East Williamsburg" as the building's locale. This despite the fact that the tower at 358 Grove Street is in deepest Bushwick; look it up on any map.

"This is the continuation of Williamsburg," insists the condo's frantic real estate agent, dashing about the sixth-floor sales office. "Look," he says, burbling the happy nonsense of a salesman, "people in the neighborhood are ready to take their lives to the next level."

What's at work here is straight out of the brokers' handbook: Link the property in buyers' minds to the worldwide cachet of that now-prosperous and booming neighborhood a couple miles west of here. "The Peter Luger Steakhouse is just a couple of blocks away," the agent says, leaning over an unfinished rooftop cabana. Actually, Peter Luger's is a solid eight subway stops away from here on the M train that rumbles along Myrtle Avenue. But no matter. There are some very solid marketing rationales for this approach.

For one thing, mention of Bushwick still summons up unfortunate images lodged in the collective municipal subconscious. Most enduring are the apocalyptic blazes that erupted 30 years ago this summer when, on the sweltering night of July 13, 1977, New York City's lights and power went out. Looting and burning— the worst since the draft riots of the Civil War—broke out in half a dozen city neighborhoods. Nowhere was it worse than in Bushwick, which had been lurching steadily downhill for years. Pummeled by the loss of its blue-collar, job-generating breweries and knitting mills in the late '60s and early '70s, the neighborhood underwent a wrenching racial transition as low-income blacks and Hispanics replaced fleeing Italian and German families. By 10 p.m., minutes after the lights went out and the subways froze in place, crowds began pouring onto Broadway, racing under the elevated train tracks to smash gates and windows of appliance, clothing, and sporting-goods stores, hauling away whatever could be carried: televisions, air conditioners, mattresses, shotguns. Looting continued into the next day before cops got things under control. There were 890 arrests in Brooklyn, most of them in Bushwick.

A few days later, things got worse: A massive arson blaze erupted on July 18 in an abandoned knitting mill at the corner of Knickerbocker and Myrtle avenues. It quickly escalated into an all-hands fire—the biggest blaze in modern city history until 9/11. Even with 300 firefighters responding, the firestorm wiped out more than 30 buildings, leaving 250 families homeless and smoldering ruins that bespoke only urban hopelessness.

Later that year, Howard Cosell brought the South Bronx international notoriety when he announced in the midst of the World Series at Yankee Stadium, "Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning." But most New Yorkers understood that for a true picture of Dresden-like devastation, Bushwick—the old Dutch settlement on Long Island's western shores—had no peer.

The devastation bred despair. Another reason not to invoke the neighborhood's name in a real estate sales pitch is its lingering reputation for that other urban scourge, drugs. In the firestorm's wake, drugs swept through local streets. Much of the merchandising was homegrown: Before he was famously gunned down in 1979 while dining on the back patio at Joe & Mary's restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue—his cigar either clenched or planted in his teeth—Bonanno crime-family boss Carmine Galante peddled so much heroin in Bushwick and other neighborhoods that he became an embarrassment to his own Mafia cohorts.

Those who challenged the lucrative trade suffered the consequences. From the upper floors of 358 Grove Street, condo purchasers will have a direct "view corridor" down Irving Avenue to Maria Hernandez Park. The once thriving drug supermarket had its name changed from Bushwick Park back in 1989 in honor of a 36-year-old community activist who confronted the local crack merchants. On the morning of August 8, 1989, Hernandez was shot to death while she was standing in her bedroom on Starr Street blow-drying her hair, about to leave for her job as an accountant in New Jersey. The shooter—who was never apprehended—fired five potshots through the bedroom's drawn blinds.

During daylight hours, the park is pretty tame these days, thanks in part to a program the city launched a couple of years ago called the "Bushwick Initiative." The program, arranged by Bushwick's longtime political heavyweight, State Assemblyman Vito Lopez, has attempted a coordinated attack on crime, sanitation problems, and ailing housing in a 23-square-block area near the park. Some progress is already in evidence: On the first Saturday of June, an artists' group called Bushwick Open Studio held a parade through the neighborhood, celebrating the new art being created in the lofts and studios along Bushwick's western fringe. The parade route went right past Maria Hernandez's old house on Starr Street and ended at the park. That's the kind of thing that cheers the hearts of the promoters of 358 Grove Street.

Like it or not, artists are the shock troops of gentrification. By dint of their willingness to adopt urban spaces abandoned by industry, to live alongside the kind of poverty that would otherwise terrify the middle class, they inevitably soften up the neighborhood for real estate's juggernaut (often eventually displacing themselves; ask any former Soho pioneer from the '70s). It happened on the Lower East Side and Williamsburg; it's happening in Harlem and even in parts of the South Bronx. Now, step by step—or stop by stop, since the burgeoning hipoisie have largely followed the path of the overcrowded L train through Brooklyn—it's arrived in Bushwick.

Not that that's a bad thing, by most measures. A neighborhood that ranks in the top 10 poorest areas of the city, that has the highest rate of asthma hospitalizations and the most serious housing-code violations, can use all the help it can get. New investment means new residents, new stores, new jobs. And, whether city fathers choose to admit it or not, it means much closer municipal attention to crime and the quality of local life. For those who already own a modest piece of the rock, and who held on through the bad years, rising real estate values also yield a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza, a hike in net worth that trickles down to the rest of the family, providing a nice cushion against an otherwise fickle economy. When the price of limestone two-family homes in Windsor Terrace, a central Brooklyn neighborhood once considered Park Slope's poor cousin, topped $1 million a few years ago, the Irish-American families who had bought them in the '60s on a wish and a prayer danced in the streets, celebrating their impossibly good fortune.

The people directly in harm's way, however, are those clinging to the lower rungs of the economic ladder: renters who never came close to raising a down payment for their own home, let alone a sparkling new condo with granite counters and backsplash. For those living in buildings of fewer than six units—the cutoff for rent-regulation protections—it's just their hard luck: Eviction is usually as simple as a lapsed lease and a new rent set far beyond the pocketbook of the current tenant.

But those in rental buildings of six apartments and over—roughly half of Bushwick's housing stock—are supposed to enjoy the full protections of the law. They're entitled to basic services like a paint job every few years, regular visits by an exterminator, and a locked front door, not to mention security against illegal rent hikes and harassment. But try telling that to the avid buyers now answering the clarion call of a new hot real estate market in, of all places, Bushwick. In the past two years, residents and community groups say, new landlords have flocked to this once woebegone territory, their apparent mission to empty and re-rent these now valuable properties—regardless of the rules—as fast as possible.

Although no one's keeping score, there's a huge displacement going on here of working families who are otherwise entitled, under statutes, regulations, and common civic decency, to hold onto their homes. As old a story as gentrification has become, it's still a double-edged sword that can cut ruthlessly at the poor unless tempered by tough enforcement of housing codes and rent rules.

"It's happened so fast," says Roberto Marrero, a Legal Services attorney who has handled housing cases for the poor in Bushwick and Williamsburg for 10 years. "Rents were all around $600; that was what owners got. Then all of a sudden, in the last couple years, they doubled. Everywhere people looked, owners were asking $1,200—like that was the magic number all of a sudden." Even if the rent hike is well above the maximum set under state rent-stabilization guidelines, owners just take the chance that they won't get found out, Marrero says. "If no one challenges it for four years, it's legal."

Angel Vera, a housing organizer for Make the Road by Walking, a community group whose offices are located just down the street from the new condo tower, says he encounters the same scenario over and over. "The landlord wants the building and not the tenants. They'll wait them out as long as they have to, not giving heat, hot water, or other services."

Yolanda Coca, a tenant organizer who lived down the street from Maria Hernandez when she was shot, and who still makes her home on Null Street, says she's been swamped by families trying only to get the law enforced. "They are living in terrible conditions and still facing eviction," she says. "It breaks my heart." Continue