8 10 188 https://melrosestories.org/files/original/3c26cd7df8f7fd940f67ae78062cd49f.mp3 d03155346f36e67ff1bd080720f54911 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Diamond Naga Siu Description An account of the resource Eduardo Garcia Conde was born in Mott Haven in 1975, and goes by the name of Ed. He has two words of his last name as part of the Puerto Rican tradition — both his parents moved to the South Bronx from Puerto Rico before their 20s. Ed grew up as a single child and moved to Melrose at seven years old after his parents won a housing lottery for Christopher Court, which is right off the 149 Street-Grand Concourse subway stop. Although he left the South Bronx after graduating college — a goal that formed in high school — he gravitated back to Melrose for the community and life of the neighborhood. He is a former real estate appraiser and is now an active member of the large LGBTQ community in Melrose. But his main job consists of running his Welcome2TheBronx blog, which garners 100,000 to 200,000 readers per month. Since his blog aims to represent the whole Bronx, he spends a lot of time walking the borough to try showing an unbiased perspective of the Bronx. He wants to share narratives of the Bronx that most people do not see or hear. And now, here is his story from when he was growing up with the city still burning, to now as he fights with his neighborhood to avoid its gentrification. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Diamond Naga Siu Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Ed Garcia Conde Location The location of the interview Melrose 2825 Third Ave, Bronx, NY 10455 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound DNS: Hi. My name is Diamond Naga Siu, and I’m interviewing Mr. Ed Garcia Conde on Thursday, April 13, 2017. This for Professor Rebecca Amato’s (Dis)placed Urban Histories spring 2017 course at NYU Gallatin. Do you mind spelling your name for us, please? EGC: Sure. My name is Ed Garcia Conde, and that’s E-D G-A-R-C (as in Charlie) I-A and second last name is Conde. C-O-N-D-E. DNS: Okay great. So while this is about the neighborhood, I was wondering if I could talk a little about you first — I’d love to hear about your background, your time at Melrose, and you know. EGC: I was actually born at Mott Haven in the old Lincoln Hospital. It was a hospital that was in the South Bronx since before the Civil War, and I was one of the last babies there. It was one of the last years that kids were born there, and I lived for seven years of my life in Mott Haven, but just literally Mott Haven is adjacent to Melrose, so it was just like, we were always there. I went to in Melrose, and then in 1982, while things were still burning… buildings were still being abandoned still. Underdevelopment was opening. It was sort of like a little beacon almost in Melrose on Morris Avenue and 150th and 151st Street, and it’s called Christopher Court. My parents decided to apply for the lotto, you know, the affordable housing lottery back then, and sure enough they were one of the lucky families that were called, and in 1982 — May of 1982, actually May 25, I’ll never forget the date, we moved to Melrose, and I’ve been living here ever since with the exception of a couple years, where I lived in Manhattan and then I put a little stint in New Jersey. New Jersey, I actually broke my lease in New Jersey, cause I just didn’t like it. I broke it one month shy of completing my full year, cause I just couldn’t stand living there. It was a horrible experience. Not because it was a bad neighborhood, but I felt so disconnected from everything, so I came back to Manhattan again, because that’s where I lived before I had moved to Jersey. And while living in Manhattan, I was living in Midtown, living in a nice luxury building. And high floor, but I felt so separated from everyone. Everyone was always cold, there was no sense of neighborhood, and I started looking again, and next thing I know, I’m looking in the Bronx in Melrose, and I found a place literally half a block from my parents’ house. So I moved back. And I was there for a while until things got bad with 9/11, you know? And everybody started losing their jobs including myself, so I ended up moving another half a block into my parents’ house again. And then actually I was there for about five years, until I was able to get back up on my feet. Moved within Melrose, I decided that I’m not going anywhere else. DNS: Okay, great. So your family lived here the whole time? EGC: Yeah, well, my parents were born and raised in Puerto Rico. My father was actually raised both Puerto Rico and here in New York. He came to New York when he was 12, so he’s pretty young. My mother on the other hand, she came when she was 19, so she spent pretty much her whole school years in Puerto Rico and her adult life all over here in New York when she moved in with her sister. And that’s actually how she met my father, because my aunt was married at that time, and coincidentally enough, my uncle — her husband — is my dad’s cousin, so my dad was visiting his cousin one day, and his wife — who happened to be my aunt — and there was my mom, and they fell in love. So it was too sisters married, you know, two cousins. DNS: That’s great. EGC: So I’m related to, my cousins and I are were from that marriage, we’re related on both sides, so it’s like we can’t escape each other. DNS: That’s really funny. What was it like growing up here? EGC: Growing up, I never really thought much about it, you know, the — so many bad things were happening, it just was so normal that buildings were burning and that I could walk six, seven, eight blocks with my mother through the neighborhood and not one person lived on any of those blocks. Whether the buildings were abandoned or it was just rubble and field at that point. So it was sort of interesting you know? Really as a child, you know especially one who’s imaginative like me, and you know, loving fantasy novels and sci-fi and all that stuff, my mind would always wander and sort of create these stories of the landscape around you. So it seemed pretty innocent to me almost. Like, I didn’t know that there was, that that was wrong what was happening around us. Even though we went to Puerto Rico every summer, my mother and I. Dad stayed behind working, because he could never get the vacation days together, because he had just started with New York City transit. So you know, I’m in Puerto Rico in the summers, and in the mountains where my mother grew up on the farm and then I’ll visit my dad’s family and my dad’s father — my grandfather. They were in the city San Juan, you know — beautiful — everything is pretty much kosher. But I never really put two and two together you know, like that why was my existence in Melrose so wrong, versus what that normal scene that I lived in the summers in Puerto Rico. Or where I saw elsewhere whenever we travelled. So it was, like I said, it was really interesting. I remember it was also the height of the crack epidemic, so my mother and I sometimes were walking to my cousin’s house also in Melrose, and I remember one day — the streets were always littered with crack vials. You’d see them everywhere with different colored caps and whatnot. And one day we were walking on Courtlandt Avenue and middle of the day, and there was like a big commotion, people excited. It wasn’t like a negative commotion, you know like a “run away, something’s happening.” And my mother heard people say, “Look, look, they have the blue caps and the yellow caps” and my mother was just curious. She was like, “Maybe they’re selling something, some trinkets or something.” And her mouth just dropped. She had me in my hand, and she’s like, “Let’s get out of here quick, quick, quick,” when she realized the guy was just holding like tons of crack vials with the drugs. That’s when things started becoming a little more real to me as far as what was going around. But it wasn’t until I hit high school that things really started to bother me. I went to school — you know, Catholic school in Melrose — St. Anselm, and it’s borderline Melrose it’s kind of like Melrose-Longwood, Woodstock, which nobody really talks about Woodstock anymore. It sort of got absorbed by Melrose and Longwood. But anyway, that’s where I went to school. I graduated in 1989 from 8th Grade and went to Catholic High School Cardinal Spellman in the North Bronx — largest Catholic School in the New York Archdioceses. It’s one of the top schools in the nation and in the state, and it’s where Sonia Sotomayor graduated from as well among tons of other amazing people. And that school was very mixed. My grammar school was predominantly Latino with a small African American population. And even the Latino was 98 percent Puerto Rican, so that was Melrose. Melrose was mostly Puerto Rican — that’s all I saw everywhere. There were African Americans, but Puerto Ricans were by far the vast majority. And then here I am in high school in 1989 as a freshman, and I’m surrounded by everyone under the sun. Every race, nationality, ethnicity. Everything you can think of. Socioeconomic groups, all of a sudden it wasn’t just low-income families, but it was some very wealthy families as well, all mixed in. So it was a bit of a culture shock for me to see all that. And I liked that, I loved it. But immediately once you started making friends and we’re all hanging out at each other’s houses, I started noticing my friends’ parents they happened to be, my white friends, mostly Italian. Mostly Italians, that was actually the group I ended up hanging out with the most and some of the Irish kids. But none of their parents would ever let my friends come visit me in the South Bronx once they found out that’s where I lived. And that’s when it started hitting me that something was bad, something was going on. But I still didn’t really piece everything together. I just felt really hurt actually that here I come home every day, I’m safe. Even though there are gunshots and yeah, you know, when I look back 1990, which was my freshman year, you know in Melrose and in the 40th precinct part of Melrose, we had well over a hundred murders, and every night I heard gunshots around us, so I guess I grew so accustomed to it that I didn’t realize that it was so bad that it was something really bad. And it took rejection from my friends’ parents to make me feel that way, and it really bothered me a lot and to the point that by the time I was toward my senior year in high school, I hated the Bronx with a passion. I hated my neighborhood… I just couldn’t’ wait to get out. And that was all thanks to, I look back, and that was all thanks to my friends’ parents, you know. For treating me as like I felt like I was being treated like one of those commercials that was like feed the children type of thing. I felt like they were extending some sort of charity toward me. And meanwhile, my parents weren’t low-income. My parents, my dad working in transit, and my mom was working for the archdiocese. We were actually middle-income family. Middle-class, middle-income family, living in the South Bronx. We were an anomaly for the most part, like as far as income went. But we weren’t poor or anything like that. We just happened to live in that neighborhood first by necessity, since that’s where they ended up moving and living, and second by choice at that point. It was affordable. It’s not that they weren’t looking to other places, cause when my parents first got married, they looked for other places on the Grand Concourse, and racism was still really high, and it was still mostly Jewish actually, and once they heard your last name, they wouldn’t show you an apartment, so that was out. Which is why they ended up staying where they were. But you know, going back to the high school, I just couldn’t stand the Bronx at that point. I just couldn’t wait to get out. I just wanted to live somewhere where my friends can feel happy to you know, and safe to come and visit me. I did have one of the friends, eventually their mother did let him actually come over and spend the night once, which was like a groundbreaking thing, but it literally in all my four years of high school, that was the only time that someone from outside my neighborhood, outside the South Bronx actually visited me. You know, it’s stunning. All of my friends that — the only friends that came to visit me in Melrose were the ones who live in Melrose or were in the South Bronx in general, but they weren’t the ones that I always hung out with the most. I spent a lot of my time in the North Bronx, especially during the summers, because there was really no place just to hang out in Melrose and feel safe, so every day I took the bus on Third Avenue at the hub, all the way up to Throggs Neck, while at Westchester Square, then take another bus to Throggs Neck all the way to the end, to literally the last stop. So talk about like, how far I wanted to escape the neighborhood was literally going as far as I could on the bus line, where my best friend who was Italian lived. And every day in summer, that’s what I did every day. Day in and day out. Leave at around 10 in the morning and we hung out. That’s all we wanted to do, that’s all he wanted to do anyway. We’d just veg out, watch TV, walk the neighborhood. It’s all suburban up there, middle class, you know. One-, two-story houses. Nothing bigger much than that. And it’s on the waterfront. Sometimes we’d go to the waterfront, you know, just hang out. But it was all escape the Bronx for me. Escape the South Bronx. DNS: Did you express this to anyone? EGC: No, not really, I never really spoke about it much to anyone except that you know, that I just wanted once I made it would be to move out of the Bronx, and that was just something everyone always said anyways, so it didn’t really seem strange if I had said it. It wasn’t like someone was going to turn and say, “Well, why do you want to leave the Bronx?” Because that’s what everybody does. You either move to Riverdale or one of the nicer parts of the Bronx or just leave the Bronx in general. It wasn’t until college, I didn’t go away. I went to New Rochelle in Westchester County, but I drove every day. I spent as much time as I could there on campus, and I would drive back. I eventually got a job on campus, so I could actually study and work and I’d leave when the library closed at 10, come back home and just park the car, and go to sleep. And rinse, repeat in the morning kind of thing and leave you know Melrose. There was nothing there at that point, I felt. DNS: Is that sentiment the same today? EGC: Not at all. It’s completely different, you know. I love this neighborhood with my heart, with everything. And looking back, I don’t feel guilty for how I felt, because I was younger, and I didn’t understand what was going on around me. It wasn’t like we had the internet either to research for ourselves as easily. It’s not like there were also books published. Everything that was written on the Bronx was always negative, and in the media. So now, it’s like complete love affair with Melrose. I love the vibrancy, I love the mixed-income families that live here, I love everything about it. The different cultures and ethnicities. It’s actually right now, Melrose is the most diverse it’s ever been in its history. You know, Melrose was founded in the 1850s by Germans — German immigrants from the Lower East Side. They came up to what was Westchester County, cause the Bronx wasn’t the Bronx at that point. It was still Westchester, and they spoke with the Morris family, descendants of Governor Morris who was one of the Framers of the Constitution and owned all this land. So they decided to negotiate with the family, like: “We want to buy a parcel of whatever land and move up here.” I think it was about a couple maybe just under of a couple of a hundred families that ended up moving and founding the village of Melrose. It was actually Melrose South, Melrose, and then Melrose East. But they were all connected. And it was from that point, it was German sprinkled in with Irish, then eventually Jewish and Italian as well. And African American eventually started looking at moving in. They started moving in — I’m not quite sure when that happened — I think it was probably in the 20s and 30s. Not much. It wasn’t until the 40s and 50s, and then that was when the Puerto Ricans started moving in. The Italians were here also. Actually, the Italians were here at the turn of the century. There’s still a couple of Italian families left — literally, there are probably only two Italian families left in Melrose from those original families that came over from Italy, you know, like three generations, four generations ago. But now, it’s not just like, when I was growing up, it was mostly Puerto Rican, African American, and then there was actually still Italian. Like the mass I went to at Our Lady of Pity, the first mass was in Italian, the second in Spanish, and then it was English. And then our Christmas masses, every Christmas and holiday mass was done in all three languages, so they didn’t have to have these long services, they’d just lump us all into one. So you know, everyone was always waiting patiently for their language to come up, but it was really mostly the people who only spoke English, because Italian and Spanish, we could pick out and understand pretty much what they were saying, cause the languages are pretty similar. That actually led to me learning Italian and wanting to learn it. That’s probably why I ended up hanging out with so many Italians in high school. Actually, I am 100% fluent in Italian to this day. And that started here in Melrose, because I attended these trilingual masses, because it always fascinated me. That was one thing that I did look back at, you know when I was in high school. “How come my Italian friends up there didn’t want to come down here when we still had Italian families that lived here.” That always baffled me, and every June, they had their Feast of San Antonio, and every June, they would march out of the church — the Italian community — hundreds and do a procession through the neighborhood. And it was really interesting, because it wasn’t just the Italians. At that point, the Italians who lived here, were like I said, dwindling, so the majority who attended the march were Italians who lived in other parts of the Bronx, Westchester County. They all came for the feast day, and they all did the procession. Everyone would literally stop, because they were like, “Where are all these white people coming from? Why are they marching through our streets?” And I was always the one who’s like, “They lived here, you know?” Because a lot of people didn’t know the history of their own neighborhood, and I was always interested about what was here. Like, who was here, and, uh, sorry. I talk in stream of consciousness, so I sort of lost my thought there. Uh, where was I? I forgot where I was actually going with this. Oh, I was talking about the diversity. So as a kid, you know, those were the three main groups, including the Italians and some Dominican families. That’s when Dominicans started migrating to New York, so they still didn’t have a huge presence like they do now. That to me was like a really foreign experience. It was like, “Oh, Latin from somewhere else.” Spanish was very different from ours, and I was like, that’s interesting. I only had a few in my grammar school there was only one Dominican student with me. In high school, there were a lot more. That’s when I actually was exposed more to that culture. But now, it’s Puerto Ricans, it’s Mexicans, it’s African Americans, it’s Dominicans, it’s West Africans. And West Africans — just to lump them in as West African is an injustice, because it’s whatever countries that are there as well. And also other parts of Africa. All living in side by side. And it’s Christians and it’s Muslims, you know. You have literally a Christian church right next to a mosque, so it’s pretty amazing to see everyone coexisting, and no one is fighting. That’s one of the reasons why I love this neighborhood. It’s like, we’re like a living proof of we can actually do it. We can actually live together and survive, you know. I mean, after Melrose and after the fires settled and people started moving back when the new developments were being built, because at one point, Melrose had a population of I think about 25, 27 thousand roughly. But by 1980, it was down to just a little over 3,000, and that’s the era that I lived. I lived in a neighborhood that was pretty much vacant. It was about 400,000 people that left the South Bronx. That left the Bronx in general between 1970 and 1980, so you know down in the South Bronx, we were decimated as far as that goes. People compared us to the bombings in Dresden, Germany. That was the image that a lot of people would conjure when they described South Bronx. And when you look at the old photographs, that’s what it looked like. You literally thought that this was a war-torn country. Where else do you see buildings collapsed, half-collapsed, you know? Burnt out shelves and abandoned churches except in war and war scenes. But then to where we are today in Melrose, you know we owe a lot of the, probably everything to Nos Quedamos We Stay, the organization that pretty much stopped the first time gentrification tried to come into the neighborhood, which was the city. The city had committed I would call them war crimes on our neighborhood through planned shrinkage by cutting out services to us. And if it wasn’t for organizations — grassroots organizations — that fought for our services to come back. I don’t know where we would be, but this neighborhood was rebuilt literally through blood, sweat, tears, and the lives of the people lost during those years. Nos Quedamos came in, because there was a woman by the name of Yolanda Garcia. She caught wind of a plan by the city that wanted to basically raze the entire neighborhood — what was left of the neighborhood — and then create middle-income and upper-middle-class housing condos and co-ops and whatnot. Literally displace the people who lived here, and she was like, “Nope, it’s not going to happen.” And you know, they got together, they fought, you know tooth and nail, and eventually they were able to have to halt the city’s plans, and they were able to design a plan that was for us by us, because if it wasn’t for that, we would have been gentrified long before Harlem and Williamsburg. Like that Williamsburg wasn’t even on the map for gentrification at that point or signs and neither was Harlem. It was actually our neighborhood that would have been the first one to go. So thanks to them, I’m still here. I’m still in my rent-stabilized apartment and my parents are still here, and my friends and family. Cause now we don’t have many empty parcels left. What’s left is already slated for more affordable housing. Although we’re starting to see market-rate housing being built, so now we’re bracing ourselves for the second wave, you know, of gentrification coming now that we built it up, everybody wants to come, so that’s a little scary. DNS: Okay. So with all those factors, did those contribute to the name of your — or not the name — but the slogan of your blog? EGC: Oh, “You think you know the Bronx, but you don’t?” So a little background on that. I started blogging in 2009 on Melrose, and the reason I started writing on Melrose is because… I had already moved out of my parents’ house the second time, and I was during my search actually, during my search for my apartment, every time I looked up Melrose and things like that, I never saw anything positive. Everything was just images of what I grew up with, which was — even though it wasn’t too long ago at that point — they were far enough we were with new construction with affordable housing and families moving in, and the narrative was always negative, it was never positive, which brought me back to my childhood, one that I didn’t really see much wrong. That was because even though there were fires and the drugs and the violence, there was life happening all around us. There we carnivals and street fairs and impromptu gatherings of hundreds of people playing salsa music and cooking up a storm in shopping carts and barbecues in the middle of the streets, cause hey, who were they interrupting? No one, cause there were bocks and blocks of debris around them. Puerto Ricans are known for making do with what they have, you know and just being happy about their circumstances. I mean, it is what it is. It’s almost like a motto in Puerto Rico: they’re still happy. So anyway, going back to the slogan, it was, well that came after. I decided to blog about Melrose, but again, because I was tired of the negative images and the false narratives, and I realized that nobody was telling our story from within. Everyone was just coming in and telling our stories from their eyes, which even though my eyes are biased as well, their eyes are just completely biased, cause they don’t even know the true history or they don’t know the true experience of living in the neighborhood, so how are you actually going to write about it properly? So I started doing that in September of 2009, and it was called Welcome2Melrose, and Welcome to the Village of Melrose was what I had originally called it, cause that’s what we were — we were originally a village. But we were still a village despite having grown, and the slogan once I morphed into Welcome2TheBronx, when I decided to cover everything, cause I realized it wasn’t just Melrose, but it was a Bronx-wide image problem that we had that people were still were thinking that we were burning and that gangs were roving our streets. It became “You think you know the Bronx but you don’t,” and a lot of that had to do with the fact that even I thought I knew the Bronx, but I didn’t. Once I started my love affair with the borough and my neighborhood, I just rushed into the history, looked into every history book that I could and old photographs and asking questions like, “Who’s this, who’s that? Why did this happen?” And that’s pretty much how my slogan came to be, cause I didn’t know, and I figured if I didn’t know and I lived here, if you don’t live here, then you definitely don’t know. DNS: What are some things that people don’t really know about Melrose or even the Bronx? EGC: Well, with Melrose, a lot of people don’t know that it’s the unofficial downtown Bronx. It’s also where the Bronx was founded, officially as the 62nd county at the old Bronx County Courthouse on 161st Street. That’s where the Bronx in 1914 became the 62nd county of New York City, and we officially separated from Manhattan. And Melrose, like I mentioned earlier was founded by German immigrants from the Lower East Side. If you go to Immaculate Conception Church on 150th Street, that was a church that was built by the German community, and if you go in there, the stained glass is all in German. After my original church Our Lady of Pity, we transferred just to one more block to Immaculate Conception, where my grandmother used to go — where she still goes. And that’s where we began service. So as a kid there, I never payed attention to mass much, cause I lived in Catholic schools all my life. My eyes would wander, and I’d read the stained glass, and then I realized that that’s not English, and that’s not Spanish, and that’s not Latin, what is it? And eventually, that’s how I found out that it was German. You know, what else? Melrose, we had an opera house on 149th Street, which George Burns, famous comedian performed at. And the legendary Mae West, she performed there. And as a matter of fact, it was her performance there that sort of gave her her claim to fame. Her sexuality, how she was very scandalous at that time, and she performed a play that she wrote — a piece that she wrote — and it was called “Sex.” And actually, after she performed it, she was arrested for indecency, even though it wasn’t indecency compared to anything with us nowadays. But Lloyd Ulton, the borough historian, the Bronx historian, he says that he likes to think that “Sex” debuted in Melrose at the opera house — that’s where it debuted in the world. You know, there are just so many things. What else about Melrose? Besides that, it’s a nice place to live, and especially now with everyone who’s worked so hard to carve their little corner of the world here in Melrose and so many different nationalities that are here. You know, and then the Bronx in general, I mean, has history, you know. The Bronx was the first borough of New York City. People don’t really realize that, cause in 1874, about 20 years after Melrose was founded — which I find kind of ironic, cause it was Germans from the Lower East Side — they were trying to escape the crammed quarters of that tenement living down there. And this was all farm land. Melrose was all farmland and country, so they came up here to escape and founded a village. And about 20 years later in 1874, the West Bronx gets annexed to New York City, so all of a sudden, they’re part of New York again. And that was 1874, so it was pretty much everything west of the Bronx River. And then in 1895, the rest of what is the Bronx today was annexed from what was Westchester as well. And I think in 1898, like two tiny portions of the Bronx came along with the rest, and for three years, if you count the full annexation basically of the borough, for three years we were the only other part of New York outside of Manhattan, and 1898 is when Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens came onboard. So I like to call us the first borough, you know, we were a borough before it came cool so to speak. You know, the Bronx has always been home to so many immigrants. I mean clearly, we are all immigrants here in North America, but taking it to another step, the Bronx at one point had the largest Jewish population. No borough to this day has ever come close to the amount of Jewish families that they had living in the Bronx. At one point, the estimates were between 40 and 60 percent of the borough. Everywhere you went was a synagogue, kind of like how you have bodegas now. And Christian temples and churches and whatnot. We have the largest population of Albanians. Albanians they settled here as well. We have the largest population of Puerto Ricans of course still. What else do we have? We also have the largest population of Irish from Ireland — Irish immigrants — in Woodlawn. Woodlawn is pretty much an Irish enclave, like you go up there, and it’s not uncommon to hear pretty much a thick Irish brogue, you know, just coming by. Just as you walk by the streets. We also have a very large Bangladeshi community. We still have a large Italian population although it’s dwindled a lot. There’s just so many different ethnicities in the borough just living side by side in different neighborhoods, so a lot of people don’t know that. We’re also the greenest borough, the Bronx. We have the most parkland than any other borough in New York City. Almost a full 25 percent of our land is actually parks. And we have three of the top ten largest parks. The largest park in New York City is in the Bronx — it’s not Central Park like a lot of people think. It’s Pelham Bay Park with about 27, 28 hundred acres, and the third largest park is Van Cortlandt. There’s just so many stories with history. George Washington slept here too, up in Van Cortlandt, and as a matter of fact, it was still Westchester, but what’s considered the final act of the American Revolution was when George Washington entered Manhattan and basically took over. It was considered like that was it. The American Revolution? Done. Well, he did that by leaving Van Courtlandt, the Van Courtlandt Mansion, and that’s where he went into Manhattan and ended it. So we have that claim of history. We also have the first Tibetan Buddhist temple in the Western hemisphere. Was here in the Bronx. It’s still here, so that’s another sort of like. That one is another piece of trivia that a lot of people don’t even think about, they’re like, “What? Buddhism? Tibetan? In the Bronx?” It’s like, yeah, they parked themselves right here, you know? Of all places, so a lot of firsts. You know, right just a couple blocks away into Mott Haven, the Lincoln Memorial, the Lincoln statue, that was carved here by the Piccirilli brothers. And the dome of the United States Congress building, the iron support structure, that came from here as well. So it’s a lot of history. And if you go to the main library on 42nd and Fifth Avenue, you’ll notice the lion statues, the famous lion statues Patience and Fortitude, they were also carved here in the Bronx in the neighborhood, over in Mott Haven, which is right next door to Melrose. DNS: Wow. So — EGC: Yeah. And there are so many more things that I can’t even remember off the top of my head, cause I’m on the spot, so I could keep talking about all the other stuff, you know? DNS: It’s all good. Since you started blogging about both Melrose and the Bronx, how have the two changed? EGC: The two have changed drastically since I started blogging. Melrose when I started blogging, we still had a lot of vacant land that was still, it was already slated for development but nothing was going up yet. Since I started blogging, Melrose has gained roughly 4,000 apartments, maybe 5,000 apartments at this point. And there’s like another couple of thousand on its way. The Bronx, sadly, we’re a victim of our own success, cause now developers are turning their eyes on us. Since I started blogging, developers have taken an interest in the borough as the last frontier, cause there’s nowhere else to go — they’ve pretty much exhausted everything, I don’t think Staten Island is much of an option for them to make big bucks, so no offense to people from Staten Island. I love you, cause I go there. But that’s the number one thing you know? We’re worried now. We have these developers now and all these businesses coming to the Bronx. We have the first mall in New York City in almost 25 years to open. It opened up two years ago, going on three now, and not just the regular mall, but a mall with high-end stores with Tiffany and Michael Kors, so there’s this huge confidence by that sector, you know, that is starting to displace mom and pop shops, you know. We’re seeing more small businesses being shut down. People are being pushed out, even though the borough president likes to argue that there’s not displacement happening. But there is. There is. There’s landlord pressures and you know, displacement doesn’t necessary just happen by you being evicted or being priced out of your apartment, but it also happens when your landlord buys you out and says here’s $5,000, move out, you know, and then they’ll raise the rent: double the rent or triple the rent. But what’s $5,000 in New York City? You can’t start a new life like that, and you’re not going to get what you were paying. So like, it’s this whole plan of just pushing us out, and I think those are really the biggest factors. There’s one thing though that I did notice on the positive side is that — I don’t want to say that I started the trend for Bronx pride, cause I didn’t — but when I started blogging, there were really only two blogs around. One of them was someone who’s a friend of mine now. Nicole Perrino, you know. She founded Bronxmama, and it was a resource guide — and it still is to this day — you know, the number one resource guide for families. You know, what to do with your kids in the Bronx, and then there was another one called the BoogieDowner, which kind of covered the whole Bronx, and they were pretty cool. Loved the guys that ran it. The couple — it was a married couple that ran it — but they actually eventually left the Bronx. Not cause they necessarily wanted to, but they had another child, and their support system was in Queens, so it was kind of hard going back and forth on the bridge and expensive, so they decided to move back, and it was because of them leaving that I decided to expand just sort of fill in that gap, because they ended up giving the blog to someone who immediately within a couple of days destroyed practically everything that they built. A solid audience, a loyal audience, they just decided to use it to just advertise a lot of their real estate stuff, and you couldn’t talk about politicians negatively or anything like that. It was just so many rules that I was like, “This is not what a blog should be, you know?” This is like total censorship, so that’s when I decided to do the Bronx thing, but one of the things that I started was with Welcome2TheMelrose that translated to Welcome2TheBronx was Bronx pride… You live here — love it. And the Bronx is beautiful, contrary to popular belief. Even you know, I look back at my childhood, and there was beauty everywhere, even in the rubble there was beauty, and I wanted people to be proud of that and soon after — probably maybe four years after that — I started seeing more similar accounts, social media accounts popping up and people doing the same thing, you know. Showing the Bronx in a positive light, so that’s definitely one of the things that I’ve noticed that I love, you know, that more and more people are taking into their hearts — a borough that we all took for granted at one point. DNS: Okay, what are some things that you would want to change within the Bronx? Or Melrose specifically? EGC: You know, in Melrose, I would love, love, love more than anything for small businesses to be able to own the spaces they actually are in instead of just renting, cause that’s what’s causing the displacement. That’s why they have a lease for 10 years and then now that the market is looking rosier for landlords now when they go to renew their lease, they get an increase and then they don’t get another 10 year lease, they get like a three year lease. And after that three year lease, the rent is probably doubled again. So I think I would love to be able to work with the community to find creative solutions to — not solve that problem completely, cause that’s not something that’s going to go away — but to come up with creative solutions of how can we keep our mom and pop shops around, you know? Those stores, they’re the fabric and life blood of our communities, and there are many of them that actually not only just do business here, but they live here. For example, the restaurant that we went Xochimilco, the owners live one block over in their house that they bought. They were one of the first Mexican families in the neighborhood. They’re sort of pioneers in the South Bronx, you know. They own the laundromat across the street, so it’s like when I call the neighborhood a village, I literally mean it. Cause you have a lot of people who work here and who own businesses here that also live here. And I find that somewhat unique, I don’t see that. I’ve travelled throughout the Bronx, and you know other than communities like City Island, which is expected, cause it’s literally on an island, you know, you don’t see much of that, let alone New York City. So that’s one of the things that I’d definitely like to see. And protections for our people, especially our low-income, the most vulnerable, you know. We need to protect those families instead of pushing them out. Right now, public housing at NYCHA is a disaster, and we need to fix that. Those people deserve better. You know, my grandmother lives there. She’s going to be 85 this year, and she’s been living there for 45 years. You know, luckily her apartment’s fine and in great condition, but the general condition of the building isn’t that great, and I think that we need to take care of those people before we start catering or even think about opening up the neighborhood to anyone else, and that’s not something I necessarily want, you know? I don’t mind like in theory, development is not a bad thing. In theory. A mixed-income neighborhood in theory is not a bad thing, you know. For me, I think it’s great if we can have from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high mixed all together in one neighborhood, but in practice, it never works. In practice, you know, everybody gets pushed out except the ones who can afford it. So I think we really need to focus ourselves more on what we have rather than attracting what we don’t have. And why do we want to attract the crowd that never wanted to be here when it was rough? You know, for me, it’s like they’re undeserving of our beautiful neighborhood and our hard work and you know. Like Yolanda Garcia, she started that organization through anger and love of the neighborhood and anger at the city. And she died. She had a heart attack on Third Avenue, like she was living a stressed life right in the city. So there were many people, many warriors like her that are unnamed that died during the battle so to speak. So again, I question the motives of our borough president who all he wants to do is call it the New Bronx, and there’s nothing new about — it’s not the new Bronx — we’ve always been here. Those are really like the main things, you know. Of course, education for our kids, figure out how we can get our — now that we have free college tuition, hopefully things can start getting brighter for the future generations. DNS: Yeah. How — cause you’ve lived here in like different times of Melrose — what would a normal day kind of look like when you were younger and then when you moved back and then now? Like what was daily life like groceries, laundry? EGC: Daily life when I was a kid. You know, we lived in Christopher Court, my parents are still there, still the original tenants, you know 35 years later. They had a private playground. That was a thing when they were built, you know. They built a private courtyard, a massive courtyard, gorgeous. And we had security. Cause you needed security in the Bronx, but it was a safe space. So I actually had — again, I was privileged — to grow up in the middle of the South Bronx in Melrose, where drugs and guns were everywhere and violence, and people were getting killed. But in our complex, it was an oasis, and I still call it that to this day. But my parents — our apartment — faced the courtyard, so my mother could always keep an eye out, but there we were kids, living a happy life. So after school, it was either playing video games on the Atari once the Nintendo came out or playing in our playground, and then hearing my mom calling out my name. My full name is Eduardo, so she’d be like “Eduardo!” and then I’d here that and be like, “Time to go home, so go upstairs.” And I think that had to do with the fact of why I felt safe in the South Bronx, cause we had that. We had that security guards, the security guards there watching over us and we were able to play in that garden in the middle of the chaos, so you know, my mom at that point, she wasn’t working. When I was born, she worked maybe for a couple years, but you know, she decided to be with me. I’m an only child, so when I grew up, I didn’t have siblings or anything. She decided to stay home, and make sure everything was taken care of with my needs. So I spent a lot of time with my mom. Going shopping. Shopping was always, you know, in the 80s, when I look back, there was a particular path we took, cause you don’t want to go into the worst areas, even though you were in a bad area. You never wanted to go through the public housing, even though my grandmother lived there, you know, and we always went with my father every Saturday for dinner. Which is only four blocks away from us, but we never, we tried to not go through the projects as much, cause that’s where a lot of the guns, we would hear the gunshots coming from. So 149th Street was the safe zone, cause it’s a big commercial district and Third Avenue. So we would always walk up — we took the longer route, cause we were on 150th and 151st, so if we wanted to get to Third Avenue to the shopping district, we could go all the way up 151st Street if we wanted to, but it was easier going through 149th Street, cause at least you have store after store after store versus just you know, a vacant house, a vacant building. But other than that, you know with school and Sundays, going to church with my mom. My dad didn’t go to church until I was about 14, and that was when we transferred from Our Lady of Pity to Immaculate Conception. Our Lady of Pity is closed now, closed about six years ago I think. You know, we had a bakery that we would go to, that’s where we’d get the bread on the weekends. What else? It was just, you know, it was pretty much doing a lot of that with my mom running errands and then on weekends, we’d go away to Pelham Bay Park for picnics and barbecues in the summer with other family and friends. It was always a fun, big production for me, especially when it was a big one we were going out. You know, my mom and the other women in the kitchen, they would rotate kitchens in different houses, you know preparing the food for the next day and you know, going to sleep late and waking up really early so we could take that drive to the beach, you know, it’s like four or five cars, all of us packing in, and now that I think about it, they really sacrificed a lot for us. You know, all this sleep time. I didn’t think about that until just now when I caught a whiff of that memory with all the women in kitchen and the guys, you know, my dad and everyone was buying the supplies. It was a lot. It was a lot for us — gotta thank them when I see them today. You know, that pretty much was routine, you know, every day I would go down to buy the newspaper for my dad. I always wanted to go do that, usually go get the milk as well or the bread. It was always an adventure for me, and then growing up, now in Melrose, it’s pretty much the same, you know. For me, my laundromat is across the street, so it’s the family with the restaurant, that’s where I go do the laundry. I have a dog, so I walk her around the neighborhood, and she’s a Siberian Husky, so she gets a lot of walk. Although when I was in high school and in college, that’s when I had my first dog. Probably one of the most well-known dogs in Melrose ever. His name was Rex, and we rescued him, my ex and I. My first boyfriend actually worked in a motel in Putnam County, and he worked the graveyard shift, so he was just stuck there midnight to 8, and there was this dog that lived at the motel, but he wasn’t taken care of too well, and you can tell, and we couldn’t take it was just eating us away. The dog barely never slept, because every time someone came into the motel — because he lived in the lobby — so he would just run in and greet the people and get excited and bring his toys and everything. And it would break our hearts, and one night, he just said, “Wait here.” Cause I had just dropped him off, and I was like, “Okay.” And then he comes out with Rex in his arms and he throws him in my car, and he’s like, “Run, go, take him!” And I’m like, “Oh my god, we’re dog-napping!” But like I said, they weren’t taking care of him, so we rescued him, and we actually spoke — myself, I had told the story to the priest, you know at Immaculate Conception. And he was like, “You did a good deed. The dog wasn’t being taken care of.” I mean you know, and they didn’t really miss him at the motel, you know. To our knowledge, they never really spoke about it. Cause he had a habit a couple of times running away, so they pretty much attributed it to that. I mean, he was running away clearly, cause he wasn’t being taken care of, so Rex came to live with us in Melrose in Christopher Court, he was a poodle bichon mix, and everyone just fell in love with him, you know. We joke around, he was like “insert your struggle hero,” and he was the first dog in Christopher Court, cause dogs weren’t allowed. So we were like uh oh, what are we going to do? And my mother was like you can’t keep him here, but my mother and my dad just fell in love with him and you know, next thing we know, we eventually actually got taken to court, because of the dog. But there’s a New York City code that if they know that you have the dog for 90 days and they’re still collecting your rent, dog gets grandfathered in, so that’s what eventually happened. And then eventually you started seeing more families taking the risk and now, there’s definitely dogs in the building. So you know, he was a groundbreaking dog, and he was already six years old when we had him — when we got him. And he lived another ten years, he lived a long, full life with us. Travelled to Puerto Rico. But everyone in the neighborhood like, “Hey Rex.” They knew him more than they knew my name, and there’s a big, empty lot that used to be an empty lot until recently. That was fenced in, it was the size of a city block, and it was always perfectly manicured, because it belonged to the building next door, and it was like our unofficial dog run, so I always let him running around there, and then there was the day that we noticed he was getting older and older, and it really came quickly. And one day my mother had come back home early, cause she wasn’t feeling well from work, and she found Rex in the hallway just — not dead — but he couldn’t get up. And she called me crying, and I ran down from work, I left my office, and we took him to the vet. And it turned out that he had a big tumor, but he wasn’t going to be down, but he probably isn’t going to make it, you know. So we decided to bring him home, and we did with a comfort pack so he wasn’t you know, in pain. Just wanted to be with him, and our neighbors started coming, knocking on the door to pay their respects to say goodbye to him. And I’ll never forget that. You know, around 3 in the morning, he passed away. Took him to the animal hospital, and we made preparations to have him buried at the pet cemetery in Westchester, and our neighbors came up for the little — they actually have a private wake area, like a little viewing area, where you can view your pet, the casket before they bury it, and we were like, “Wow. We had a dog that was that famous that people came to his funeral, cause they just loved him that much.” And they were crying with us, right there at the gravesite as the casket’s being lowered and shoveled in. So that’s one aspect of daily life that I just totally had just forgot about it. The routine of just walking the dog, and he always came out with his toy. One of his toys, and everyone just always laughed, cause it was always just some stuffed animal or something. I buried him with the toy, the only toy he brought with him that fateful night that we kidnapped him — dog-napped. It’s not a crime — it’s a rescue. His beloved Sharky, a little plush Sharky, so I buried him with that. I was like, this is what you came with, you know, go with that. I didn’t want to keep to around. I still have his dog ID on my keychain. And now the tradition passed along to my Siberian Husky, you know, walking through the neighborhood. She’s also pretty well-known in the neighborhood as well. A Siberian — she’s red as well, she’s red — so it’s sort of a unique color for Siberian Huskies, but yeah, that’s my routine in the mornings, is walking around the neighborhood. I like to take long walks just to see what’s going on and you know, say hi to people on the way, and that’s how I know if there’s something that needs to be addressed. If there’s a light out at night, if I notice some lights out, I get on the 311 app, and I start reporting them, making sure they get taken care of. If they don’t get taken care of, I forward it to the councilman and say you know, listen, this block has this many number of lights out, and then he’ll push for it. Same thing with NYCHA. If I see something sort of like off, you know, I’ll make sure that that gets taken care of. So I’m sort of like the eyes and ears. And if people tell me, you know, I have people who’ll like tell me like, “Oh, I heard this is what’s happening on my block, can you help us?” And I’m like, “I’ll go take a look.” And I’ll make sure I forward it to the right authority to take care of it. And yeah, that’s kind of like what I do. I shop local. Before, when I was you know, when I was growing up in Melrose, The Hub, that’s the oldest shopping district in the Bronx, The Hub. And Third Avenue and 139th Street when we were crossing, that’s actually the busiest intersection outside of Times Square. It’s over 200,000 pedestrians a day go through there, and you know the whole shopping district is mostly — now it’s changing — you know, a lot of national retailers are coming in, whereas in the 70s and 80s, there were a few, but most of them because of the fires and the economic downturn were small, low-, middle-income families, so I always stayed away. There was always this stigma like, you know, you’re poor if you shop there, you know, don’t shop there, so I would drive to White Plains in the middle of Westchester County 20 miles away to do my shopping when I was in high school and I had my car. And even as an adult, I’d shop in Manhattan, go to J-Crew and all the expensive stores, but it wasn’t until I moved back, and I started loving where I really lived that I started shopping locally. And to this day, I will shop at the mom-and-pop shops first. I get all my clothes, all my shoes and sneakers, I shop for my clothing on Third Avenue. I don’t have that, you know, conflicts anymore. And then I realize how much I’m saving too, and I’m like, “Holy crap, I just got the same designer stuff that I could have gotten for retail, I got it for so much cheaper, you know.” And you know, I ran Bronx Fashion Week for two years. We had it in Melrose at one at the old courthouse, and I was the vice president of public relations and marketing, but I was doing most of the logistics behind it, and I shopped on Third Avenue for those events, and everyone was always asking me, “Oh, what are you wearing? Where’d you get that?” And I’m like, “Third Avenue,” and they’re like, “No.” And I’m like, “Yes!” So my friends are like, “Are you kidding me? You really got that?” And I’m like, I give them the store names and I’m like, “Check these stores out — a lot of gems there.” And you know the fact that really no one likes saying that they shop there is even better, because you’re going to find things that no one else is wearing. So it’s pretty funny. Even my mom, she’s like, “Oh my god, you did a turn around. You would never shop at Third Avenue. You used to cry if I bought you things from Alexander’s, and now you don’t care.” And I’m like, “You know, I want a vote with my dollars, you know.” I want to make sure that goes to our businesses in the neighborhood, so you know, like I said, it’s the mom-and-pop shops first. If I can’t find it there, I’ll try to find it at another mom and pop shop in another neighborhood if possible. And then if not, if I have to go to a national chain, like a retailer, it has to be in the Bronx. You know, like I don’t buy anything that’s not in the Bronx, unless it’s just not here, you know. My electronics, that’s kind of like the only thing that actually I don’t support mom and pop shops, because I kind of like —they’re not that trustworthy usually with electronics — so you never know what you’re getting even if it’s refurbished or not, so I have no shame in saying I go to the Best Buy. But I do it in the Bronx, so I make sure that tax money stays here, cause for me it’s really important you know to keep the dollars. Food shopping, I do the same. I do the food shopping the neighborhood, farmers’ markets when the season’s here. We have a number of farmers’ markets throughout, you know. We have one in the hub sometimes, another one next to Lincoln Hospital twice a day — I mean, twice a week — and then there’s the granddaddy of them all on 161st on the Grand Concourse on Tuesdays, that’s my favorite. So that’s where I get a lot of my produce, and everything else I get it at local — I shop at Aldi’s, it’s a national chain. The reason I do is it’s kind of hard not to, you know, you get things for 50 percent off, versus supermarkets, so until the supermarkets start lowering their prices, that I won’t. And that again, is I’m voting with my dollars, you know. Hopefully, they’ll realize they’re losing you know, a lot of business. You know, and we have plenty of supermarkets in the neighborhood, so there’s you know, in theory you’d think that with so much competition, it’d be cheaper. But it’s not. But Aldi’s rocks. Last night, Aldi’s was closed already, and I had to go get milk, cereal — I drink almond milk — milk, cereal and Splenda, and I went to the supermarket, cause I had no choice, and I spent 15 bucks, and I felt so bad, because at Aldi’s, I would have spent about six bucks. I was like, wow, that’s like nine bucks. I could have saved that for something else, you know. So yeah, that’s what I do. DNS: Do you think other people have that same mentality? EGC: Yeah, I see a lot of people, a lot of my neighbors, do the same thing — they try to keep things local, and I do have conversations with people like, “Hey, have you ever thought about shopping here? Try to keep it local.” Another thing about Melrose actually that I forgot to mention that people may not know just hit me, cause it’s part of my daily life, in the summer especially is our community gardens. We have about 17, and no other neighborhood in New York City has that high concentration of community gardens, and you know, they’re just special places. Most of them — actually, pretty much all of them — were founded by the Puerto Rican community. The oldest one is Casa de Chema, which is on Brooke Avenue between 157 and 156, and it’s basically a cultural center. I mean, you go there, and there’s live music there on the weekends. The founder passed away two years ago unexpectedly, and he’s credited as one of the first in New York City to build a traditional casitas, which are the little houses that were common in Puerto Rico at one point. It was a lot poorer — pretty much all the houses were little wooden shacks and bungalows — so the Puerto Rican community decided to build those things in the empty lots that were left behind by the rubble sort of like back home, and yeah, that’s another important part that I totally had forgotten about, how a lot of these lots were brought back to life since they were abandoned by community gardens, you know. DNS: Absolutely. So unfortunately, our time is almost up, but is there anything else you’d like to say about growing up in Melrose, the Bronx, the neighborhood, how it’s changing? EGC: No, I mean, I think I covered it. I don’t know, what do you think? DNS: Do you have any final thoughts? EGC: These are always the rough ones, the final thoughts. Yeah, I do. I have a final thought. I want Melrose and the Bronx to stay Melrose and the Bronx. I don’t want it to become a generic, gentrified, homogenous, bland, soulless place, you know. I want it to be a place where people come to and not only realize their dreams but live them, you know and stay here. I don’t want people who don’t really care about the history. All they want to do is just create their own version of what they want to see, you know. I want them to see what we have and appreciate it and ask how they can contribute, you know, or how they can help. Instead of saying, “Hey, we have an idea, what do you think?” Don’t come in that way. Come in respecting the existing culture, respecting the existing history, you know. Respecting the countless lives that were lost, because that’s what they’re doing. They’re coming into our neighborhood, you know, and you’re basically standing on those shoulders, so respect them. Ask them. Ask the people who’re here, “What do you need? How can I be of help?” Understand your privilege basically and use it for the greater good. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio File Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:12:23 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Oral History Interview Subject The topic of the resource Life in Melrose then and now Description An account of the resource Eduardo Garcia Conde was born in Mott Haven in 1975, and goes by the name of Ed. He has two words of his last name as part of the Puerto Rican tradition — both his parents moved to the South Bronx from Puerto Rico before their 20s. Ed grew up as a single child and moved to Melrose at seven years old after his parents won a housing lottery for Christopher Court, which is right off the 149 Street-Grand Concourse subway stop. Although he left the South Bronx after graduating college — a goal that formed in high school — he gravitated back to Melrose for the community and life of the neighborhood. He is a former real estate appraiser and is now an active member of the large LGBTQ community in Melrose. But his main job consists of running his Welcome2TheBronx blog, which garners 100,000 to 200,000 readers per month. Since his blog aims to represent the whole Bronx, he spends a lot of time walking the borough to try showing an unbiased perspective of the Bronx. He wants to share narratives of the Bronx that most people do not see or hear. And now, here is his story from when he was growing up with the city still burning, to now as he fights with his neighborhood to avoid its gentrification. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ed Garcia Conde Diamond Naga Siu Language A language of the resource English blogger ed garcia conde Interview Melrose oral history welcome2thebronx https://melrosestories.org/files/original/64d26361bbf0c1465bbeb73a42095d2c.pdf 35f1ce931ed973564fad8d4ee5c39b5a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Danny Barber, the Sergeant Subject The topic of the resource Oral History, and the Revolution of the Salvation Army Description An account of the resource This piece is about how the Salvation Army has grown throughout the nation, and has had a major influence on Daniel Barber's life. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rahni Davis Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived WhedCo and NYU Gallatin Collaboration Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 11, 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Rahni Davis Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Rahni Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Daniel Barber Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Rahni: (0:00-0:11) Hello, my name is Rahni Davis from NYU Gallatin, Spring 2017 of (Dis) Placed Urban Histories. Uhm today I am introducing Daniel Barber. Would you prefer to be called anything else? Danny: (0:12-0:13) Danny, cool. Rahni: (0:14-0:37) Danny… Barber. Uhm, and so we can begin. Thank you for coming today, again. I really do appreciate you taking time out, uhm and so my first question is just… tell me about your life? Where does it start? I mean we can go backwards, into where you are today, and how that led you here, or… we could *laughs* we can start from the beginning? Danny: (0:40-16:56) Uhm, like you said, my name is Daniel Barber. Uhm, I grew up everybody calling me Danny. Uhm, I was born July 17, 1969. Uhm my mother, Jamie Barber Walker, uhm my dad Dan Walker, uhm they had a total of 5 children: Gale Massey, Keith Massey, uhm… Laura Massey, Sandra Massey, and myself Daniel Barber Walker. Uhm… my siblings they weren’t my dad’s biological children, but he raised them. He was the only dad that they ever knew. So, uhm… we lived on Morris Avenue and 151st, that's where I was, I was born in Columbia Presbyterian and that's where they brought me home to. We call that home, well they were living there for a long time, but I called that home for the first 3 years of my life. Until the city had us move and we got placed here at Andrew Jackson houses, which we moved into August of 73’. Uhm… *chuckles* little story, I remember growing up as a kid in 1973 when Pope John Paul came to the Bronx, and he blessed the ground on Morris Avenue where now the Christopher Court development sits and, I remember this man patting me on my head, and I smacked his hand off of my head, and they said “that's the holy father,” and I had a mouth like a sailor as a kid, I cursed everybody out. I said “He’s not my effing father! That’s not my father!! Don’t touch me white man!” And it was the pope that literally touched my head, and I freaked out. Uhm, we came here, like I said we came here in August in 1973, and we been here ever since. Forty four years, in the same apartment. Uhm, same community. Growing up, for the first say, three, four years of my life, I was stuck underneath my mom, I had friends in the building, in the development, we hung out periodically, we played, we got into trouble, and at the age of six years old I started attending the salvation army. Uhm, we would go there and mom put us into different programs there; and we liked it, me and my sisters. And I couldn’t go outside or they couldn’t go outside unless they had me with them. And they used to hate taking me with them cus’ if they would talk to boys I would tell, or if they… my mom would give them money, “Make sure you spend the money on him!” and they didn’t spend it on me I would tell, they would beat me up, I would come home and tell, they would get in trouble, they’d get whoopings. As a young black kid growing up, we didn’t get beatings we got whoopings. And a whooping is consist of whatever your mother could grab to chastise you at the time. Mines was the old black broom sticks with the straws, with the straws for the uhm, for the broom. And I remember one day telling her, she was like “Get up you’re getting ready to go to church” “I aint going to no church,” she said “Whatchu said?” I said “I said aint going to church” and my dad heard it. And I was six or seven… seven, and my dad heard it. And my moms… no, he started laughing and said “Repeat… Tell me again what you said.” I said “I told that lady I ain’t going to no damn church!” And he started laughing and said “See, he’s adding stuff” and he said… “say it…” By this time, he done got out the bed, I did put two and two together. So he said, he walks into the kitchen, uhm…. I remember uhm… Him making it to the kitchen and said “Tell me one more time what you said.” I said “I said I ain’t going to no damn…” And by the time I got damn out my mouth, this man hit me. I flew through the closet door and the back of my shirt got hooked on the coat hook in the closet and my little fat feet was dangling. He said what are you getting ready to do? I said, “Go to church.” *laughs* I tell that story to everybody, I’ll never forget that. And that was like one of the first and only times my dad hit me, and my mom felt so bad because… I mean… he created the monster. He thought it was cute that I would cuss his friends out, and then when I did it to him, he flipped out and she didn’t like it. Even though I was being rude and disrespectful at the time, she could control it. I mean… I knew how far to go, I knew I couldn’t hurt her feelings, and come out bad to her cus at the end of the day, that was mom. Uhm… I started helping everybody out at the Salvation Army at seven, eight years old. Uhm.. my mom and my aunt, they both volunteered over there. They were in charge of uhh, feeding the community, the homeless feeding. Then after I got older, I started like volunteering going out on the disaster truck. So, that consist of going to fires, police emergencies, uhm, whenever a situation aroused and like a fire, third alarm fire or something, they would call, Salvation Army would come supply coffee, donuts, uhm, maybe a cup of soup or something to that effect. And I loved, it. I fell in love with it. Once I got like six… fifteen… fourteen years old, I got my first job there...  PAID job. We used to get little stipends for helping out, and volunteering but it was nothing like doing your first paid position and that was through the SYEP program, and I was the maintenance worker. So I would clean up, some program ended, by the time, I was, I came back for like two, three more years and the Salvation Army would keep hiring us, we were their kids, so they would take us, so that they could pay us. Then, once I got like sixteen, I started volunteering on the canteen, the mobile truck to go around doing the mobile feeding in the Bronx and Manhattan. Uhm, it was cool, we enjoyed it, we got to help people uhm, we extended the program, we went into Hunts Point, we did the Bronx Terminal Market, we were going to Manhattan on 12th avenue, uhm, from, *sucks teeth* from 17th street, like, 30, like 27th, 30th, and 12th ave, all the way down to 17th street. You had the ladies of the night, the working girls walking the streets, so we would give them condoms, we would give them dental bans, we give them, uhm, the lubricants, uhm, then at one point, we helped, we had Salvation Army got from the health department the little, the works kit, with the bleach and stuff to clean the works, so that they didn’t share the needles, cus by that time we were introduced to AIDS and stuff like that. Uhm, *sucks teeth,* that's like 18, *whew*, by like 19 years old, 20, I became, 20, 21, I became, I got a higher position where I was working with the kids doing homework, and... I became like an assistant to the director for the after school program. So, my boss was training me, but not letting me know he was training me to take over. So, the next year, I became the community center director, or afterschool director, uhm, I ran the summer program, I still did the mobile feeding, uhm, and I was just open up for the community. Uhm, got sick in 1998, had a little mild heart attack, stopped working for the Salvation Army, my boss and I, we were so much alike, we couldn’t take each other. Two stubborn, pig headed… egos and attitudes, uhm, I wound up suing the Salvation Army in one, got classified as disabled in 2000 totally. Uhm, my dad used to work used to work for NYCHA. He was the Tenant Patrol Supervisor, and in this room here, was the alternative high school. He started this. HE would beg me, ya know, “Why don’t you run for TA President so you can bring change?” and I was like “Dad, I don’t want to even be bothered with that.” We used to call him buddy, that was his nickname. So I said “Buddy! I don’t want to bothered with that. I got my own problems.” He said “but I want you to do it.” So I ran, I put my name in the race, I lost the election cause at the time the President, that was Ms. Helen Harris, she had her little crew. She had her flunkies, her team, whatever you want to call em’ that supported her. So I won the vice Presidency. Ms. Harris, couldn’t stand my guts cause’ she really didn’t like my dad, but I was connected and had connected and she can use me to get to the connections. So, she had a feeding program, and I would donate Salvation Army cases of food. If we had the food, and it was there for like 3 weeks, and we new we were doing a big ordering soon, I would empty out the pantry and tell her to “Send your truck driver and two helpers,” and I would empty everything out of the pantry and give it all to her and we order all new stuff to help the community. Uhm, she… like I said she went into the nursing home in a hospital, NYCHA, New York City Housing Authority deemed her incapacitated and I moved up. So, I figured since 2002 since present date, I’ve been President of Andrew Jackson Houses. I mean I love it. At times, it becomes overwhelming, it gets very stressful a lot, but it’s home. If I don’t do it, who will? And if, I… If I didn’t step up, who would have? And… nobody can fight for home like the people who live there. So uhm…. Now, I am currently am the President of Andrew Jackson Houses, I am the Vice Chair for the South Bronx Councilor  Presidents, uhm, Title of City Wide Youth Chair for the Citywide Councilor Presidents, I hold the title sitting on Board Member Community Plan Board I, uhm… President of the Bronx Works Classic Center Advisory Board, I sit on several other different committees, uhm… anybody that lives in New York City and lives in public housing, and you need help, Danny Barber will help you. If it’s wrong, I’m going to say something, if it’s not right, I’m going to try to fix it. Uhm… Life it what you make it. So, I push the residents to be empowered so that they can sustain better positions for employment; their not being stagnated working McDonald’s jobs, where everything is below minimum wage, and they can barely pay the rent, and got three or four children at home. So I just try to like… well not try.. Cause to try is to fail. So, I push the residents do what they need to be able to sustain higher education, better employment, uhm… to be classier people, better pillars of society, better role models for those who are watching. People always say I didn’t choose to be a role model, but you.. You may have not personally made the choice, but there is always someone watching… that sees how you move, how you respond and react to things, and in their eyes, you’re that role model. Whether you asked for it or not. So be it. It’s there. My thing is, just take it, and run with it, and do the best that you can do, and you run into a position where you can’t do your best… then you just move forward and you take it from there. But, I’m just… me, personally, Danny Barber? Danny Barber loves a challenge. Danny Barber loves a fight. Uhm… and it’s not to say that I fight with NYCHA, well… that's the acronym for New York City Housing Authority, it’s not to say that I fight with NYCHA to be… combative, to be… [what’s the word I’m looking for?] to be like… Rahni: (17:01) “a problem…” DB: (17:02-20:20) yeah… Basically yeah, a problem. To be an outright problem. But, this is my home. My home doesn’t start behind my apartment door, my home starts outside, the grounds that my building sits on, my apartment starts in front of the building when I walk up them 5 steps, my apartment starts when I walk into my lobby and I have to walk over the urine that a guest that came into my home, decided, either a guest or someone else that lives in the same building that we all call home decide that they want to deface the place by using as a public toilet. Or… they want to deface the place and use it as a social club for gathering of them and their friends. It’s… The New York City Housing Authority does a job for 8 hours, it’s the residents place to do a job for 24 hours, because no one can fight for you the way that you can fight for you. Everyone can assume what you want or what you need, but no one knows what you want or what you need better than you. So.. to.. To say that, I honestly feel that our destiny is totally controlled by us, the outcome and the outcome and the life that we live is totally controlled by us. I give people an analogy. Life is a card game. It’s a hand, that dealt, and it may not be the hand that you wanted to play, but at the end of the day, play the hand, let the hand play out, once it done played out, that hand is over. You get dealt another set of cards, and you continue to play on. And that’s just basic life. You handle situations as they come. You either resolve the situation or the situation , it stays the same, uncompleted, unresolved, and it becomes a burden. You do the best that you can do, and you solve what you can solve, tomorrow’s another day, and if the problem can’t get solved the next day, then maybe it’s not for you to solve that problem. Every fight, every battle doesn’t deserve a to be fought. And every war, isn’t created to go to a battle. You understood that? Rahni: (20:01) “Say it again…” DB: (20:03-21:49)I said every fight, every war, isn’t meant to be fought. And every battle that turns to wars weren’t meant to be fought. We have to better pick and choose our fights and our battles. Just because something arises and we may not like that it arose, or the outcome, or the way that it turning, that may not be the fight for us to fight. Coming into the work that I do, and to be all volunteer, no pay, no deduction in rent, no favor, the only favor you get is… you meet people, you network, you get, you build relationships to better the life of your people. You do favors for others to assist them, and.. And in return they do favors to assist you, it becomes a barter system. Uhm.. it becomes a one hand washes the other and together they clean the face type scenario. It’s up to you, the individual. And I tell them that all the time, it’s up to you. You control the outcome of your destiny and where you go from there. Rahni: (21:51-22:24) That was deep. *chuckles* Thank you. Uhm, so I think my next question, going off of that, uhm you spoke about, a lot about, you know, having agency in your own destiny, you being the controller of, ya know, where you end up. And so, my next question for you is: Why do you personally stay in housing? I am sure you got offered other jobs, or ya know, always are open to look at other places.... DB: (21:25-27:24) I’m here… because… several reasons. I left, I had to come back become my mom got sick. Uhm.. my mom got sick, she couldn’t take care of my cousin, which she adopted, made him my little brother, who was born with multiple ailments. He was born with Bell’s Palsy, that later turned into Scoliosis, uhm, Mobis syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, uhm… Seizure disorder, he’s legally blind, partially deaf, nonverbal, and she gave up working to take care of him. So, I came back, because she got sick, she couldn’t really give her all for him. So I stepped in. I took care of him. My mom died, September the 21st, 2013, and that was the day that I became a man. You always say I’m grown, when a grown up tell you something, and you feel it’s a disrespect, a violation, you just simply don’t want to hear it. But a grown up does grown up things. And a grown up has no place in their life to be a child, or childish. When you grow up, you move away from your childish ways. You can’t do both, be grown and still be a child. It’s either, or. I had no opportunity to choose which one I wanted to continue to be. It was forced upon me. “Grow up” and everything that you’re taught that child to become that man, it begins to start to kick in and little things like, “Wait till’ you have your child, you’ll see for yourself” or “Respect your elders because we ain’t raise you to be different than respectful…” “Don’t take nothing from nobody if you ain’t willing to give it back.” Little things like that, structure, foundation, love, uhm… caring, support, being admirable, being humble, these were all traits that were instilled from birth. Uhm… giving back, if you got on two shirts and it’s cold outside, with a coat on top, you take off one of the shirts and you give up the shirt. If you can endure coming home in the two shirts, then you give up the coat. My parents were very religious, my dad was a little… *chuckles* My mom would call him a ‘boot-leg’ preacher. *chuckles* And my mom believed in God, and she raised her children that way. We went to church every Sunday. It wasn’t no you went outside Monday through Saturday, and you could get up and go to church on Sunday. If you didn’t go to church on… and her favorite line was… “If you gonna live in my house or you gonna serve my God,” and it  wasn’t a question... from a kid, me telling her I wasn’t going to church, seeing the severityness of her saying “you’re going to serve the Lord, you have no choice” and then having to go, and it sticks with you. Still until this day, as a grown man, I look forward to going to serve God. I look forward to getting up on a Sunday morning, to go to church to rejuvenate to thank him, for all that he’s done for me during the week. Thank you for waking me up, thank you for the pain in my back, had me crying, I got pain. Thank you for the headache. Thank you for the migraines that got my head feeling like it’s about to explode, because you didn’t have to wake me up this morning to be able to say Thank You, or to be able to experience that pain. Somebody had a lot more pain than me and they didn’t wake up. So I thank him for waking me up, and I thank him for all the ailments and everything I have, they’re mine… they’re mine. And at the end of the day, I can close my eyes and wake up and still have them… I’m good. Cause’ if that’s all I have to deal with, there’s somebody out there living a lot worse off than I am. So we have to be more mindful to what others go through, and not just make it about you, or yourself. Rahni: (27:26-27:41)You’re speaking a lot about, uhm… ya know, the teachings that your parents passed down and even stuff that you’ve learned from your neighborhood and your community. What does education look like for you? I mean… is it a building? Is it desks? Is it children, is it your mentees… DB: (27:42-39:44) Education is everything. It’s all that you named. It’s the building, it’s the mentee. It’s the mentee, it’s all of that. Uhm… I went to junior high.. I went to elementary school in P.S. 156, Benjamin Banneker. It’s over there on concourse Village West. The school is now fazed out. Uhm… I went to junior high school 183, Paul Robison, across the street from the Patterson Houses, on Morris Ave and I believe that's 1...4...1st and 140th and 142nd street, and Morris Avenue. School still there, several other schools in the building, but Paul Robison 183 got fazed out. Uhm, left there in 1983, went to D.Wood Clinton High School. Uhm… loved high school. High school was the last teachings before I got pushed into the world. I remember going into, as a freshman, going to gym, and at that time when you went into high school, you had to take gymnastics. And I had this teacher, gym teacher name Mr. Rictor. And Mr. Rictor was the gymnastics coach for D.Wood Clinton High School. And Mr. Rictor told me “Hey! Get over here and do a front roll.” And I said “Just because everything is big doesn’t mean it can roll.” And he said “You being a smart behind?” And I said “No, I’m not being a smart… *hesitates* donkey.” And he says “Do the roll for I tuck your fat ass and roll!” And I was like “Old man, I’ll take ya glasses and you can’t see,” so he kicked me out his class and sent me to the assistant principal's office. Now, in high school, you have the athletic director, he’s the assistant principal for the whole athletics department and his name was Joseph Prezioso. He was the head football coach. And this man had this annoying voice. It was raspy, it was deep, and when he talked it sound like he was yelling at you, and it went like this... *Mocks voice* “HEYYYYY… HOW ARE YOU DOING?!” and that's how Coach Prez talked. This man was phenomenal. When I first met him, I hated him. I couldn’t stand him, and my mother raised her children to say “You never say you hate something cause hate is a strong word, you dislike it, you don’t appreciate it, but you never say you hate it.” I hated Coach Prez when I first met him because he Mr. Rictor sent me there and he says “Coach! This fat piece of trash don’t want to participate!” So he told me “Everyday you come here, you’re sitting here, and you do what I tell you to do!” And this old man yelling at me. So one day I got mad, and I was having a bad day, and I stood up to Prezi Oso... not realizing he was the football coach, and he yelled at me and I yelled back at him. He cursed at me, I cursed back at him. He told me he was going to smack the crap out of me, and I told him I was going to knock his old ass dead. And then one thing let to another, and we kept going back and forth. His daughter worked at the school. Madeline Prezioso. She did… she was a special ed teacher, she walked in and she said “Coach, who are you yelling at?” “I’m yelling at piece of shit!” And she said “Coach, don’t talk to him like that!” And he was like, “Maddie, You’re my daughter! Get out of my office” and she says “Not until you apologize to Danny,” and she asked me my name, I told her ‘Danny.’  And she says I’m Madeline, I’m his daughter, and he’s rude. So after he kicked her out, and we finished yelling, a couple of members of the football team starting coming into the office. And I’m like, why is everyone bringing this old man Litman’s Oatmeal Raisin cookies? He loves oatmeal cookies. He would have at least three hundred packs of cookies a week brought to him by the players… *imitating coach prez* “When you come to my office, bring some cookies!” So we loved the man, and I fell in love with him. Everyday, for… my whole freshman year I had to sit in his office because Mr. Rictor would let me in his gym class. And he wound up giving me a hundred, and we got close, and he said come try out. I tried out for the football team, I made it, I got hurt cutting class, and he yelled at me. I fell off the wall and messed up my hip and he yelled at me. So, I couldn’t play football so I said I wanted to do sports medicine. So I was the student trainer for the football team for D.Wood Clinton. I was trained by Mike Saunders, at the time, who was the trainer for the NEw York Knicks, who had traveled with the United States soccer team with ‘Pelle’ and was the trainer on that team. So, I was good at what I did. They had a program startup at lehman college… which was down the block from D.Wood Clinton, and I would go to Lehman two days out of the week for about four hours and learn sports med there. I learned how to do R.I.C.E: Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevate, R.I.C.E.S: Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevate, Support. I learned how to dod the basic wrap for your knee, for the ankle, the stirrups, put them up, wrap around, figure eight, lock it, pop it, its done. Uhmm, I knew how to set a fracture, a sprain, strain, fracture, contusion, abrasion. I can handle all of that. Uhmm, I got, I applied for college, I got accepted to Chowan University, I got accepted to Temple, I got accepted to, uhmmm, University of Tennessee, I got accepted to… North Carolina State. I had.. Prezioso gave me a full scholarship to go to school and he was paying for it. He started a memorial fund for his parents, and he was going to pay for my ride for four years of college. School wasn’t for everybody. I chose the street corner. So, while everyone else was going to get an educational degree, I got a street degree. So, I learned how to be a pharmacist, I learned how to be an engineer, I learned how to be a dictator, I learned how to run a democracy, I learned a lot. I learned how to survive, I learned basic survival 101 through 150, I learned basic life… being on the street. And it was either defend yourself or get punked for the rest of your life. So eventually I defend myself. I was known as the kid to pick up something and knock you upside the head, and then haul butt home. I was a little short fat kid; could run up at least seven, eight flights of steps without getting tired. And people would chase me, but I would make it. So, education… I’ve thought about it, but doing what I do is so much… where do I get the time to go to school? I mean… they say, “You can do online classes,” where do I get the time to go to school? Cause’ the first time that I get home, and I get to sit down and relax, the next thing I know I could be watching TV, the TV is watching me. I’m content with my education. I didn’t graduate with a regular high school diploma, I graduated with a regents diploma. *puts emphasis* Uhmm, very bright. I know I’m smart. I can sit with some of the best of em’. I’ve ran a branch of the Salvation Army with an 350,000 dollar  a year budget. I had over 200 volunteers working for me about 60 staff members. I know how to make a budget, implement the budget, I know how to how to go through an audit, and all of that. So basic business, operating a business, I’ve done it. Do I think, probably, education could make me go further? Sure. Uhmm, do I wish to go any further? Sure. I’ve always had aspirations on moving a political career to another level, and being one of the true, honest politicians, and what not. But God’s speaks to us and he tells us our callings, and our moves that we need to make. And, that's not my move. I know, it leaves much room to be tainted, and for me… to leave, now, here...who’s going to take care of my home? I leave now, and move out, what about my family? Are they going to have…  be afforded the same care? Love, compassion, admiration? Will somebody fight hard for them as I do for everybody? So those all things… and then my little brother. To be here, is accessible to everything for him. Uhm, other than Charlotte, North Carolina, Boston, Massachusetts, or Canada any place else in the United States, health care is not sufficient for him. And… the process that we would have to go through is grueling to start all over to have people to try to get to understand him. I made a promise to my mom that I wouldn’t let anybody else cut, poke stick, prone anything else to him, and I’ve kept that. Rahni: (39:45- 39:55)Thank you for sharing. Uhm, so kind of switching gears a little bit.. Are there any new programs or anything that you wish to implement in Andrew Jackson Housing? DB: (39:56-46:08) I want to put a computer, I’m going to put a computer lab… Not that I want. Everything that I’m going to tell you, everything I say to you, I’m going to do it. We’re going to put a computer lab in this room. Whether NYCHA helps us to get computers, or if I have to do it myself, we’re going to make this a computer lab for the residents. It will be open during the day hours,of nine until about one-ish, two-ish, to give the residents opportunity to do resumes, to do job search, to have access to a computer. Those who don’t know how to use a computer, to take a couple days out of the week to teach computers. I have so many people that I meet that ask me what do I see doing for my residents, and then I throw out the computer thing. I have about eight people that want to volunteer to teach. You say… somebody said, that’s too many people. It’s never too many people to teach, because I can have one person do beginners, I can have somebody do intermediate, then I can have somebody do advanced, then I can have somebody working with just the senior, I can put somebody that is great with kids just working with the youth, and the computers. So it becomes a great thing, it becomes an avenue to have alternatives, instead of just one. To say “Oh, Mr.Barber is going to teach you everything that he knows, and it might be limited, whereas you have 6,7,8 people that has so much knowledge about the computers and they’re willing to share it, so I hop on it. Uhmm, we want to do a program like movie nights. We’re ordering an outdoor movie screen, inflatable, so we can set it up and do movie nights. We did last program last year with the NYPD, uh, PSA7, and they made… literally had bought a movie screen up, and they had a BYOC, ‘Bring your own Chair” event, where they provided the chairs. It was just the community to come out, the kids sit, watch movies, stuff like that and… refreshments. It could be a fundraiser, but me, I don’t the residents for anything, I give everything away. Uhm, we want to do, like, multiple health fairs in the summer time. So, it gives different partners a chance to come through and do recruitment as well as give information. And I am not talking about having a table, where somebody is giving out, taking names, and sign you up to get you join MetroPlus, or HealthFirst, or Affinity… or any of those providers… I’m talking about literally having people come out, and I give up this space to them where they can do HIV testing, swabs, and stuff like that. Or, we can have a van pull up, and they do mammograms. Or, we get the dentist van pull up. I mean, I work… I partnered with VIP Health Services, I’ve partnered with, uhm, we actually have a program Thursday with Well Care - we partner with, we partner with Metro Plus, we’ve partnered with Health First, uhmm, I’m about to reach out to Lincoln Hospital and do some work them. So, we just, we don’t discriminate. Just as long as we can get like information dealing with the different health care providers and changes with the systems and everybody wants to cut ObamaCare and all of that, residents are scared. So you give them, you afford them, a little comfort. You give them a little bit of relief and say, ‘Don’t worry about that, let me worry about that. You just go and make sure you go to the doctor and when you go to the doctor, if you have a problem seeing the doctor, call me. Let me deal with working out your situation.” So, You’ve learned to make the littlest issue that someone might have to stress them out, your issue, so that they don’t have to be stressed out. I mean.. You have to have skin, tough skin. You have to be willing to go outside of the box. And you have to be compassionate. You have to have care for people. You have to be a people person. You have to have excellent customer service skills. Uhmm, you have to know how to put others before yourself. You have to be able to say, it’s not about me, it’s about you, how can I help you, what do you want, what do you need? You have to show others that, how they feel and what they’re going through means a lot, and it’s not just what you’re going through and what you’re feeling. I mean… if all those before us thought the way that we came to think, where would be… literally be now. Rahni: (46:07-46:17) It’s true… it’s true. So what is a day to day schedule for Mr. Barber? When he makes up in the morning, where is he going? What is he doing? *laughs* DB: (46:18-55:26) Well… I wake up every morning about 3:30, 4 o’ clock. I lay there and listen to the news till’ about 4:30. Then I get up, go to the bathroom, fin… come out, go to the kitchen and start the pan, breakfast for my brother, that's about 5 in the morning, so now I am making his breakfast. Uhmm, I go in the room, I’ll feed him, give him is medication, wash him up, get him dressed, get him situated, it’s now 5:45 - 10 minutes to 6. So, I’m back in the bathroom, taking my shower, brushing my teeth, getting myself situated, come out, go in my room, get dressed, so by quarter to 7, I can be downstairs with him to put him on the bus for his day program. Now, by 10 minutes to 7, I done made it to the grocery store, got me some breakfast, I go into the senior center with the ladies in the office, I’ll have breakfast in the morning, we’ll talk. Uhmmmm, from there, uhmm, I’ll hang around the senior center, or if I walk the development I’ll see what is out of place from the night before, maybe walk a couple of buildings to see what is out of place, what the caretakers need to correct, what they need to clean, what they haven’t been cleaning, what they’ve been “laxing” on. I’ll come back to the senior center, I’ll write an email, send it to the manager or the super, *coughs,* [excuse me], tell them I’ll give them anywhere from seven to fourteen days to correct the issues, go back to the building and walk it again in another week for fourteen days later, and if it’s corrected, fine, if not, I let them know as well. Uhmm, it’s probably now about, let’s see, nine o’ clock, the seniors what eight o clock, the seniors start going into the center, they sign for breakfast, they go to different activities. Breakfast starts at nine. So, I’ll sit there, I’ll help whatever seniors have problems with NYCHA issues. Get repairs done. Speed them up to get them done quicker. Uhmm, I may walk around if I don’t have a doctor’s appointment or something, I’ll come out into the community and just hang out. Kids are going to school, I wish the kids well for the day. People are going to work, “Have a great day,” “God bless you.” Uhmmm, might have a meeting or two. I do a lot of meetings during the week. Everything, I rather do it in the day time to get it done cause’ I don’t know what the afternoon is going to be and I have to try to basically, pretty much, keep myself free and available cause’ of my brother. But uhmm, my day normally winds down about three-ish, four-ish. I would try to like cut it low, and it may stop right there, and I run upstairs and I’ll go watch Steve Harvey and Ellyn. I am an Ellen Degeneres fan to the ‘T.’ I don’t care where I’m at, what state, I have to see Ellen. And then I do it on my phone. I done wrote her a total of 5 or 6 letters. If you know anybody that like writing letters, please, I really wanna meet her. I don’t want her to know that… what I do, and whatnot. I really don’t want nothing from her, I just want to meet her. She rocks! Love her totally. And then the second one, is Steve Harvey. I watch his show. Love him, and I think his wife Marjorie has changed his life so much, and how he’s become a greater man, and how his family is everything. And that's a trait that I snatched from him, because to me, family is all. Being a young black male, I know what I am, endangered. I know that my life expectancy as a black man… I outlived it, because I wasn’t supposed to live this long, coming from here. Uhmmm, its either… you always hear: “It’s either two things going to happen to you. Either you’re going to do what you gotta do or you gonna die or go to jail.” That's like, three or four things right there. How are you going to say that's two things that’s going to happen? “Oh shut up, you know what I mean!” No, I don’t know what you mean, tell me. I mean, it’s… cause’ people get the wrong idea cause’ you live in the projects, that your mentality is that way. Like I said, I grew up in the Salvation Army. I grew up around white people. I didn’t … I just lived here. I thought I was too good for here. And, when my mom would let me, and my boss, like he raised me, helped to raise me, cause I spent more nights in Dobbs Ferry in Ardsley, NY as many as I did here on Courlandt Avenue and the Andrew Jackson Houses, in apartment 15B. I spent… and I love… I love Ardsley, NY. I hated in the winter time. You had to walk up them hills. I loved Dobbs Ferry. I think it’s cool. I mean… Salvation Army had a camp in Jersey called “Starling Camp.” We would go out there, we got to get away. I got to experience stuff. I’ve been to every city in Canada… as a kid. We had a singing company. We used to travel the United States, singing at different Salvation Armies, doing programs as kids. And, that gave me an insight to know people, to experience different people, different cultures, to taste different foods, to see how other people live, and then come back home… and then you see at home, homelessness in Canada is nothing like homeless here. Homelessness in Canada is basically in some aspects, they have what we have, but in the majority, homelessness is… you’re living in like a shelter… that's homeless. It’s completely different than what we got. Homeless is living on the street, eating out of the garbage can, you don’t know where your meal is coming from. Bathed? You haven’t done that in God knows how long. If water was to touch your skin, either two things are gonna happen. Either you’re gonna get clean or you’re gonna go into shock because you don’t know what water is! That's homelessness! I’ve done that! At no choice of my own did I have to ever sleep in an abandoned building, did I ever have eat anything somebody else threw out, and when you’re homeless, and you experience things, your pride gets in the way… food’s pride gets in the way. And you tend… cause’ me… I didn’t have to experience the street, but I chose to. I didn’t have to indulge, and get high with different drugs and stuff, but I chose to. And, it was a choice, all of mine. I wouldn’t come home for weeks, and so I could come back home to how she saw me last, because I didn’t want her to say “Boy what are you doing? You’re doing something you know you ain’t supposed to be doing!” You didn’t want always get a chestation. You didn’t always want to hear that speech, it wasn’t always about getting yelled at. Dag… stop yelling! Talk to me… don’t yell at me! It was.. It was warranted. Rahni: (55:28-55:54) I totally understand and resonate. Uhmmm, and so my last and final question Mr. Barber… what does your activism look like in the future? What are you future plans? Not… it doesn’t have to be specific, but where do you see yourself? Your family? Your community? Uhmm, your mentee, your mentors? And you can take a second to think about it. DB: (55:54-58:03) I see myself in the future… somebody fighting to restructure New York City housing regarding.... To make public housing truly public for the people. There’s no such thing as affordable housing. Because… when you use the word affordable, it becomes a question… affordable for who? And I think that's a significant question. It’s a significant question that others so afraid to answer, because people now become… fingers pointed, you’re put on… on blast, to have to answer things that you may not publicly now how to answer, or can not answer, or may not just even know the answers to the question. So… *sucks teeth* I see myself, within the next five, let’s say five to ten years… I was hoping to be out of here to run for elected office. Uhmm, stay in the community. I love the community. Uhmm, I think the community is not gone, its vibrant, its upcoming. Uhmm, I don’t think the youth in the community are lost, I think that they’re just confused and... misunderstood. Uhmm, the seniors.. They can take a little more time to speak with the youth, and the youth can work with the seniors to get the understanding. So I am pushing this… senior youth initiative to get them together. I just took… Saturday we came back from Washington. We took 50… 50 something residents, young and old.. Down to the African African History Museum. Rahni: (58:05) How was that? DB: (58:06-1:01:03) It was gorgeous, and they loved it. They loved it! Uhmm, we had lunch together. I took them all to the Golden Corral. Some of them never even been outside of New York City. They said, “Where are we at?” We’re in Logan, Maryland. “I didn’t know Maryland was that big..” Some of them never been off of this block. This is all they know. And to be able to go to something like that… it’s like.. To them, it was a attractive, it was mind boggling. It blew their mind, cause’ you heard comments like “Thank you so much. I’ve never seen nothing like that” Somebody said, “Why you have to go to D.C.? You got the Schomburg Museum. Schomburg wouldn’t even meet up to what that is. [excuse me one second - he answers the phone call] … So, I mean, it’s… I see it. I mean… it’s either that or, I’m still here because nobody else wants to step up and do it. In all… I don’t see all the progress we made, just to give it up because you want to become a city council member.. Or what not. You’re able to to help your people more, but to an extent, because your hands are tied. Because now, instead of where I can focus on my development, I have to think about a broader area, and it’s called the district! Councilmatic District, that you’re responsible for, and it’s not just Andrew Jackson. So, where I may of helped Andrew Jackson this year… I might be able to do nothing for them for another two years, cause’ it has to go around, and everybody gotta get a piece of the pie, cause’ if you don’t, you’ll be… a one term, politician. People are tired of the politicians lying, and not doing what they say they’re gonna do on the platforms that they run on. And I’m training my residents, and I’m pushing my residents. If… even if I don’t stand up to everything I say I’m going to do, you give me a shot. And if I don’t correct it, you let me go, you kick me to the curb. Rahni: (1:01:08-1:01:19) So, last and final, last last last and final question. Three words to describe Mr. Barber? From his self perception. DB: (1:01:20) Passionate, loving, and caring. Rahni (1:01:32-end.) Pasionate, loving, and caring… Okay! I like those. I think I got a gist of that throughout this whole interview. Uhm, I want to thank you again, for definitely sharing your life story, your life history, so inspiring. Uh, now I have more work to do… for myself, as a college student from the South Bronx. So, thank you, thank you, thank you. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1 hour, two minutes Time Summary A summary of an interview given for different time stamps throughout the interview Time Summary: 0:00-0:21 - Daniel's childhood and life, his connection to NYCHA, and foundational beliefs 0:21-0:28 - Passion for his work (Housing) 0:28-0:39 - Educational trajectory, and relationship to education in his community. 0:40-0:46 - New Programs, Innovations, Ideas for his job 0:46-0:55 - Daily Life of Daniel Barber 0:55-0:58 - Daniel's Future 0:58-1:01:01 - His trip to the African American Museum Last Minute - His perception of himself/ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Biography of Daniel Barber https://melrosestories.org/files/original/4ece00ccfc874a0624e67e0adec76851.jpg 86780c12ed87dab6b27ce2e2633edbb1 https://melrosestories.org/files/original/663813c7130d3921e36bfe40d945d4f6.jpg fadd819c1f11887fcef0dfdda1d3dd8e https://melrosestories.org/files/original/225a273391711a5cd3d2487b2b00eb83.m4a 28b31bf43cd6e7196a2a2faed766afc0 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Danny Barber, the Sergeant Subject The topic of the resource Oral History, and the Revolution of the Salvation Army Description An account of the resource This piece is about how the Salvation Army has grown throughout the nation, and has had a major influence on Daniel Barber's life. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rahni Davis Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived WhedCo and NYU Gallatin Collaboration Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 11, 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Rahni Davis Person An individual. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Sergeant of His Army https://melrosestories.org/files/original/12de5a5c80fea050c2990742808b4c81.jpg 7b0dc7d3109ef7a69ec9aade6abd95ff Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Danny Barber, the Sergeant Subject The topic of the resource Oral History, and the Revolution of the Salvation Army Description An account of the resource This piece is about how the Salvation Army has grown throughout the nation, and has had a major influence on Daniel Barber's life. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rahni Davis Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived WhedCo and NYU Gallatin Collaboration Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 11, 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Rahni Davis Physical Object An inanimate, three-dimensional object or substance. Note that digital representations of, or surrogates for, these objects should use Moving Image, Still Image, Text or one of the other types. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Armor https://melrosestories.org/files/original/c1f8d63a4d16aeba0ee7edd876d8fcd3.jpg 9fdca3370509d350617e19c134fc5d76 https://melrosestories.org/files/original/fcd92ce390ec91c69eac397a71138f92.jpg aa72c9066afd1dea64bd3c41c968f108 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Diamond Naga Siu Description An account of the resource Eduardo Garcia Conde was born in Mott Haven in 1975, and goes by the name of Ed. He has two words of his last name as part of the Puerto Rican tradition — both his parents moved to the South Bronx from Puerto Rico before their 20s. Ed grew up as a single child and moved to Melrose at seven years old after his parents won a housing lottery for Christopher Court, which is right off the 149 Street-Grand Concourse subway stop. Although he left the South Bronx after graduating college — a goal that formed in high school — he gravitated back to Melrose for the community and life of the neighborhood. He is a former real estate appraiser and is now an active member of the large LGBTQ community in Melrose. But his main job consists of running his Welcome2TheBronx blog, which garners 100,000 to 200,000 readers per month. Since his blog aims to represent the whole Bronx, he spends a lot of time walking the borough to try showing an unbiased perspective of the Bronx. He wants to share narratives of the Bronx that most people do not see or hear. And now, here is his story from when he was growing up with the city still burning, to now as he fights with his neighborhood to avoid its gentrification. Physical Object An inanimate, three-dimensional object or substance. Note that digital representations of, or surrogates for, these objects should use Moving Image, Still Image, Text or one of the other types. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Book Subject The topic of the resource "How to Survive a Plague" by David France Description An account of the resource Ed Garcia Conde recently received this book as a gift from a friend. Although relatively new, he said this book is special to him, since it epitomizes living through the roughest times in Melrose and the South Bronx. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Photo by Diamond Naga Siu Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 15, 2017 Language A language of the resource English Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Danny Barber, the Sergeant Subject The topic of the resource Oral History, and the Revolution of the Salvation Army Description An account of the resource This piece is about how the Salvation Army has grown throughout the nation, and has had a major influence on Daniel Barber's life. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rahni Davis Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived WhedCo and NYU Gallatin Collaboration Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 11, 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Rahni Davis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gaining Salvation Description An account of the resource What is Salvation? - A preservation or deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss. -- How Daniel Barber Gained his own Salvation (through family and spirituality) https://melrosestories.org/files/original/5759428112c9a68213ef353b5ec9ed32.jpg 7e2a25e69c94f94e1a122d3df1d7c8f3 https://melrosestories.org/files/original/a102c4c0e73d0e950e198a202d122846.jpg caab014eb31f579e350729f696375718 https://melrosestories.org/files/original/4e2bcac3d67fbeda84bbecd7d01ddb7f.jpg b36a17bb0873af40c35a4d30a13aca55 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Diamond Naga Siu Description An account of the resource Eduardo Garcia Conde was born in Mott Haven in 1975, and goes by the name of Ed. He has two words of his last name as part of the Puerto Rican tradition — both his parents moved to the South Bronx from Puerto Rico before their 20s. Ed grew up as a single child and moved to Melrose at seven years old after his parents won a housing lottery for Christopher Court, which is right off the 149 Street-Grand Concourse subway stop. Although he left the South Bronx after graduating college — a goal that formed in high school — he gravitated back to Melrose for the community and life of the neighborhood. He is a former real estate appraiser and is now an active member of the large LGBTQ community in Melrose. But his main job consists of running his Welcome2TheBronx blog, which garners 100,000 to 200,000 readers per month. Since his blog aims to represent the whole Bronx, he spends a lot of time walking the borough to try showing an unbiased perspective of the Bronx. He wants to share narratives of the Bronx that most people do not see or hear. And now, here is his story from when he was growing up with the city still burning, to now as he fights with his neighborhood to avoid its gentrification. Physical Object An inanimate, three-dimensional object or substance. Note that digital representations of, or surrogates for, these objects should use Moving Image, Still Image, Text or one of the other types. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Buddha Artwork Subject The topic of the resource Buddha Artwork on Wooden Board Description An account of the resource Ed Garcia Conde said he found this artwork on a piece of wood out on the streets to be thrown away. He rescued this image of Amitabha, who is the Buddha of Infinite Life. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Photo by Diamond Naga Siu Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 15, 2017 amitabha artwork buddha ed garcia conde infinite life Melrose https://melrosestories.org/files/original/74042aa36c0be971de015b89c2e95f5e.jpg 573256569e233391ee97b9330dd602d4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Diamond Naga Siu Description An account of the resource Eduardo Garcia Conde was born in Mott Haven in 1975, and goes by the name of Ed. He has two words of his last name as part of the Puerto Rican tradition — both his parents moved to the South Bronx from Puerto Rico before their 20s. Ed grew up as a single child and moved to Melrose at seven years old after his parents won a housing lottery for Christopher Court, which is right off the 149 Street-Grand Concourse subway stop. Although he left the South Bronx after graduating college — a goal that formed in high school — he gravitated back to Melrose for the community and life of the neighborhood. He is a former real estate appraiser and is now an active member of the large LGBTQ community in Melrose. But his main job consists of running his Welcome2TheBronx blog, which garners 100,000 to 200,000 readers per month. Since his blog aims to represent the whole Bronx, he spends a lot of time walking the borough to try showing an unbiased perspective of the Bronx. He wants to share narratives of the Bronx that most people do not see or hear. And now, here is his story from when he was growing up with the city still burning, to now as he fights with his neighborhood to avoid its gentrification. Physical Object An inanimate, three-dimensional object or substance. Note that digital representations of, or surrogates for, these objects should use Moving Image, Still Image, Text or one of the other types. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Asthma Inhaler Description An account of the resource Ed Garcia Conde said he developed asthma during his thirties, and while he has only ever used it twice, he panics if he ever forgets to bring it with him. Garcia Conde said his condition is indicative of the environmental crisis in the Bronx. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Photo by Diamond Naga Siu Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 15, 2017 asthma climate change ed garcia conde emergency environment inhaler Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Danny Barber, the Sergeant Subject The topic of the resource Oral History, and the Revolution of the Salvation Army Description An account of the resource This piece is about how the Salvation Army has grown throughout the nation, and has had a major influence on Daniel Barber's life. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rahni Davis Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived WhedCo and NYU Gallatin Collaboration Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 11, 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Rahni Davis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Zone of Action Subject The topic of the resource Melrose, and Courtlandt Avenue Description An account of the resource - going to speak about the history of this neighborhood using readings like -- --> Urban Mythologies by Lydia Lee --> the South Bronx by Evelyn Gonzalez https://melrosestories.org/files/original/b04585e1ba8640511ec9bebb0717eb8e.jpg 10d94b94817ddcfe249f858f67c7762d https://melrosestories.org/files/original/c54e53f4ebcd533792494716bd0889d3.jpg 41dff1a848a74b92f2eb9db886fc16c8 https://melrosestories.org/files/original/a6c9d31b996676f37ddb0962d0e61e83.jpg 01a37466657cbddb6a71b8e47ecd0d1e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Diamond Naga Siu Description An account of the resource Eduardo Garcia Conde was born in Mott Haven in 1975, and goes by the name of Ed. He has two words of his last name as part of the Puerto Rican tradition — both his parents moved to the South Bronx from Puerto Rico before their 20s. Ed grew up as a single child and moved to Melrose at seven years old after his parents won a housing lottery for Christopher Court, which is right off the 149 Street-Grand Concourse subway stop. Although he left the South Bronx after graduating college — a goal that formed in high school — he gravitated back to Melrose for the community and life of the neighborhood. He is a former real estate appraiser and is now an active member of the large LGBTQ community in Melrose. But his main job consists of running his Welcome2TheBronx blog, which garners 100,000 to 200,000 readers per month. Since his blog aims to represent the whole Bronx, he spends a lot of time walking the borough to try showing an unbiased perspective of the Bronx. He wants to share narratives of the Bronx that most people do not see or hear. And now, here is his story from when he was growing up with the city still burning, to now as he fights with his neighborhood to avoid its gentrification. Physical Object An inanimate, three-dimensional object or substance. Note that digital representations of, or surrogates for, these objects should use Moving Image, Still Image, Text or one of the other types. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Branding Iron Subject The topic of the resource Branding Iron Description An account of the resource Ed Garcia Conde received this branding iron, a family heirloom, from his grandfather. He originally did not know where to safekeep it when he got it after his grandfather passed away, so it now hangs in his kitchen. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Photo by Diamond Naga Siu Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Ed Garcia Conde family heirloom Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 15, 2017 brand branding iron ed garcia conde family heirloom history horses puerto rico