#in our narrow old rowhouse

[myemuisemo]

It's week 3 of Letters from Watson, and there is an elephant in the room.

We're going to feel the elephant's trunk, but first I want to crawl into the mindset of a contemporary 1887 reader. It's been a long time since I watched the Jeremy Brett versions of Sherlock Holmes, so if my impressions are shaped by that experience, it's in an indirect subconscious way.

Holmes' explanation of how he spotted the courier as a retired sergeant of Marines indicates that he's storing a good deal of trivia about military services in the lumber room of his mind.

Gregson and Lestrade, the best of Scotland Yard, are blessed with the Victorian compliments of being "quick and energetic." Watson, in his rush to order a cab, is also implied to value quickness and energy over whatever thought processes Holmes is about to introduce. When not humored in his rush to be useful, he falls into a sulk.

Gregson is the whitest of whitely white guys, from pale face to flaxen hair. The fact that he's not the slightest bit red-faced suggests both that he rarely sees the sun (well, London fog) and that he doesn't drink. There's very likely a teeny bit of a joke here in calling him Gregson, since Watson would certainly have been aware of the work of Joseph Gelson Gregson, the Baptist preacher and Army chaplain whose mission in the 1860s-70s was to convert British Indian Army soldiers to total abstinence from alcohol. Will our Gregson turn out to be zealous and self-righteous?

If Gregson did not arrive in a cab, and Lestrade did not arrive in a cab, then likely there are some specific sort of tire marks in the mud.

Now, the house at 3 Lauriston Gardens came close to baffling me. Obviously, when I first read the Sherlock Holmes stories as a mid-sized child, I knew only sprawling ranch tract homes, so the description of the 3-story vacant house was just "ooh, creepy!"

That numbering really suggests its an attached rowhouse, though. That would be consistent with development down Brixton Road in the mid-19th century. There are so, so many terraces of identical attached houses in yellowish brick. Here's Google Maps demonstrating 3-story terraced rowhouses on Handforth Road, just off Brixton Road. These are a little too new, dating from the 1890s, so we've got to imagine a Brixton Road area that's still far less developed -- things that look "old" to us weren't there yet.

These remind us that as London built outward, the rowhouses usually did not have two features that Lauriston Gardens has: a front garden and a center hall. The front garden suggests that the intent of the four dwellings composing Lauriston Gardens was to be a little more suburban and bucolic than the typical urban terrace. Its general aura of mud indicates that it has failed at this promise.

But move on down Brixton Road to the 300 block, and here we are with that garden! These are 3 stories, have a yard, have pillars suggested Greek Revival (1850s-60s), and are depressing af.

Maybe it's my years in the Albany-Troy (NY) area speaking, but these are exuding "we are holding onto middle class by our slipping fingernails." I think that is actually the impression Doyle intends to give: Lauriston Gardens was never quite perfectly respectable, even in its heyday, but it was trying.

That center hall still troubles me. A middle-class rowhouse typically has a side hall, which holds the staircase volume. The parlor is then either narrow (one window) or wide (two). Lauriston Gardens is built with a center hall (pointing to a more lavish lifestyle) but only one "reception" room deep. It has "offices" (butler's pantry or whatever) and a kitchen on the main floor, not in the basement.

Something like this, a titch further out Brixton Road, might be a fit if it weren't for the extra wing on the side. I think the dormer floor is a modern addition. These super-plain houses with only the pillared doorways look so grim, especially compared to the more ornamented Victorian styles.

If the reader is meant to feel uneasy at the mismatch between 3 Lauriston Gardens' pretensions and its actuality, we're there! In any case, the carpet has been pulled up (as was common, you took it with you when you moved), the florid older wallpaper is peeling, the fireplace mantle is a faux finish (yep, aspirations above our proper class), and there is a body on the floor.

Our body is wearing a frock coat, which was the formal daytime wear of a gentleman but on its way out of fashion by the 1880s. Broadcloth of the era had a felt-like feel and was known for durability. So our corpse is respectable, practical, probably conservative in habits, and possibly punching a bit above his social class.

And he has a "simious and ape-like appearance," which worries the heck out of me in a modern 2023 sense. Watson, as the late Victorian everyman, refers to common notions of facial bone structure indicating character. Simian is never good; it's an indicator of primitive, uncouth nature. I'm going to hope hard that we are solely being set up to see the dead man as representative of the worst sort of grasping, self-centered, profit-minded, uncouth American. We're definitely supposed to "get" that, as the house is failing at its pretentions, so too is the dead body trying to be something above its class.

I am nervous for next week, and I'm determined not to look ahead. I'm going to sit with my discomfort like a proper serial-reader, so don't spoiler it for me!

[freebooter4ever]

i've said before my favorite mr robot episode, like the FULL episode, was season three episode 8, it's softer it's more character than plot it deals with elliot's clinical depression in a fairly satisfying way AND it featured the most adorable kid on the show with elliot learning to relate to someone who was almost at the same emotional maturity level he was (makes more sense given season four i guess). anyway, i mentioned this to my roommates before we started watching and they got excited, and then five minutes into trenton's little brother following elliot to the beach my one roommate was like 'THIS IS WHY I HATE KIDS'. so if i was ever in doubt that i am not one of those 'i dont want kids bc i hate them' people, that reaction was proof enough lol! mine is the opposite, i watch this episode and i miss chez terribly (speaking of people i didnt get to see this summer), and it makes me wistful about not ever having kids of my own. all my roommates on the other hand were the exact opposite, ha! there is so much pressure if you dont want kids to think that therefore you must hate kids OR you must love kids and want kids...like no one seems to believe a grey area exists. at the end of the show my roommate goes 'is that really what kids are like?' and im like 'yeah?' and he shudders in horror

[roundtheworldrambles]

Penang, Malaysia

Day 147 – Kuala Lumpur to Penang

Early in the morning, I jumped on a modern commuter train heading south to Terminal Bersepadu Selatan, the main station for long-distance buses in Kuala Lumpur. Looking out the window of my air-conditioned car, I couldn’t help but notice a substantial amount of trash along the edges of the track as we moved south. Arriving at my transfer point to the bus station, I was also stunned by the number of people begging for money outside the terminal– well over 50. Both of these observations contrasted strongly to the polished, modern side of KL that I had seen in the previous days.  

The multi-storey bus terminal was chaotic, with passengers criss-crossing in every direction as I arrived. Designed to serve over 50,000 travellers a day, the station was fortunately well signed in both Malay and English. As I navigated through the throngs of people, I eventually located my check-in counter, picked up my ticket, and began hunting for my departure bay. I must have checked my ticket 50 times, as there were countless buses rolling in and out of the departure bays – and I was almost certain I would miss my bus in the hubbub of fellow travellers!

I finally boarded my bus around 9:45am, heading north to Penang, a small island in Northwestern Malaysia. I was looking forward to my stay in Georgetown, a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its eclectic architecture, impressive street art, and delicious street food! A 5–hour journey by bus, our route traversed through small towns and green, tropical hills, making occasional stops for washroom breaks (there were none on the bus, much to my dismay) and snacks. The interior of the bus was full of wide, blue velvet chairs, which could fully recline. As I was reading along the route, three young Malay boys ran up and down the aisles, stopping briefly at my chair to check me out, before giggling and running away again. By the time we had arrived in Penang, they had gotten quite comfortable with me, and hung around my chair. I would say a few words in English, which they would delightedly repeat back to me, all while chattering between themselves in Malay.

As our bus arrived at Butterworth, the mainland town adjacent to the island of Penang, I grabbed by pack from under the bus and wove through the crowds, taxi drivers and hawkers to board a city bus to the Jetty. From there, I completed the last leg of my trip with a short ferry ride across the bay to Georgetown, my final destination. Brightly coloured long-tailed boats skimmed across the water next to us, bobbing up and down in the ferry’s wake. We passed a large, moored ocean liner, with barbed wire and life-sized human dummies, intended to ward off pirates.

Streets of Georgetown

As I disembarked in Georgetown, I could immediately see that the city was steeped in history, with influences from all over the world. Georgetown was the first British Settlement in South East Asia, and has continued to act as a trading port since the late 1700s. In the early 19th century, the island of Penang was at the epicenture of spice production and trade – with spice farms on the island producing nutmeg, clove and pepper. During World War 2, the Japanese Army also occupied the island of Penang for 4 years.

Today, the Georgetown represents an intermingling of ethnicity and religion, with Chinese, Peranakan, Malay, Indian, Eurasian, Siamese, and indigenous cultures being primarily represented. In the past, the city was also home to Persian, Filipino, Japanese, Sumatran, Arab, Burmese and Jewish communities – a true global city! Because of all of these influences, modern-day Georgetown is packed with unique, eclectic architecture and pre-war buildings. All four major languages of Malaysia are also spoken in Georgetown: Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.

Walking through historic Georgetown, I arrived at my guesthouse for the next 3 nights. A converted three-storey heritage shophouse in old Georgetown, The Frame Guesthouse was previously the workshop of a colonial frame maker. The hostel has been upgraded to a modern, clean space, with big open communal areas shared with other travellers.  

I quickly met one of my roommates, Tonje, a traveller from Norway, and later met up again with Caroline and Jannes from Kuala Lumpur. As evening fell, we hailed a Grab, heading out to Lok Sok Si Temple, the largest Buddhist temple in all of Malaysia, and an important pilgrimage site for Buddhists living across Southeast Asia.  Located at the base of Air Itam mountain, this temple also features predominantly in Chinese New Years celebrations. Since we had the good fortune of visiting Penang around the time of this festival, Lok Sok Si temple was open late, lit with thousands of lights and colourful red lanterns.  Although we arrived just as the temple was closing, we were still able to take in the sea of light surround the temple, with the city lights of Georgetown twinkling in the distance.

Nasi Lemak

Heading back into town, we meandered through street food stalls along Chulia street, deciding what we wanted to eat for dinner. Woks sizzled in every direction, with sounds of chopping, stirring and pounding filling the air. The smell of unknown spices and savoury dishes followed us as we walked along. Overwhelmed by the choice, we opted to try numerous dishes, including Nasi Lemak, Char Kway Teow, Beef Rendang, Hokkien Mee, Oh Chien (fried oyster) and Rojak (spicy fruit salad). After only a few bites, it was immediately obvious to me why Georgetown had such a widespread reputation for gastronomy and street food. Needless to say, it was a very tasty way to end my first day in Penang.

Street Food Stalls in Penang

Day 148 – Penang

In the morning, I met up with Caroline and Tonje for breakfast at Mugshot, a nearby (thankfully air-conditioned!) café on Chulia street, and spent a few hours doing planning and bookings for the rest of my trip in Southeast Asia. Mid day, Tonje and I headed out to wander the streets of Georgetown. It was a hot, humid afternoon – as the island is located in a tropical rainforest climate.

Architecture of Penang

In addition to Georgetown’s stunning architecture, the city is also famous for it’s street art.  Dozens of wrought iron caricatures have been put up around Georgetown, depicting local culture, ethnic groups, city history and lifestyle. The street art scene has blossomed throughout the city over the past decade, and it was fun to keep our eyes peeled for street art in the most unexpected places – sometimes down side alleys, or above street level.  

We walked through the streets of Little India, checking out sari stores and Hindu Temples, the deities inside adorned with fresh floral garlands, called mala. Along the roadside, massive bunches of bananas hung from the ceilings of shophouses. Tonje and I stopped into Restoran Kapitan for a late lunch, tucking into delicious Indian dishes, including claypot chicken biryani, chapati and squid.

Durian Ice Cream

Continuing onward to Armenian Street, we walked along the narrow street, home to the famous “Children on a Bicycle” mural and other street art.  Colonial shophouses along the street were selling everything from fresh fruit to souvenirs and other trinkets. Chinese clan houses, local art galleries and small museums were also scattered along the street.  Tonje and decided to try durian, sometimes considered to be the “stinkiest fruit in the world”, which in Malaysia, Singapore and other parts of Asia is a well-loved delicacy. That said, we “cheated” a little in this regard, as instead of trying the fresh fruit, we opted instead to try durian ice-cream!

“Children on a Bicycle” Mural

Heading east towards the harbor, we stopped at the Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi (kongsi translates to “clan house”), built over 600 years ago by the 5 big Chinese clans of the Hokkien community in ancient Penang. A large, ornate building, this kongsi is a place where Chinese families with the same surname gather to pray to their ancestors. The lavish architecture of the Kongsi was truly stunning, embellished with intricately carved wood and stone, and beams painted in brilliant shades of red, gold, blue and green. The Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi is a complex series of structures, including a temple, and association building, a theatre, and nearby 19th century rowhouses for clan members. Historically, these “clan houses” were almost mini-cities unto themselves, with clan members running their own education, finance and social programs with a self-governing structure.

Streets of Penang

Tonje and I stopped for dinner at the Jetty food hall, tucking in for another terrific meal of char koey teow, poh piah (a large variation of a spring roll) and bowls of steaming laksa. As the evening began to fall, we headed down to the clan jetties on the ocean. There are 6 remaining jetties down by the water that were historically home to various Chinese clans.  Clusters of century-old homes have been built on stilts above the ocean, with each jetty named after a Chinese clan. Historically, these jetties were used for loading and unloading cargo ships, where there was sometimes a rivalry between different jetty clans for control of the seatrade and economic resources of Penang.

As we walked through the Chew Jetty, along a boardwalk of creeky planks, and wound between the historical stilted homes, it felt like a bit of a time warp. Many Chinese families still live here, and occasionally we could catch a glimpse into the entryways of homes, many with large shrines to worship their ancestors, the air hazy with swirling clouds of incense. While the jetties now have electricity and running water, many of these community members live in homes that have hardly changed in over 100 years. On the main floor of some of these stilted houses, clan members have turned these spaces into small restaurants and shops.

We reached the end of the jetty, and sat down, taking in the twinkling lights of Butterworth across the bay, listening as music from nearby buskers drifted through the air. Fishing boats and long-tailed boats zipped along the water, returning to town as evening began to fall.

Taoist Temple at Chew Jetty

As the sky darkened, thousands of red lanterns began to shimmer overhead as we headed back into town, passing several Taoist temples at the entrance to Chew Jetty, dedicated to the God of Heaven and the Taoist Sea Deity, Haisen. This day in Penang was near perfect – packed with incredible company, unique architecture, cultural experiences, street art, and (importantly!) fantastic food.

Day 149 – Penang

In the morning, Tonje and I threw on running shoes and workout clothes, grabbed breakfast at Mugshot, and jumped on a bus, taking us up into the lush, dense jungle surrounding Penang Hill. As we passed through a neighbourhood shopping street near the base of Air Itam, our bus inched through heavy pedestrian traffic, with locals bustling between stores and stalls, doing last-minute holiday shopping before the official Chinese New Year’s celebration the following day – February 16, 2018.  

We arrived at the base of Penang Hill, and bought our one-way ticket for the funicular, taking us up the slopes to the top of the hill.  It was an overcast day, with humidity heavy in the air, and as we ascended, we could see little more than a hazy view over the distant towns of Georgetown and Butterworth. Tonje and I wandered around the top of Penang Hill, where there were numerous lookout points and walkways through the area’s spectacular rainforest. A small mosque, a Hindu temple, and several residential homes and guesthouses are scattered nearby.

Funicular up Penang Hill

Hundreds of birds chattered overhead as we meandered around the hilltop, with dusky-leaf monkeys and macaques scampering through nearby trees. We had decided to hike down from Penang Hill to the Botanical Gardens, which took us deeper into the jungle as we descended on a steep jeep track. Leaving the tourism hub behind, we saw more and more flora and fauna as we went along – including countless monkeys, and the occasional snake slithering out of our way. It took us about an hour and a half to descend the 5 km zig-zagging track – a true knee-knacker! I was thrilled to finally arrived back on flat ground at the botanical gardens. With some difficulty, we figured out the bus route back into town, and arrived back in Georgetown in the late afternoon. I had a shower and a brief nap, before doing some more life-admin and Vietnam visa applications.

At dinner time, all of the street markets and food stalls were closed for Chinese New Years, so Tonje, Egle and I went out for tacos on Love Lane. True to its name, this lane was apparently once the location of many brothels, and was where Peranakan and Chinese businessmen would reportedly keep their mistresses.

Our Mexican dinner, though from a cuisine on the other side of the word, was still delicious – further solidifying my opinion that Penang can do no wrong when it comes to food! As we enjoyed Tiger beers and tacos, a steady procession of buskers, fire performers and street artists moved along the narrow laneway. Live music floated towards us from every direction. I clearly remember how present and alive I felt in that moment, feeling deeply linked to cosmopolitan group of people surrounding me – locals and travellers alike - even though they were strangers to me. In that moment, people from countless backgrounds, countries, ethnicities, and religions were gathered in the same place, all collectively enjoying good food and entertainment.

After almost 6 months of travel at that point, every day I felt more strongly that, as global citizens, we have far more in common than the differences that separate us.  

[icaruskey]

Whilst whiling away some time and re(rere)listening/watching Centaurworld (I will make a video on it but my brain cells are currently with B after doing stuff today? What did I even do?) I want to talk about houses I’m looking at on Zillow. Pics included. Please enjoy the insanity of a 28 year old too tired to do shit but too energized to not do shit.

This ceiling has three nipples shown, though you can see the glow from the fourth one. Also single shoe.

I love the giraffe house aesthetic on our right. One of these houses we’re actually super interested in.

I don’t know what’s better. The table who is clearly hungover, the abandoned wheelchair thingie, or the literal door trying to block the window and/or keep the curtain in place.

Why. Would. You. Do. This. You painted over perfectly good flooring there! That looks like original flooring too! You see how narrow it is? Modern day it’s way more common to have wide planks. I know this because I’ve been up at 4 AM researching engineered wood and how 1920′s and earlier rowhouses were built originally. 

I’m not upset about the fireplace. That’s how rowhouses were updated as we moved from just fire warmth to other styles of heating homes. It’s pretty damn neat and you can see a lot of these plaster and lathe, not super updated houses have those decorative vents in different rooms. 

But the floor. UGH. Talk about a grey shoebox.

Same house as before. You can tell by the painted floors. But look at these built ins. I’m lusting, full on fanning myself with the free hand while I await my leaf fan and grapes servants over here. I fucking love built ins like this. It’s an almost perfect cat nap place. Just needs to be a little higher.

Is it bad I see this and I just want to bite it like an orange? 

This is the home of a vampire who is just emerging from a depressive episode and decided to try and fit in with the modern aesthetic.

This place has a fucking vestibule. I love it. It’s another classic touch from when the house was first built. It’s also very useful if you get packages cause you can leave the outer door unlocked to hide the package but the inside door locked. 

ominous door

Another design element I like, though I’m not sure it’s original to the home. The house was built in 1925, so arches are more common, but the double column? Mm, not sure. It’s neat though. Just not something I’d keep. 

How to look like you live in the suburbs while not actually living in the suburbs.

An actually spacious bathroom, though this is technically outside the city. The chain dangling down lets you open this skylight to vent the room! Also super good for summer days cause you can open it up and let the heat that rises get sucked out the top of the house. 

I’d bet anything this is a near original staircase. Also look at the parquet flooring! 

Okay that’s it from me for now. I just. Am lowkey obsessed with 1920′s rowhomes in Philadelphia. They’re So Cool. 

[classpectanon]

Stitch's rowhouse was a quiet little place, on the edges of the city, away from all the action - the action that used to consume so much of his life, now left to the dusts of the past, where he could retire away from them in peace. It was quiet here, with a single car maybe once every fifteen minutes, creeping through the narrow streets, weaving harshly around bumps and ridges in the road to avoid smashing into one of the many parked cars, like Stitch's old, creaky Volkswagon, old reliable, the conductor of a thousand getaways. It was a brisk fall night, with all the children of the neighborhood asleep at this sort of hour, to prepare for the school day ahead, outside of some hooligans smoking here and there. Stitch would never say shit, though. Everyone knew snitches get stitches, and Stitch doesn't snitch.

150/365

[cokeisrael4-blog]

Can South Philly Hold On to What’s Always Made It Unique?

City

It’s our most famous neighborhood, defined by its immigrants and its characters, by intermingling (sometimes clashing) cultures — and by near-constant change. Where does it go from here?

The rapidly changing South Philly. Photograph by Adam Englehart

In the late summer of 1981, very much against my Catholic mother’s wishes, I had just moved into a rowhouse at 17th and Naudain — then the very bottom edge of Center City — where my new boyfriend lived. Mom, who’d recently been diagnosed with cancer, was coming for her first visit, reluctantly. The neighborhood was admittedly sketchy — most of Center City was, back then — but I was proud of our chic little home, with its new sofa and drapes and the garden planted out back. Mom knocked, I opened the door, and she peered past me into the narrow hallway.

“Oh my God,” she said, and not in a good way. “It’s just like Morris Street.”

That was where my mom grew up: 128 Morris Street, in the heart of South Philly. A hundred or so years ago, for reasons that are lost in the sands of time, Casimir Norvilas, a Lithuanian immigrant, moved there. He was still in his 20s, but he’d already lived an exciting life, having served in the merchant marine and fought Pancho Villa on the U.S.-Mexican border.

In Philly, perhaps calling on some leatherworking skills acquired on the horse farm near Vilnius where he grew up, he opened a shoemaker shop. He married a fellow Lithuanian immigrant, bought the house on Morris Street, and had three daughters, the eldest of whom was my mom.

The part of the city where he settled was traditionally a point of entry for immigrants. It was close to the docks where ships arrived from the Old World; those same docks provided jobs for laborers whose only skill was brute force. The first big flush of migrants to the city had been Irish, pried from their hearths in the 1840s by a potato blight that caused widespread starvation, killed a million people, and drove another two million to exit the Emerald Isle. The next was Italian, propelled by the “unification” of small city-states and the breakdown of the peninsula’s feudal system. Some seven million mostly Southern Italian peasants decamped for foreign parts.

The Morris Street house where the author’s mom grew up. Photograph by Michelle Gustafson

Since then, wave after wave of newcomers has inhabited the rowhouses of South Philly, on both the east and west sides of Broad Street — Southern blacks with the collapse of Reconstruction, Eastern European Jews starting in the 1880s, more Italians after World War II ended. Mexicans moved north under the 1942 bracero (“one who works using his arms”) program, and smaller tides of Cubans and Puerto Ricans and Vietnamese and Cambodians and Liberians landed here, too. South Philly was a place to gain a foothold, to begin anew, to build something from nothing for impoverished families from all over the world. Then your kids got the hell out.

That was what Mom did. She made her way to Girls’ High, which was then at 17th and Spring Garden, and after graduating went even further up Broad Street to Temple, where she met my dad. Together, they began a family and a series of successive moves away from South Philly, to Willow Grove and Glenside and finally bucolic Doylestown. They raised a solid middle-class clan of four kids and a dog on a third of an acre there.

Which is why, I think, the house on Naudain Street so unnerved Mom. When you’ve spent a lifetime trying to escape the past, it can’t be easy to realize that your child just cheerfully leaped back in.

That was the only time Mom ever visited me and Doug, who eventually became my husband. She died three months later. I’d like to think it wasn’t seeing the house.

•

The workingman’s homes that make up Philly’s rows were built in the mid-to-late 19th century, as the city underwent rapid industrialization. But there were rowhouses even before that; witness the city’s oldest block, Elfreth’s Alley. William Penn envisioned his city filled with gracious single homes set amid green lawns, but it didn’t take long for speculators to slice up the blocks he laid out and eke the most from them by erecting rowhomes. The city was built atop clay, which is what you make bricks from, which is why the rowhomes were brick.

I have the vaguest memories of the house on Morris Street; Poppy’s shoemaker shop and the penny-candy place next door made more of an impression on me. I know this, though: Mom’s parents, like so many new arrivals here, found the fact that they were allowed to own land amazing. Slaves from the South and serfs from the Baltic States and paesani from Italy had all fled societies in which “real estate” belonged to the master or czar or king. To buy for yourself even the postage-stamp property beneath a rowhouse was a marvelous thing.

Which is one reason newcomers stayed put. “People would move to South Philly because it was close to jobs on the waterfront or in the garment factories,” says Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple. “Then they created a culture that reminded them of where they were from.” They opened butcher shops and bakeries, planted grapevines in tiny backyards, built churches and fraternal organizations. They dug in, deep.

A window near 8th and Tasker. Photograph by Michelle Gustafson

Southern Italian immigrants, notes Penn city planning and urban studies professor Domenic Vitiello, had a particular pattern of migration: “They settled in groups of people from the same town. You could identify them — this block from this village in Abruzzo, this block from this village in Calabria.” Mexican immigration, Vitiello adds, would later follow this same pattern.

My mom’s mom’s sister, Adeline, married an Italian my grandfather fondly called “Goombah Jimmy.” We only visited Adeline’s house, on Wolf Street near Broad, for the Mummers Parade and the occasional funeral, but it stood out because it was so unlike anything else in my bland suburban life. People drank, hard; everyone was loud; the women and the food — Italian sausages, kielbasa and pierogies — smelled wonderful; and in an upstairs bedroom there hung the biggest painting I had ever seen, a full-size reproduction of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, with all that bare-breasted flesh. Who could look away?

I went back to South Philly recently and checked out the house on Wolf Street. There were potted plants taking the sun beside the front stoop. Mom’s people were farmers at heart. She would have liked that.

I went to Morris Street, too, to see what was left of number 128. It looked good — the trim all freshly painted, a fancy ornamental door. There was a planter beside it, too. The houses on Mom’s row are tiny — under a thousand square feet, with two bedrooms and a single bath. Yet when she was a kid, her family took in a boarder to help with the bills, which wasn’t rare. A 1904 survey of the area from 8th Street to 9th Street between Carpenter and Christian showed that 41 of the 167 houses were occupied by three or more families. That’s a tight squeeze.

Bryant Simon says you can tell when a neighborhood gentrifies by the house numbers; newcomers prefer sans serif fonts. There’s a lot of sans serif on Mom’s block. Another clue: the four new three-story townhomes with garages and roof decks. They have three bedrooms and two and a half baths and, you can bet, one family apiece.

•

Mom’s old house sold for $43,000 in 1995; today, its estimated worth is $218,985. The big difference between people buying in South Philly these days and those from the old days is that the latest arrivals don’t land here with nothing. They bring along advanced degrees and SUVs and Mitchell Gold sofas and IRAs.

Back in 2011, Kate Mellina and her husband, Dave Christopher, moved from Asbury Park to Philadelphia, where Mellina had grown up: “In the Northeast — St. Timothy’s parish. But my dad was from South Philly. St. Monica’s. You forget how Philadelphia is defined by its parishes.” The couple, both artists, were looking for an area that was “up-and-coming,” Mellina says, and they bought a house in East Passyunk, overlooking the famed Singing Fountain. “It was not quite as developed then,” Mellina says, “but you could see it was on its way.”

Not long after they moved in, one of the couple’s friends happened on a vintage photo album at Lambertville’s Golden Nugget flea market and recognized some famous faces posing with the grinning strangers inside: Bob Hope, Tony Bennett, Johnny Mathis, Liberace. On the back of the album was the photographer’s studio address, on East Passyunk Avenue. “Our friend knew we’d moved in around there, so he gave it to us,” Mellina explains. “He said, “Here’s your housewarming present — find out who these people are!”

Naturally, Mellina says, she started by showing the album to her neighbor, “Frank from around the corner, who’s been here forever.”

“Oh, that’s Palumbo’s!” Frank said.

“We were like, ‘What’s Palumbo’s?’” Mellina had never heard of the now-defunct nightclub at 8th and Catharine that hosted everyone from Sinatra to Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. back in the day. It started life as a boardinghouse for immigrants sailing from Italy; legend has it they’d arrive speaking no English but with signs around their necks that read PALUMBO’S.

Plenty of Palumbo’s stars were homegrown. South Philly’s rowhouses all looked alike on the outside, but they sheltered singular individuals inside. The roll call just of those who passed through South Philly High at Broad and Snyder is startling: Marian Anderson, Mario Lanza, Chubby Checker, Jack Klugman, Frankie Avalon, bandleader Lester Lanin, composer Vincent Persichetti, NBA founder Eddie Gottlieb, world heavyweight boxing champ Tim Witherspoon, mayor Frank Rizzo, boxing trainer Angelo Dundee … It’s hard not to feel optimistic in a neighborhood where just a few streets over, a Jewish punk named Eddie Fisher grew up to divorce Debbie Reynolds so he could marry Elizabeth Taylor. America. What a country.

“South Philly is a real neighborhood,” says Kate Mellina. “It’s a mix of people whose families have been here for three or four generations — in the same houses — and new people moving in with dogs and babies.”

Since the album was foisted on her, Mellina has visited senior centers and the local library in her quest to identify the non-famous people in its pages. She discovered that it had belonged to Arthur Tavani, a writer for a little local newspaper. “His sister was still alive then,” she recalls, “living in the same house they grew up in. She greeted me like a long-lost daughter.” Mellina also talked to Carmen Dee, who’d been the bandleader at Palumbo’s, which burned down in 1994. And she’s chronicled her efforts at a website, Unexpected Philadelphia, that lets you scroll through the photos in case there’s anyone you know.

“South Philly is a real neighborhood,” says Mellina. “It’s a mix of people whose families have been here for three or four generations — in the same houses — and new people moving in with dogs and babies. Everyone seems to get along. You take your lawn chairs out front in the summer, and people parade by with the kids and the dogs.” Asbury Park, she notes, actually was a small town — “but it didn’t have that small-town feel.”

The small town has gone big-time over the past decade. Townsend Wentz, Nick Elmi, Chris Kearse, Lou Boquila, Lynn Rinaldi, and Lee Styer and Jessie Prawlucki have all opened restaurants along this stretch of East Passyunk. The neighborhood has coffee shops, twinkly string lights, a British pie shop, and Artisan Boulanger Patissier. You’ll find dim sum and doggie boutiques, a retro typewriter repair shop, breweries and bike stores, not to mention a yoga studio that recently hosted a visit from an alpaca. It’s a freaking hipster paradise.

A block or so north, the paradise ends.

•

Philly’s Italian Market, which stretches along 9th Street roughly from Dickinson to Fitzwater, started out as a Jewish market. It’s now mostly Asians and Latinos who run the iconic sidewalk stalls. To go from twinkly Passyunk Square to, say, Giordano’s produce stand just above Washington is sort of a shock. The market hasn’t gentrified. It still has flies in summer and burn barrels in winter, and wooden skids and flattened cardboard boxes are piled everywhere. (“That’s not real trash,” Bryant Simon teases when I raise the subject of the market. “They bring it out every morning so it looks like a scene from Rocky.”) It also has guys who pick out your tomatoes for you, thank you very much, and put them in a bag. The area is a good example of the challenges of gentrification. “How do you maintain the market while the neighborhood changes?” asks Simon. “That’s a delicate balance. Tourists can only buy so many vegetables.” Anthony’s Italian Coffee & Chocolate House has stood here for four generations. Now it has online ordering, and seasonal lattes like the Spring Fling and the Crème Brûlée.

There have been fitful efforts to start up a Business Improvement District for the market, so merchants can kick in to gussy things up. A few years back, Michelle Gambino, business manager for the South 9th Street Business Association, described her vision for the future, with organic foods and craft booths alongside the homely produce carts: “We’re hoping that the look will continue to be Old World, but just upscale.”

To add to the balancing act, New York developers have so far unveiled three iterations of an apartment building planned for the heart of the market, right at 9th and Washington, ranging from six to eight stories in height. The latest version has 157 units. Merchants and shoppers panicked when plans showed the driveway to the building’s underground parking right on 9th Street, where it will surely disrupt the market’s traffic and pedestrians. So much for Old World.

“There are two processes going on in South Philly right now,” says Bryant Simon. “Longtime residents are being displaced by new immigrants and by high-end creative-class people.” In other words, old South Philly’s getting squeezed from both sides.

The Italian isn’t the only market in South Philly. The busy commercial stretch of Washington between 6th and 16th earned the soubriquet “Little Saigon” thanks to immigrants who settled there after the Vietnam War. (Condé Nast Traveler once dubbed the area “Pho Row.”) The city’s Asian population has continued to grow, jumping by 42 percent from 2000 to 2010; Philly is now home to the East Coast’s largest population of Vietnamese immigrants. At Horace Furness High, near Mom’s old house, 48.5 percent of the kids are Asian.

In Little Saigon, too, change is coming. Developers have proposed new rowhomes and duplexes, plus parking spots, on the site of the Hoa Binh shopping center, which occupies almost an entire block at Washington and 16th. The current shopping center isn’t pretty. But neither are most newly built rowhomes, when you think about it.

There may be no better example of South Philly’s metamorphosis than what used to be the Edward W. Bok Technical High School at 8th and Mifflin, where neighborhood kids not bound for college once studied tailoring and plumbing, hairdressing and bricklaying. After closing down in 2013, the Art Deco building, constructed in the 1930s by Franklin Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration, was reborn as BOK, an urban playground with a roof-deck bar, boutiques, “maker spaces,” tattoo artists and, of course, yoga. “I think BOK is a fascinating symbol,” says Bryant Simon. “There are two processes going on in South Philly right now. Longtime residents are being displaced by new immigrants and by high-end creative-class people who value urban spaces and are knowledge workers.” In other words, old South Philly’s getting squeezed from both sides.

��

We tend to think of “South Philly” as the Rocky world that’s east of Broad Street, but Point Breeze and Grays Ferry are South Philly, too. They were settled along familiar lines, first by European Jews, then by Italians and Irish, and finally by blacks driven west from their original stronghold in what had been farm country near 7th and South. There were race riots here in 1918, touched off when a black woman moved in; thousands battled in the streets. By the 1920s, according to a resident quoted in Murray Dubin’s South Philadelphia: Mummers, Memories, and the Melrose Diner, from Lombard Street to Washington Avenue between Broad and 20th was “solid black.” Still, racial strife bubbled up regularly. In 1997, then-mayor Ed Rendell had to negotiate a compromise with Louis Farrakhan to ward off a planned protest.

Today, Point Breeze is ground zero for Philly gentrification. The median housing price in the most gentrified section rose from $29,000 in 2000 to $234,000 in 2016, while the population of black residents changed from 80 percent to 46 percent. Bryant Simon, who wrote a book about Starbucks, says you can trace the spread of gentrification in coffee shops. He mentions developer Ori Feibush, who fueled Point Breeze’s gilding by opening OCF Coffee House at 20th and Federal “as a way of planting a flag. He was smart about that.”

Neighbors playing at 2nd and Porter. Photograph by Michelle Gustafson

For many residents of western South Philly, Feibush, who’s been building new townhouses everywhere, has become the face of black displacement. In 2015, he ran against incumbent 2nd District Councilmember Kenyatta Johnson in a bitter primary fight that stirred race into the already boiling pot of tax assessments and abatements and property values. Johnson won. In May, he introduced a bill that would ban from Grays Ferry and Point Breeze the balconies and bay windows featured on many newly constructed rowhomes — a pointed up-yours to Feibush and gentrification. The resentment is understandable.

Racism has a long history throughout South Philadelphia. “It would have helped if Frank Rizzo didn’t tolerate white resistance, or if there had been no redlining,” Simon says. Old photos of South Philly High show integrated sports teams as far back as 1918, and black and white cross-country runners in the ’50s with their arms draped around each other. But as recently as 2009, black students were beating up Asian immigrants. Following a boycott, a new principal, and a Justice Department investigation, matters have improved.

In fact, says Penn’s Vitiello, you could make the case that since the 1970s, South Philadelphia has been the city’s most successful neighborhood in terms of immigration: “A wide variety of refugees has found it comfortable and livable. There’s a wide variety of ethnic groceries, goods and services. The housing stock is still affordable. There are still plenty of absentee landlords who see new immigrants as an important source of income.” And many older residents, he says, “welcome newcomers in a very humane way. They appreciate that their neighbors are here just trying to raise their kids and provide for themselves.” It was former mayor John Street, he points out, who first established sanctuary protections in Philadelphia back in 2001, along with Irish-born police commissioner John Timoney.

“Change related to new immigrants is nothing new in South Philly,” Bryant Simon says. “It’s never been without tensions. Change is kind of perpetual there.”

To some extent, Vitiello says, politicians here have embraced immigrants because they know that without them, the city would be shrinking, not growing. He puts Michael Nutter in this economically motivated camp. But Jim Kenney, whose parents came to the U.S. from Ireland — and who grew up five blocks from my mom’s house, at 3rd and Snyder — “has consistently been more about treating people as humans, as neighbors,” he says.

At the same time, South Philadelphians, Bryant Simon points out, have always shown “a commitment to maintaining their turf.” Historically, this is the land of mobsters and payola, not touchy-feely empathy. “We make fun of yoga studios and deck bars serving IPAs,” Simon says, “and the identity that goes along with certain cultural practices.” But alpaca yoga isn’t South Philly’s big problem now: “The real tensions are over real estate values.”

On the positive side, he notes, “Change related to new immigrants is nothing new in South Philly. It was always a place of immigrants. It’s never been without tensions. Change is kind of perpetual there.”

•

I used to live in South Philly. In 1988, Doug and I bought a little rowhouse near 20th and Snyder for $35,000. We were ready to have kids and wanted some stability. We were an odd fit for the neighborhood back then. There was nobody our age on our block; old people lived there, and their kids drove in from Jersey for Sunday dinner. One entire wall of our bathroom was mirrored; it became our daughter’s favorite part of the house. Once, when I was taking the bus into Center City with Marcy when she was two, a nun asked what parish we belonged to. “We don’t go to church,” I told her. “Surely you’ve had her baptized,” she said. I shook my head. She looked me dead in the eye and said, “Do you want your daughter to go to Hell?”

Most people, though, were nice to us. Johnny from the auto shop across the street would invite us in for barbecued deer during fall hunting season. In winter, we pushed the kids in strollers beneath rainbows of Christmas lights. In summer, there were walks to the water-ice stand and cooling showers from fire-hydrant sprinklers. The mobster’s mom down the block wouldn’t let her grandson come to Marcy’s birthday party, but she did show up afterward with excuses and a gift.

After six years, we got tired of chasing guys with guns off our stoop, of worrying that the kids would get hit by cars, of the endless litter and the fight to find parking. I longed for a real garden, not a couple of barrel planters. We escaped to the suburbs, just in time for Marcy to start school. We sold the house for less than we’d paid for it, to two Cambodian brothers. We always have been terrible at real estate.

Today, the house we dumped for $32,500 is worth an estimated $195,954. I go back to see it, for old time’s sake. The neighborhood is still dotted with bodegas and pharmacies and Chinese takeout joints, but there’s a new coffee shop that delivers through Grubhub. Our place looks tidy and kempt; there are a host of potted plants beside the front door, which is painted deep blue. The house numbers are a bougie font. The young woman who lives there now walks dogs for a living. We exchange emails, and I ask if the bathroom still has that mirrored wall. She LOLs. It does.

In nearby Girard Park, I pick my way through downed tree branches from a recent storm to view a plaque honoring Kenyatta Johnson for nabbing $600,000 in improvements to its drainage, benches and walkways. Within eyeshot of the house where a pipe bomb blew up Phil “Chicken Man” Testa in 1981, I join a woman sitting on a park bench with a little girl in a stroller. I smile and tell her my daughter learned to walk right in this park. She smiles back. “I’m the nanny,” she says.

A nanny. In Girard Park. It’s the beginning of the end.

Not so fast, says Vitiello. “South Philly is pretty big,” he points out, “and gentrification moves in waves. There are some indicators that suggest South Philly will keep growing, and others that suggest its growth will be slow and halting.” That means South Philly’s seemingly impossible balance of old and new, rich and poor, black and white and everything else, could endure. Large tracts here, Vitiello insists, should remain affordable for a long time to come.

Maybe so. All I know is, there’s new three-story housing going up across 20th Street from our old place, no doubt with garages and roof decks.

Oh my God. It’s just like Morris Street.

Published as “True South” in the July 2019 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

Source: https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/07/06/changing-south-philly/

[heartvalue2-blog]

Justin DiBerardinis runs for Philadelphia City Council on a good government platform

Justin DiBerardinis wants to change Philadelphia’s government, and not just by winning a seat on City Council.

At this early stage in the 2019 municipal elections, DiBerardinis is one of the few candidates who has made a big impression.

That’s partly because of who he is — his father Michael DiBerardinis was the city’s managing director until recently — and partly because he’s raised more money than any non-incumbent at-large City Council candidate.

DiBerardinis ended 2018 with almost $145,000, only outstripped by Councilmembers Helen Gym and Allan Domb. All three are Democrats and will compete with each other, and a couple dozen other candidates.

“His fundraising is impressive and your ability to raise money is a clear indicator of how someone should view your candidacy,” said Mustafa Rashed, a prominent Philadelphia lobbyist and political consultant. “If you have a lot of different donors and people willing to support you that speaks to a coalition and it looks like out of the gate he’s assembled a large coalition.”

Even beyond his family’s substantial legacy, DiBerardinis isn’t a political neophyte. He served for six years in Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez’s office, where he focused on tax policy, and then served for six years at Bartram’s Garden, the beloved park in Southwest Philadelphia.

A new deal for Philadelphia?

DiBerardinis’ policy platform calls for both government reform and progressive economic policies, packaged in what he describes as “a New Deal for Philadelphia.” But his website doesn’t include many details, so PlanPhilly asked him to expand on some of the policy proposals.

In the wake of a series of scandals, DiBerardinis says one of his priorities would be reforming City Council by trying to change the way the body functions.

His website calls for some changes that are fairly basic, such as placing strict limits on outside employment for City Councilmembers. (A practice that recently got a lot of bad press after the indictment of Councilman Bobby Henon, who drew dual salaries from the electricians’ union and his council job.) There are other reforms that would be substantially more ambitious, like a fundamental restructuring of the city’s charter.

“Council has surrendered a huge amount of power to the executive,” said DiBerardinis. “In exchange, they were given parochial and local power in their districts. I don’t think that’s a good deal for council. I don’t think it’s a good deal for the city of Philadelphia.”

Under Philadelphia’s current political norms and laws, district council members are given near total power over public land sales, zoning, and streets regulations in their territory. The practice, known as councilmanic prerogative, creates a system where ten mini-mayors have a lot of discretion over their little corners of the city.

Critics argue that this both incentivizes narrow policy making, where politicians craft legislation with citywide implications — like zoning — with the interests of a small sliver of their constituency in mind. It also facilitates a pay-to-play culture, and actual corruption. As a 2015 Pew study noted, council’s control over land use is related to all six of the council members convicted of wrongdoing since 1981.

“When you have a lot of unilateral power in a government system that doesn’t lend itself to collaboration, it lends itself to corruption,” said DiBerardinis.

Much of the conversation around councilmanic prerogative ends with a denunciation of City Council, but DiBerardinis says he doesn’t want to make a narrow case against the mini-mayor system. Instead, he wants to see council play a more active role in crafting the city’s $4 billion budget.

Currently, the chief powers council enjoys over the budget are oversight hearings held every spring and the ability to set spending caps for each city department. After that, the mayor can do whatever he wants (with a few exceptions like the relatively new Office of Property Assessments, where council gave itself veto power over the agency’s top leadership position).

“I’d like to see a more normal balance of powers between executive and legislative branches,” DiBerardinis said. “We need a new era of governmental reform. Let’s take a look at our charter, let’s have a convention to look at how we are structuring government.”

Without seeing the details of such a policy, Rashed said it could be hard to sell district council members on reforms that would lessen their ability to micromanage their territory. That will be particularly true if most of the changes after this election are in the ranks of the seven at-large council members, who run in citywide races, as opposed to the district members who often remain in power for decades.

“If … most of the changes at the at-large level, and the districts remain the same, then they will be inclined towards incremental rather than whole-scale change,” said Rashed, “because they have been so invested in getting their districts where they want them to go.”

Higher taxes for commercial real estate, more city jobs

Government reform isn’t the only ambitious item on DiBerardinis’ agenda. Following the work he performed in Quiñones-Sánchez’s office, he wants to reform Philadelphia’s tax structure to be both more business- and worker-friendly.

DiBerardinis says he likes the proposal floated by Paul Levy and Gerard Sweeney, which is championed by some business leaders and would shift taxes toward commercial real estate and away from wage and business taxes. But the potential council member says he wants to see the idea shifted toward wage tax relief for the poor and working class.

“If we are just looking at the business community, I don’t think that’s a win,” Diberardinis said. “I would like to see those reductions in wage taxes be focused on making a progressive wage tax for working-class Philadelphians. That’s where the real ability for a big coalition resides.”

DiBerardinis’ New Deal for Philadelphia also focuses on a renewed commitment to public sector employment, shifting city resources to hiring teachers aides, school nurses, and street cleaning crews.

“When America had a poverty rate as high as Philadelphia, we did something called the New Deal,” said DiBerardinis. “A massive employment program that drove living wage to communities that needed it the most. You don’t build a program like this overnight. It will take years, maybe a generation. But I want us to start now.”

Like many current councilmembers, he also criticized the ten-year property tax abatement. Unlike most other councilmembers, DiBerardinis ties that critique to a plank about historic preservation in his policy platform. Like his rhetoric around wage tax reform, DiBerardinis says he would like to see the abatement bent toward home repair in rowhome communities rather than chiefly incentivizing new construction.

While historic preservation is rarely debated in the legislative body, demolition and neighborhood character are increasingly foregrounded in community groups as new waves of new construction wash over once-stagnant areas like Fishtown, Francisville, and Point Breeze.

“I would love to see us incentivize preservation, I would love to see us abating people, the homeowners keeping up their old Philadelphia rowhouses,” DiBerardinis said. “This advances ownership and it will do more than any other policy I’ve heard to advance the preservation of Philadelphia neighborhoods.”

DiBerardinis launched his campaign Monday afternoon, at Johnny Brenda’s in Fishtown, the neighborhood where he grew up. There are less than three months until the May primary, which often determines who actually wins power in this overwhelmingly Democratic city.

Source: http://planphilly.com/articles/2019/02/18/justin-diberardinis-runs-for-philadelphia-city-council-on-a-good-government-platform

[monroesinflux]

From Northern Ireland: Giants Along the Coast

IT had finally arrived: anxiously anticipated, the most ambitious transportation in our two years of European travel. Frankly it was a nightmare to plan – how does one get from the Irish capitol, to the remote reaches of Northern Ireland, to the even more remote inner seas of Scotland? And of course, how does one do it without back tracking, problems crossing three international borders, wasting precious vacation days, or paying exorbitant amounts of money?

The answer: a rental car, a bus, a train, another train, another bus, walking, two taxis, and a ferry.

And can you actually believe that transportation was NOT the most amazing thing of the day? True story.

Because bus schedules in remote Northern Ireland would be exceedingly limited, we were on a very tight time schedule for this day. Any errors or delays would mess up the whole process and potentially leave us stranded. (I’m not kidding when I say that all our experiences using public transport in foreign countries had lead us to this day.)

So our travel day began with a very early morning drive from Greystones back to the Dublin airport to return our rental car. Ironically the closest thing we had to a mishap was trying to find a gas station that was open in the bleary, pre-dawn hours, and would also accept non-Irish bank cards.

Fortunately we prevailed, got our car returned on time, and hopped on our first public transport: the airport shuttle bus back into central Dublin, where we caught a train bound for the Northern Ireland capital of Belfast. We even had time to grab coffee in the station...such luxury!

Our morning train rides (2 hours from Dublin to Belfast, and 1 hour from Belfast to Coleraine) took us through more serene Irish countryside and quaint cities. It was particularly meaningful for me as our train pulled into Northern Ireland’s capitol city: at the age of 17, Belfast had been the first place I’d ever visited outside of the US. It had been nothing short of magic to me: the lines of red stone rowhouses, churches springing from cobbled streets, accented words all around, and everything surrounded by the most verdant green countryside I’d ever seen.

Between then and now, I’ve been fortunate to have seen much more of Europe. In comparison, Belfast looked certainly less grand: but I could still remember and feel that potency, that excitement and that wonder at my first taste of the old world.

By the time we reached Coleraine, our carriage was stuffed full of families and teenagers headed for the beach – because no matter where you’re from, when the weather is beautiful you take advantage!

From Coleraine we hopped on a bus bound for Bushmills, a Northern Irish town most famous for its whiskey distillery. By this time we were famished: we purchased two enormous fish and chips takeaways on the Bushmills high street, pulled out our Highbank cider samples, and plopped down in a random field.

Despite the good food, this was a low moment in the day. We had planned on walking our way to the next stop – we’d become avid walkers in Europe, and a mile or two seemed doable when looking at a map online. But in person, the road we needed to traverse had zero sidewalks and deep, thick overgrowth crowding right up to the narrow traffic lanes – in other words, typical Irish roads with no possible way of walking safely. We ended up heading back into Bushmills proper, where we grabbed bus schedules and taxi listings from the tourism office. The solution was simply resigning ourselves to waiting around for the next bus a few hours later and taking a costly cab ride home at the end of the day (after all the buses had already completed their runs).

So. You’re probably wondering what on earth were we going to all this trouble to see. And could it possibly be worth so much headache?

In short: yeah, it was worth it.

The natural wonder of Giant’s Causeway sits on the northernmost edge of Northern Ireland. It faces Scotland, and the legend goes that an ancient giant named Finn built the causeway as a bridge between the two isles.

But the science is possibly more spectacular than the legend: the causeway is notable for it’s naturally occurring, hexagonal rock formations. These spectacular shapes get their form from ancient cooling magma, and stretch high up the cliffs and down into the Atlantic Ocean.

And holy cow, did we have the best weather to enjoy this natural wonder.

There are a few hiking trails that wind around the various craggy faces, both at sea level and cliff level.

And really, who are we Monroes if not people who love climbing to the tops of things?

Yup. Always climb to the tops of things.

Mini causeway!

(Somewhere out there is Scotland...we’ll see you soon!)

On my aforementioned trip through Belfast, I actually got to visit the causeway – which was part of the reason I was so desperate to get Andrew here. And I must admit, it was even more spectacular than I remembered it. 

As wonderful as the views are from above, being able to hop all over the amazing hexagons at sea level is the real causeway showstopper. It’s just impossible to get over that these rocks are naturally made. Our world is flat-out incredible.

We spent an entire afternoon exploring this landscape to our heart’s content.

From Greystones to the Causeway, it had been a very long day: I’m both proud of us for tackling it, and grateful that we survived without any great disasters. Wearied and full of beauty, we caught a cab to our hotel for the evening, and prepared to bid the island of Ireland the fondest farewell. 

From glen to glen and down the mountainside...this island will ever be in my heart.

And Scotland was waiting.

More to come:

I: Beginnings, Beers, Behan » II: Manifest Destiny of Dublin to Galway » III: Abbeys, Saints, and Seafaring Horses » IV: Cliffs, Killarney, and the Western Coast » V: Beara, Blarney, and the Southern Counties » VI: Organic Life in Kilkenny » VII: The Un-Ireland of Wicklow and Glendalough » VIII: Giants along the Northern Coast » IX: Whisky and the Sea – Crossing to Scotland » X: Chasing History in Edinburgh » XI: Mediterranean Fjords in Montenegro » XIII: The Savors of Herzegovina » XIV: Mythos in Dubrovnik »

[itsfinancethings]

It’s just past 7 a.m. as Tavis Clinton’s sanitation truck pulls to a stop in an alley in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Petworth, its streets lined by aging rowhouses and the occasional glass-and-metal gentrified upstart apartment complex. The 41-year-old sanitation crew chief, who like the other members of his three-man team is African American, navigates the massive orange city truck through the narrow lanes, his mouth covered in a star-spangled bandana. His colleagues jump off, grab a couple of wheeled bins and swing them in a practiced arc onto a mechanized arm that tips the refuse into the truck. The team then skates the bins back behind the still-quiet homes and sprints to the next set, panting through their face masks in the former swampland’s late spring heat.

Sanitation workers like Clinton show up before dawn to start their 6am shifts, wrapping themselves in masks, gloves, neon jackets and vests, and a take-no-prisoners esprit de corps to get through exhausting shifts removing the locked-down city’s refuse. The streets have been emptier but the trash is heavier with so many staying at home during the coronavirus pandemic. The three-man crews pack into the truck’s cab, where no social distancing is possible. When Clinton gets home to his wife and five children, he sprays his clothes his disinfectant and then scrubs hard in the shower before going anywhere near them.

“It’s tough,” Clinton says. “I just have to trust in my crew that once they leave work, they are home and they’re not out socializing, because it’s all our health at once.”

Clinton and his crew are part of the essential workforce that has kept America’s capital running during the pandemic, most of which are African American, according to the city. It’s one of the reasons officials say the African American community here has been so hard hit by COVID-19: While African Americans make up nearly 47% of the District of Columbia’s population, and account for 46% of the city’s COVID-19 cases, they also account for more than 76% of the city’s deaths.

Nate Palmer for TIMETavis Clinton disinfects his truck before beginning his route on May 22.

Now, as the District’s officials weigh reopening non-essential businesses as early as Friday, they worry its black and brown residents, who are being disproportionately impacted by the virus, will bear the brunt of a second wave of infections once people leave their houses. Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser knows she has to both bring back business and minimize the health risk to the largely black and Latinx workers doing the work on the pandemic’s front lines. Latinx are the second highest risk group for COVID-19 in the U.S.; in the District, they make up 11% of the city’s population and 25% of infections. “You don’t get to open up and be successful if people are scared for their lives,” Bowser tells TIME.

The virus’ disproportionate impact on the District of Columbia’s black community in particular reflects a broader pattern across the United States. Nationwide, African Americans comprise just 12.3% of the country but nearly 26.3% of the COVID-19 cases and 22.7% of deaths, according to CDC data. (At least 30% of states’ test results compiled by the CDC failed to record race.) A high rate of underlying conditions like diabetes and heart disease, coupled with historically lower-paid jobs, have put many African American communities at greater risk from COVID-19, experts say. The skewed toll “spotlights the underlying inequalities and extra burdens that black communities have historically had to deal with in this country,” former President Barack Obama said in his May 16th commencement speech for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Until this week, Washington, D.C.’s startlingly high proportion of African American deaths has helped make the city has a national outlier in its stay-at-home orders. On May 13, Bowser extended D.C.’s the order to June 8th, while nearly all other states moved toward some kind of reopening. Her caution proved prescient: the metropolitan D.C. area had the highest rate of positive COVID-19 tests in the nation on May 22, just ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, according to White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx. But after the holiday, Bowser told reporters on Tuesday that cases were again dropping, and some non-essential businesses could begin to open by Friday if the trend continued downward.

Patrick Semansky—APD.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, right, speaks during a news conference about the coronavirus inside the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on May 11.

Drew Angerer—Getty ImagesA woman wears a mask as she walks past a bus stop on 14th Street in downtown Washington, D.C., on April 15, 2020.

Bowser’s caution has put her at odds with the President living in her city limits who has been actively urging the country to get back to business. She is trying to walk a diplomatic line with the Trump Administration, since D.C. needs federal funding to bridge a nearly $725 million-dollar budget shortfall spurred by rising social-welfare costs and falling tax income due to the pandemic. But she doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that she thinks President Donald Trump’s push to reopen overlooks the needs of some of the most vulnerable Americans. “There is this kind of a callous calculation happening that surprises me,” she says. “It’s kind of like, ‘Well, this COVID is killing old people and, Oh, well. It’s killing black people, and poor people and essential workers. Oh, well.’”

Keep up to date on the growing threat to global health by signing up for our daily coronavirus newsletter.

‘This death that’s going around’

For many of the early rising members of D.C.’s sanitation crews, COVID-19 has brought both a sense of renewed pride in their crucial work and a creeping sense of dread. “The public comes out when they are coming through the alleys, kids waiving at them,” says Earl Simpson, 43, the associate administrator of D.C.’s collection division. “I think the citizens really appreciate us being out there collecting the trash and recycling.”

Nate Palmer for TIMERetired sanitation worker Maurice “Pony Man” Queen, 72, stands in the hallway at the Department of Public Works Solid Waste Collections Division on May 22.

But some have already left the job out of concern for their safety. Fear of the virus drove one of the city’s longest serving sanitation workers, Maurice “Pony Man” Queen, 72, to finally retire on April 3, after his “50 years, 7 months and 22 days of service.” He started the job just after Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, where the reverend had traveled to support a protest by black sanitation workers. He says he never missed a week’s work until coronavirus struck. Now he’s worried about the young men he mentored who are still on the job. “We’re gonna have some more people die before all of this is resolved,” Queen says. “And I’m just hoping and praying that none of my family members or anybody that I know will be a part of this death that’s going around.”

COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting African American communities across the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Many inhabit the low-income, densely packed neighborhoods with a large number of multi-generational homes, which helps spread the virus, says Danyelle Solomon, vice president of race and ethnicity at the Center for American Progress (CAP). Other factors include type of employment, lack of a financial safety net and pre-existing health conditions, she says.

African Americans make up about a third of some of the service industry’s public-facing jobs like taxi drivers and barbers, according to CAP research. That’s in part why less than one in five black Americans, and less than one in six Latinx Americans are able to work from home, Solomon says. And for every $10 a typical white family has in the bank, a typical black family only holds $1, according to CAP research. “Wealth allows people to respond to that unexpected emergency like COVID-19,” she says, “resources you can draw upon when you’re not pulling a paycheck.”

When it comes to health, CAP’s analysis shows that 28% of people of color between the ages of 18 and 64 in the U.S. — or more than 21 million people — have a pre-existing condition, like asthma, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes, that could put them at higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19.

Nate Palmer for TIMESanitation worker Vincent Walker sits below a portrait of Mayor Muriel Bowser inside the Department of Public Works Solid Waste Collections Division.

In Washington D.C., Mayor Bowser, who is 47, says the virus has been “efficient against underlying conditions that you see in the African American community, like diabetes and high blood pressure and heart disease.” She says it has also hit those who don’t have the luxury of staying home, and those who live in multiple-generation households that are getting more crowded as families double up when they can’t make rent because of lost wages. “Less than optimal health decisions, coupled with the inability to isolate, has put black and brown communities right in the crosshairs of COVID-19,” Bowser says.

Others say criticizing African Americans for lifestyle choices that lead to pre-existing conditions smacks of blaming the victim. Washington’s most populous black neighborhoods, concentrated in Wards 7 and 8, are food deserts, says Doni Crawford of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, with only three large supermarkets serving 160,000 people. Decades of inequitable city planning also come into play, with homes in black and brown communities often located in more densely packed neighborhoods, or near warehouse or industrial districts, due to zoning practices, the 30-year-old affordable housing analyst says. “When you’re living close to a trash site, that negatively impacts your health.”

All these factors are further complicated by a historic distrust of doctors felt by many members of the African American community, says Dr. Michael Fauntroy, 54, associate professor of political science at Howard University, who studies African American political behavior. For many, that is rooted in the notorious Tuskegee experiment, he says, which started in 1932 when unethical U.S. Public Health Service researchers told African American men they were being “treated for ‘bad blood,’ a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue,” according to the CDC. Instead, they were being studied as syphilis consumed them, and infected their loved ones, long after a cure was found.

Lingering suspicion — and the prejudice African Americans continue to encounter in the modern health care system — has made some people reluctant to seek out care. It also means it can be hard to dislodge bad information, Fauntroy says, like the rumor in the early days of the pandemic that blacks couldn’t catch COVID-19. The Howard University professor recalls hearing that rumor repeated by one of his best students. “I almost lost my mind,” Fauntroy recalls, “because it’s just the single most illogical thing you can think of.”

‘Disregard for black life and black bodies’

Mayor Bowser is mindful of that history. As it became clear that D.C.’s black community was being hit hard by COVID-19, she reached out to fellow African Americans through a trusted voice, enlisting D.C. resident and former First Lady Michelle Obama to record a message that went out to denizens of the District via robocall and through social media in mid-April. It urged non-essential workers to stay home and explained where people could get free coronavirus testing. (An Obama spokesperson says she’s recorded similar messages for other major African American cities and broadcasters during the pandemic as well.) The robocall helped drive up numbers of people getting tested, Bowser says, putting the District in the top 10 states or territories in terms of people tested per capita, according to the District’s Director of the Department of Forensic Sciences Dr. Jenifer Smith.

Nate Palmer for TIMEEmery Heights Park on a cloudy day in Washington, D.C., on May 22.

But cases have still been spiking in some of the city’s low-income neighborhoods, so Bowser’s team has been setting up pop-up sites that offer free testing for essential workers, people in high risk categories, or people who think they may have been exposed. At the first one, on a sunny Saturday on May 16, a line of masked residents waited next to a mobile lab near a charter school in Brightwood, a neighborhood in northwest D.C. that was once home to a pre-Civil War community of free African Americans. Today it’s a cross-section of black, Latinx and Amharic families, and is situated within the District’s Ward Four, which has the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the city.

Juan, a plumber, stands in line to get tested because his boss is in the hospital with COVID-19. “I have four children in the house,” he says. “I have to make sure that everything is okay.”

The economic impact of COVID-19 people in low-income neighborhoods like Brightwood is putting people at higher risk of infection in D.C., health care workers say. Homes that were already tight are now even more crowded as families move in together to save money. “A lot of people have lost their jobs, and the people that didn’t lose their jobs have lost hours,” says Maria Gomez, RN, president and CEO of Mary’s Center, which is providing the pop-up center’s testing services. To save rent, families are doubling up. “So one family that already was crowded in an apartment is moving in with another one that was already crowded.”

A few blocks away, on the neighborhood’s main drag, most businesses are closed, other than a funeral home and the occasional pharmacy or liquor store. One of the few open shops is Elsa Ethiopian Kitchen, where Elsa Yirge, the 45-year-old owner, works behind the counter. Her husband Beniam Belay greets drivers from Uber, Seamless and Grubhub in a bright African-print face mask, to the sound of an Ethiopian soap opera playing on a wall-mounted TV.

He says business has been down 80% since the pandemic hit. Just before COVID-19, the business leased more space upstairs to hold tables for up to 40 guests. Now, they don’t know how they’ll pay rent at the end of the month. The restaurant applied for a loan through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the emergency federal program designed to help small business owners struggling under the shutdown. “We never heard back on our loan application,” Elsa says. When asked what they’ll do, she just shrugs, a grim look on her face.

Stimulus measures meant to bail out small businesses struggling under stay-at-home orders haven’t had the impact on minority-owned businesses that advocates would like to see, according to Crawford and co-author Qubilah Huddleston’s research for the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. Only a quarter of PPP loans could be used for expenses like rent, while three-quarters of the aid was structured to cover staff paychecks. “More than 90% of black businesses nationwide are sole proprietorships with no employees,” Crawford says. The Latinx community is also struggling, according to a recent Latino Decisions poll, which found that 35% of respondents had lost a job, 29% owned a small business that was on the brink or had already gone under, and 43% had trouble making rent.

Nate Palmer for TIMEBrightwood resident Carol Lightfoot, 73, stands on her front porch on May 22.

But for people in the capital who have watched friends and neighbors get sick, rushing back to normal life isn’t necessarily the answer. Next door to the testing site, Carol Lightfoot, 73, and her brother George, 69, watch neighbors line up for nearly half a mile from the front porch of their peeling 1800s-era Victorian home, which in its day hosted salons for members of the black intelligentsia like W.E.B. Du Bois. When the Lightfoots realized they could get tested for free, they lined up too, as the siblings share a host of serious health conditions, including diabetes, hypertension, and asthma.

Lightfoot has empathy for people who have lost income during the pandemic, but calls the primarily white protestors she’s seen on TV dismissing the virus “ridiculous,” adding that they’d likely feel differently “if it was a member of their family or friends who came down with it.”

As Trump continues to push for reopening, homemade posters have appeared on a handful of D.C. lamp posts across the District. “Coming soon to your City: Trump Caskets,” the signs say, with an image of the President grinning over an open coffin. It’s a snapshot of how some District residents view Trump’s handling of the pandemic, says longtime Washington, D.C.-based public radio host Kojo Nnamdi. Many African Americans here see the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on their community as part of a wider pattern of neglect by the Trump Administration, he says. “These are people who are convinced that President Trump does not have the interests of poor and people of color at heart. They think that President Trump prefers to err on the side of the major corporation, the big banks, and the business community.”

Nnamdi, now 75, predicts the pandemic will renew the movements for black equality that first inspired him to travel to the U.S. from Guyana as a college student and briefly join the revolutionary-minded Black Panther Party. Policy analyst Huddleston, 29, agrees. “It just reflects the disregard for black life and black bodies to say that we know that there are specific communities being decimated and devastated, economically, health wise, etc. But we’re still going to open anyway because the show must go on,” she says.

Mayor Bowser sees this crisis as an opportunity for Trump to reach out to the nation’s black community. “If there is ever a place where we could really look at the disproportionate impact on African Americans, it’s D.C., she says. “I think Trump gets that this is an issue that he can lean into for African Americans. I don’t know if he knows what the answer is.”

In Brightwood, nobody is talking politics. Juan and the other residents standing in line to get tested are just focused on getting through this crisis, like Clinton on his early morning sanitation shift. He may have to get out and help the public every day for a living, but in his private life, Clinton says he is planning to stay from public places for a while. “You gotta choose. What’s best? The economy? We need to get it back together so people can work, but you also gotta be safe,” he says. “It’s out there.”

— With reporting by Chris Wilson

Please send tips, leads, and stories from the frontlines to virus@time.com.

[freebooter4ever]

Sitting on the artist's porch looking out over pasadena and eating breakfast this morning in the hot sun, and remembering how i felt a year ago when i accidentally found myself living here for my first two weeks in LA

I'm moving into my next temp place tonight, and ngl half the reason I picked the place and went through all this trouble to coordinate my schedule to get it, was the giant two story deck built into the hill behind the house. Its rickety and looks like it stepped out of a  1920s amusement park but oh could I see myself having breakfast there and watching the sunrise.

 Reminds me of my old place in the burgh where my room connected to the roof of ted's room/our kitchen. That was a fun space...the first girl i ever asked out on a date helped me climb to the next level of roof there (who knew holding hands could be so charged?), my dance buddy and I spent quite a bit of time up there, Jon and I had our first kiss up there - how many chances do you get to tell a crush 'come find me' and it means he has to climb onto a radiator and squeeze himself through a tiny third floor window to lie out on a flat rowhouse roof with blankets and christmas lights and watch the sun set over ppg palace and the allegheny. 

And when I was a kid my grandma callyerdogsoff lived in a barn red house perched on a hill overlooking renton (the 60's era deck jutting out from the living room was bigger than the house itself - perfect for our alarmingly large family get togethers, there always seemed to be over twenty cousins - all girls except jordan and one other boy - at least, but you could fit us all on the deck for family photos. below the deck were narrow wooden stairs leading to a chainlink fence covered head to toe in ivy where grandma kept her padlocked secret garden that she'd let us have tea parties in. The house itself was built in a circle with a living from in the front and a narrow hallway of a kitchen in the back, and we could play tag when we were small enough to dodge adults. And in the very center of the house was a secret door behind which were steep steps that led to an attic where grandma did all her poetry writing). 

Whenever I got the chance to stay overnight at grandma's house they let me sleep in the attic, on this bed built into the wall with a skylight as big as me above it. The roof was sloped so even when I was a kid if I stood on the bed I could reach up, crank the skylight window open, pop out the screen, and stick my head through. And the entire city of renton would be laid out before me with sparkling lights, and I could track cars as they drove along the grid streets. And Renton was never a big city, back then it was even smaller and a bit run down than it is now, but to a kid who grew up in the suburbs and rural mountains around snoqualmie it was a spectacular view.

[viralnewstime]

It’s just past 7 a.m. as Tavis Clinton’s sanitation truck pulls to a stop in an alley in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Petworth, its streets lined by aging rowhouses and the occasional glass-and-metal gentrified upstart apartment complex. The 41-year-old sanitation crew chief, who like the other members of his three-man team is African American, navigates the massive orange city truck through the narrow lanes, his mouth covered in a star-spangled bandana. His colleagues jump off, grab a couple of wheeled bins and swing them in a practiced arc onto a mechanized arm that tips the refuse into the truck. The team then skates the bins back behind the still-quiet homes and sprints to the next set, panting through their face masks in the former swampland’s late spring heat.

Sanitation workers like Clinton show up before dawn to start their 6am shifts, wrapping themselves in masks, gloves, neon jackets and vests, and a take-no-prisoners esprit de corps to get through exhausting shifts removing the locked-down city’s refuse. The streets have been emptier but the trash is heavier with so many staying at home during the coronavirus pandemic. The three-man crews pack into the truck’s cab, where no social distancing is possible. When Clinton gets home to his wife and five children, he sprays his clothes his disinfectant and then scrubs hard in the shower before going anywhere near them.

“It’s tough,” Clinton says. “I just have to trust in my crew that once they leave work, they are home and they’re not out socializing, because it’s all our health at once.”

Clinton and his crew are part of the essential workforce that has kept America’s capital running during the pandemic, most of which are African American, according to the city. It’s one of the reasons officials say the African American community here has been so hard hit by COVID-19: While African Americans make up nearly 47% of the District of Columbia’s population, and account for 46% of the city’s COVID-19 cases, they also account for more than 76% of the city’s deaths.

Nate Palmer for TIMETavis Clinton disinfects his truck before beginning his route on May 22.

Now, as the District’s officials weigh reopening non-essential businesses as early as Friday, they worry its black and brown residents, who are being disproportionately impacted by the virus, will bear the brunt of a second wave of infections once people leave their houses. Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser knows she has to both bring back business and minimize the health risk to the largely black and Latinx workers doing the work on the pandemic’s front lines. Latinx are the second highest risk group for COVID-19 in the U.S.; in the District, they make up 11% of the city’s population and 25% of infections. “You don’t get to open up and be successful if people are scared for their lives,” Bowser tells TIME.

The virus’ disproportionate impact on the District of Columbia’s black community in particular reflects a broader pattern across the United States. Nationwide, African Americans comprise just 12.3% of the country but nearly 26.3% of the COVID-19 cases and 22.7% of deaths, according to CDC data. (At least 30% of states’ test results compiled by the CDC failed to record race.) A high rate of underlying conditions like diabetes and heart disease, coupled with historically lower-paid jobs, have put many African American communities at greater risk from COVID-19, experts say. The skewed toll “spotlights the underlying inequalities and extra burdens that black communities have historically had to deal with in this country,” former President Barack Obama said in his May 16th commencement speech for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Until this week, Washington, D.C.’s startlingly high proportion of African American deaths has helped make the city has a national outlier in its stay-at-home orders. On May 13, Bowser extended D.C.’s the order to June 8th, while nearly all other states moved toward some kind of reopening. Her caution proved prescient: the metropolitan D.C. area had the highest rate of positive COVID-19 tests in the nation on May 22, just ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, according to White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx. But after the holiday, Bowser told reporters on Tuesday that cases were again dropping, and some non-essential businesses could begin to open by Friday if the trend continued downward.

Patrick Semansky—APD.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, right, speaks during a news conference about the coronavirus inside the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on May 11.

Drew Angerer—Getty ImagesA woman wears a mask as she walks past a bus stop on 14th Street in downtown Washington, D.C., on April 15, 2020.

Bowser’s caution has put her at odds with the President living in her city limits who has been actively urging the country to get back to business. She is trying to walk a diplomatic line with the Trump Administration, since D.C. needs federal funding to bridge a nearly $725 million-dollar budget shortfall spurred by rising social-welfare costs and falling tax income due to the pandemic. But she doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that she thinks President Donald Trump’s push to reopen overlooks the needs of some of the most vulnerable Americans. “There is this kind of a callous calculation happening that surprises me,” she says. “It’s kind of like, ‘Well, this COVID is killing old people and, Oh, well. It’s killing black people, and poor people and essential workers. Oh, well.’”

Keep up to date on the growing threat to global health by signing up for our daily coronavirus newsletter.

‘This death that’s going around’

For many of the early rising members of D.C.’s sanitation crews, COVID-19 has brought both a sense of renewed pride in their crucial work and a creeping sense of dread. “The public comes out when they are coming through the alleys, kids waiving at them,” says Earl Simpson, 43, the associate administrator of D.C.’s collection division. “I think the citizens really appreciate us being out there collecting the trash and recycling.”

Nate Palmer for TIMERetired sanitation worker Maurice “Pony Man” Queen, 72, stands in the hallway at the Department of Public Works Solid Waste Collections Division on May 22.

But some have already left the job out of concern for their safety. Fear of the virus drove one of the city’s longest serving sanitation workers, Maurice “Pony Man” Queen, 72, to finally retire on April 3, after his “50 years, 7 months and 22 days of service.” He started the job just after Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, where the reverend had traveled to support a protest by black sanitation workers. He says he never missed a week’s work until coronavirus struck. Now he’s worried about the young men he mentored who are still on the job. “We’re gonna have some more people die before all of this is resolved,” Queen says. “And I’m just hoping and praying that none of my family members or anybody that I know will be a part of this death that’s going around.”

COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting African American communities across the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Many inhabit the low-income, densely packed neighborhoods with a large number of multi-generational homes, which helps spread the virus, says Danyelle Solomon, vice president of race and ethnicity at the Center for American Progress (CAP). Other factors include type of employment, lack of a financial safety net and pre-existing health conditions, she says.

African Americans make up about a third of some of the service industry’s public-facing jobs like taxi drivers and barbers, according to CAP research. That’s in part why less than one in five black Americans, and less than one in six Latinx Americans able to work from home, Solomon says. And for every $10 a typical white family has in the bank, a typical black family only holds $1, according to CAP research. “Wealth allows people to respond to that unexpected emergency like COVID-19,” she says, “resources you can draw upon when you’re not pulling a paycheck.”

When it comes to health, CAP’s analysis shows that 28% of people of color between the ages of 18 and 64 in the U.S. — or more than 21 million people — have a pre-existing condition, like asthma, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes, that could put them at higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19.

Nate Palmer for TIMESanitation worker Vincent Walker sits below a portrait of Mayor Muriel Bowser inside the Department of Public Works Solid Waste Collections Division.

In Washington D.C., Mayor Bowser, who is 47, says the virus has been “efficient against underlying conditions that you see in the African American community, like diabetes and high blood pressure and heart disease.” She says it has also hit those who don’t have the luxury of staying home, and those who live in multiple-generation households that are getting more crowded as families double up when they can’t make rent because of lost wages. “Less than optimal health decisions, coupled with the inability to isolate, has put black and brown communities right in the crosshairs of COVID-19,” Bowser says.

Others say criticizing African Americans for lifestyle choices that lead to pre-existing conditions smacks of blaming the victim. Washington’s most populous black neighborhoods, concentrated in Wards 7 and 8, are food deserts, says Doni Crawford of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, with only three large supermarkets serving 160,000 people. Decades of inequitable city planning also come into play, with homes in black and brown communities often located in more densely packed neighborhoods, or near warehouse or industrial districts, due to zoning practices, the 30-year-old affordable housing analyst says. “When you’re living close to a trash site, that negatively impacts your health.”

All these factors are further complicated by a historic distrust of doctors felt by many members of the African American community, says Dr. Michael Fauntroy, 54, associate professor of political science at Howard University, who studies African American political behavior. For many, that is rooted in the notorious Tuskegee experiment, he says, which started in 1932 when unethical U.S. Public Health Service researchers told African American men they were being “treated for ‘bad blood,’ a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue,” according to the CDC. Instead, they were being studied as syphilis consumed them, and infected their loved ones, long after a cure was found.

Lingering suspicion — and the prejudice African Americans continue to encounter in the modern health care system — has made some people reluctant to seek out care. It also means it can be hard to dislodge bad information, Fauntroy says, like the rumor in the early days of the pandemic that blacks couldn’t catch COVID-19. The Howard University professor recalls hearing that rumor repeated by one of his best students. “I almost lost my mind,” Fauntroy recalls, “because it’s just the single most illogical thing you can think of.”

‘Disregard for black life and black bodies’

Mayor Bowser is mindful of that history. As it became clear that D.C.’s black community was being hit hard by COVID-19, she reached out to fellow African Americans through a trusted voice, enlisting D.C. resident and former First Lady Michelle Obama to record a message that went out to denizens of the District via robocall and through social media in mid-April. It urged non-essential workers to stay home and explained where people could get free coronavirus testing. (An Obama spokesperson says she’s recorded similar messages for other major African American cities and broadcasters during the pandemic as well.) The robocall helped drive up numbers of people getting tested, Bowser says, putting the District in the top 10 states or territories in terms of people tested per capita, according to the District’s Director of the Department of Forensic Sciences Dr. Jenifer Smith.

Nate Palmer for TIMEEmery Heights Park on a cloudy day in Washington, D.C., on May 22.

But cases have still been spiking in some of the city’s low-income neighborhoods, so Bowser’s team has been setting up pop-up sites that offer free testing for essential workers, people in high risk categories, or people who think they may have been exposed. At the first one, on a sunny Saturday on May 16, a line of masked residents waited next to a mobile lab near a charter school in Brightwood, a neighborhood in northwest D.C. that was once home to a pre-Civil War community of free African Americans. Today it’s a cross-section of black, Latinx and Amharic families, and is situated within the District’s Ward Four, which has the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the city.

Juan, a plumber, stands in line to get tested because his boss is in the hospital with COVID-19. “I have four children in the house,” he says. “I have to make sure that everything is okay.”

The economic impact of COVID-19 people in low-income neighborhoods like Brightwood is putting people at higher risk of infection in D.C., health care workers say. Homes that were already tight are now even more crowded as families move in together to save money. “A lot of people have lost their jobs, and the people that didn’t lose their jobs have lost hours,” says Maria Gomez, RN, president and CEO of Mary’s Center, which is providing the pop-up center’s testing services. To save rent, families are doubling up. “So one family that already was crowded in an apartment is moving in with another one that was already crowded.”

A few blocks away, on the neighborhood’s main drag, most businesses are closed, other than a funeral home and the occasional pharmacy or liquor store. One of the few open shops is Elsa Ethiopian Kitchen, where Elsa Yirge, the 45-year-old owner, works behind the counter. Her husband Beniam Belay greets drivers from Uber, Seamless and Grubhub in a bright African-print face mask, to the sound of an Ethiopian soap opera playing on a wall-mounted TV.

He says business has been down 80% since the pandemic hit. Just before COVID-19, the business leased more space upstairs to hold tables for up to 40 guests. Now, they don’t know how they’ll pay rent at the end of the month. The restaurant applied for a loan through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the emergency federal program designed to help small business owners struggling under the shutdown. “We never heard back on our loan application,” Elsa says. When asked what they’ll do, she just shrugs, a grim look on her face.

Stimulus measures meant to bail out small businesses struggling under stay-at-home orders haven’t had the impact on minority-owned businesses that advocates would like to see, according to Crawford and co-author Qubilah Huddleston’s research for the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. Only a quarter of PPP loans could be used for expenses like rent, while three-quarters of the aid was structured to cover staff paychecks. “More than 90% of black businesses nationwide are sole proprietorships with no employees,” Crawford says. The Latinx community is also struggling, according to a recent Latino Decisions poll, which found that 35% of respondents had lost a job, 29% owned a small business that was on the brink or had already gone under, and 43% had trouble making rent.

Nate Palmer for TIMEBrightwood resident Carol Lightfoot, 73, stands on her front porch on May 22.

But for people in the capital who have watched friends and neighbors get sick, rushing back to normal life isn’t necessarily the answer. Next door to the testing site, Carol Lightfoot, 73, and her brother George, 69, watch neighbors line up for nearly half a mile from the front porch of their peeling 1800s-era Victorian home, which in its day hosted salons for members of the black intelligentsia like W.E.B. Du Bois. When the Lightfoots realized they could get tested for free, they lined up too, as the siblings share a host of serious health conditions, including diabetes, hypertension, and asthma.

Lightfoot has empathy for people who have lost income during the pandemic, but calls the primarily white protestors she’s seen on TV dismissing the virus “ridiculous,” adding that they’d likely feel differently “if it was a member of their family or friends who came down with it.”

As Trump continues to push for reopening, homemade posters have appeared on a handful of D.C. lamp posts across the District. “Coming soon to your City: Trump Caskets,” the signs say, with an image of the President grinning over an open coffin. It’s a snapshot of how some District residents view Trump’s handling of the pandemic, says longtime Washington, D.C.-based public radio host Kojo Nnamdi. Many African Americans here see the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on their community as part of a wider pattern of neglect by the Trump Administration, he says. “These are people who are convinced that President Trump does not have the interests of poor and people of color at heart. They think that President Trump prefers to err on the side of the major corporation, the big banks, and the business community.”

Nnamdi, now 75, predicts the pandemic will renew the movements for black equality that first inspired him to travel to the U.S. from Guyana as a college student and briefly join the revolutionary-minded Black Panther Party. Policy analyst Huddleston, 29, agrees. “It just reflects the disregard for black life and black bodies to say that we know that there are specific communities being decimated and devastated, economically, health wise, etc. But we’re still going to open anyway because the show must go on,” she says.

Mayor Bowser sees this crisis as an opportunity for Trump to reach out to the nation’s black community. “If there is ever a place where we could really look at the disproportionate impact on African Americans, it’s D.C., she says. “I think Trump gets that this is an issue that he can lean into for African Americans. I don’t know if he knows what the answer is.”

In Brightwood, nobody is talking politics. Juan and the other residents standing in line to get tested are just focused on getting through this crisis, like Clinton on his early morning sanitation shift. He may have to get out and help the public every day for a living, but in his private life, Clinton says he is planning to stay from public places for a while. “You gotta choose. What’s best? The economy? We need to get it back together so people can work, but you also gotta be safe,” he says. “It’s out there.”

— With reporting by Chris Wilson

Please send tips, leads, and stories from the frontlines to virus@time.com.

[hellofastestnewsfan]

It’s just past 7 a.m. as Tavis Clinton’s sanitation truck pulls to a stop in an alley in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Petworth, its streets lined by aging rowhouses and the occasional glass-and-metal gentrified upstart apartment complex. The 41-year-old sanitation crew chief, who like the other members of his three-man team is African American, navigates the massive orange city truck through the narrow lanes, his mouth covered in a star-spangled bandana. His colleagues jump off, grab a couple of wheeled bins and swing them in a practiced arc onto a mechanized arm that tips the refuse into the truck. The team then skates the bins back behind the still-quiet homes and sprints to the next set, panting through their face masks in the former swampland’s late spring heat.

Sanitation workers like Clinton show up before dawn to start their 6am shifts, wrapping themselves in masks, gloves, neon jackets and vests, and a take-no-prisoners esprit de corps to get through exhausting shifts removing the locked-down city’s refuse. The streets have been emptier but the trash is heavier with so many staying at home during the coronavirus pandemic. The three-man crews pack into the truck’s cab, where no social distancing is possible. When Clinton gets home to his wife and five children, he sprays his clothes his disinfectant and then scrubs hard in the shower before going anywhere near them.

“It’s tough,” Clinton says. “I just have to trust in my crew that once they leave work, they are home and they’re not out socializing, because it’s all our health at once.”

Clinton and his crew are part of the essential workforce that has kept America’s capital running during the pandemic, most of which are African American, according to the city. It’s one of the reasons officials say the African American community here has been so hard hit by COVID-19: While African Americans make up nearly 47% of the District of Columbia’s population, and account for 46% of the city’s COVID-19 cases, they also account for more than 76% of the city’s deaths.

Nate Palmer for TIMETavis Clinton disinfects his truck before beginning his route on May 22.

Now, as the District’s officials weigh reopening non-essential businesses as early as Friday, they worry its black and brown residents, who are being disproportionately impacted by the virus, will bear the brunt of a second wave of infections once people leave their houses. Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser knows she has to both bring back business and minimize the health risk to the largely black and Latinx workers doing the work on the pandemic’s front lines. Latinx are the second highest risk group for COVID-19 in the U.S.; in the District, they make up 11% of the city’s population and 25% of infections. “You don’t get to open up and be successful if people are scared for their lives,” Bowser tells TIME.

The virus’ disproportionate impact on the District of Columbia’s black community in particular reflects a broader pattern across the United States. Nationwide, African Americans comprise just 12.3% of the country but nearly 26.3% of the COVID-19 cases and 22.7% of deaths, according to CDC data. (At least 30% of states’ test results compiled by the CDC failed to record race.) A high rate of underlying conditions like diabetes and heart disease, coupled with historically lower-paid jobs, have put many African American communities at greater risk from COVID-19, experts say. The skewed toll “spotlights the underlying inequalities and extra burdens that black communities have historically had to deal with in this country,” former President Barack Obama said in his May 16th commencement speech for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Until this week, Washington, D.C.’s startlingly high proportion of African American deaths has helped make the city has a national outlier in its stay-at-home orders. On May 13, Bowser extended D.C.’s the order to June 8th, while nearly all other states moved toward some kind of reopening. Her caution proved prescient: the metropolitan D.C. area had the highest rate of positive COVID-19 tests in the nation on May 22, just ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, according to White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx. But after the holiday, Bowser told reporters on Tuesday that cases were again dropping, and some non-essential businesses could begin to open by Friday if the trend continued downward.

Patrick Semansky—APD.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, right, speaks during a news conference about the coronavirus inside the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on May 11.

Drew Angerer—Getty ImagesA woman wears a mask as she walks past a bus stop on 14th Street in downtown Washington, D.C., on April 15, 2020.

Bowser’s caution has put her at odds with the President living in her city limits who has been actively urging the country to get back to business. She is trying to walk a diplomatic line with the Trump Administration, since D.C. needs federal funding to bridge a nearly $725 million-dollar budget shortfall spurred by rising social-welfare costs and falling tax income due to the pandemic. But she doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that she thinks President Donald Trump’s push to reopen overlooks the needs of some of the most vulnerable Americans. “There is this kind of a callous calculation happening that surprises me,” she says. “It’s kind of like, ‘Well, this COVID is killing old people and, Oh, well. It’s killing black people, and poor people and essential workers. Oh, well.’”

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‘This death that’s going around’

For many of the early rising members of D.C.’s sanitation crews, COVID-19 has brought both a sense of renewed pride in their crucial work and a creeping sense of dread. “The public comes out when they are coming through the alleys, kids waiving at them,” says Earl Simpson, 43, the associate administrator of D.C.’s collection division. “I think the citizens really appreciate us being out there collecting the trash and recycling.”

Nate Palmer for TIMERetired sanitation worker Maurice “Pony Man” Queen, 72, stands in the hallway at the Department of Public Works Solid Waste Collections Division on May 22.

But some have already left the job out of concern for their safety. Fear of the virus drove one of the city’s longest serving sanitation workers, Maurice “Pony Man” Queen, 72, to finally retire on April 3, after his “50 years, 7 months and 22 days of service.” He started the job just after Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, where the reverend had traveled to support a protest by black sanitation workers. He says he never missed a week’s work until coronavirus struck. Now he’s worried about the young men he mentored who are still on the job. “We’re gonna have some more people die before all of this is resolved,” Queen says. “And I’m just hoping and praying that none of my family members or anybody that I know will be a part of this death that’s going around.”

COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting African American communities across the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Many inhabit the low-income, densely packed neighborhoods with a large number of multi-generational homes, which helps spread the virus, says Danyelle Solomon, vice president of race and ethnicity at the Center for American Progress (CAP). Other factors include type of employment, lack of a financial safety net and pre-existing health conditions, she says.

African Americans make up about a third of some of the service industry’s public-facing jobs like taxi drivers and barbers, according to CAP research. That’s in part why less than one in five black Americans, and less than one in six Latinx Americans are able to work from home, Solomon says. And for every $10 a typical white family has in the bank, a typical black family only holds $1, according to CAP research. “Wealth allows people to respond to that unexpected emergency like COVID-19,” she says, “resources you can draw upon when you’re not pulling a paycheck.”

When it comes to health, CAP’s analysis shows that 28% of people of color between the ages of 18 and 64 in the U.S. — or more than 21 million people — have a pre-existing condition, like asthma, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes, that could put them at higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19.

Nate Palmer for TIMESanitation worker Vincent Walker sits below a portrait of Mayor Muriel Bowser inside the Department of Public Works Solid Waste Collections Division.

In Washington D.C., Mayor Bowser, who is 47, says the virus has been “efficient against underlying conditions that you see in the African American community, like diabetes and high blood pressure and heart disease.” She says it has also hit those who don’t have the luxury of staying home, and those who live in multiple-generation households that are getting more crowded as families double up when they can’t make rent because of lost wages. “Less than optimal health decisions, coupled with the inability to isolate, has put black and brown communities right in the crosshairs of COVID-19,” Bowser says.

Others say criticizing African Americans for lifestyle choices that lead to pre-existing conditions smacks of blaming the victim. Washington’s most populous black neighborhoods, concentrated in Wards 7 and 8, are food deserts, says Doni Crawford of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, with only three large supermarkets serving 160,000 people. Decades of inequitable city planning also come into play, with homes in black and brown communities often located in more densely packed neighborhoods, or near warehouse or industrial districts, due to zoning practices, the 30-year-old affordable housing analyst says. “When you’re living close to a trash site, that negatively impacts your health.”

All these factors are further complicated by a historic distrust of doctors felt by many members of the African American community, says Dr. Michael Fauntroy, 54, associate professor of political science at Howard University, who studies African American political behavior. For many, that is rooted in the notorious Tuskegee experiment, he says, which started in 1932 when unethical U.S. Public Health Service researchers told African American men they were being “treated for ‘bad blood,’ a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue,” according to the CDC. Instead, they were being studied as syphilis consumed them, and infected their loved ones, long after a cure was found.

Lingering suspicion — and the prejudice African Americans continue to encounter in the modern health care system — has made some people reluctant to seek out care. It also means it can be hard to dislodge bad information, Fauntroy says, like the rumor in the early days of the pandemic that blacks couldn’t catch COVID-19. The Howard University professor recalls hearing that rumor repeated by one of his best students. “I almost lost my mind,” Fauntroy recalls, “because it’s just the single most illogical thing you can think of.”

‘Disregard for black life and black bodies’

Mayor Bowser is mindful of that history. As it became clear that D.C.’s black community was being hit hard by COVID-19, she reached out to fellow African Americans through a trusted voice, enlisting D.C. resident and former First Lady Michelle Obama to record a message that went out to denizens of the District via robocall and through social media in mid-April. It urged non-essential workers to stay home and explained where people could get free coronavirus testing. (An Obama spokesperson says she’s recorded similar messages for other major African American cities and broadcasters during the pandemic as well.) The robocall helped drive up numbers of people getting tested, Bowser says, putting the District in the top 10 states or territories in terms of people tested per capita, according to the District’s Director of the Department of Forensic Sciences Dr. Jenifer Smith.

Nate Palmer for TIMEEmery Heights Park on a cloudy day in Washington, D.C., on May 22.

But cases have still been spiking in some of the city’s low-income neighborhoods, so Bowser’s team has been setting up pop-up sites that offer free testing for essential workers, people in high risk categories, or people who think they may have been exposed. At the first one, on a sunny Saturday on May 16, a line of masked residents waited next to a mobile lab near a charter school in Brightwood, a neighborhood in northwest D.C. that was once home to a pre-Civil War community of free African Americans. Today it’s a cross-section of black, Latinx and Amharic families, and is situated within the District’s Ward Four, which has the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the city.

Juan, a plumber, stands in line to get tested because his boss is in the hospital with COVID-19. “I have four children in the house,” he says. “I have to make sure that everything is okay.”

The economic impact of COVID-19 people in low-income neighborhoods like Brightwood is putting people at higher risk of infection in D.C., health care workers say. Homes that were already tight are now even more crowded as families move in together to save money. “A lot of people have lost their jobs, and the people that didn’t lose their jobs have lost hours,” says Maria Gomez, RN, president and CEO of Mary’s Center, which is providing the pop-up center’s testing services. To save rent, families are doubling up. “So one family that already was crowded in an apartment is moving in with another one that was already crowded.”

A few blocks away, on the neighborhood’s main drag, most businesses are closed, other than a funeral home and the occasional pharmacy or liquor store. One of the few open shops is Elsa Ethiopian Kitchen, where Elsa Yirge, the 45-year-old owner, works behind the counter. Her husband Beniam Belay greets drivers from Uber, Seamless and Grubhub in a bright African-print face mask, to the sound of an Ethiopian soap opera playing on a wall-mounted TV.

He says business has been down 80% since the pandemic hit. Just before COVID-19, the business leased more space upstairs to hold tables for up to 40 guests. Now, they don’t know how they’ll pay rent at the end of the month. The restaurant applied for a loan through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the emergency federal program designed to help small business owners struggling under the shutdown. “We never heard back on our loan application,” Elsa says. When asked what they’ll do, she just shrugs, a grim look on her face.

Stimulus measures meant to bail out small businesses struggling under stay-at-home orders haven’t had the impact on minority-owned businesses that advocates would like to see, according to Crawford and co-author Qubilah Huddleston’s research for the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. Only a quarter of PPP loans could be used for expenses like rent, while three-quarters of the aid was structured to cover staff paychecks. “More than 90% of black businesses nationwide are sole proprietorships with no employees,” Crawford says. The Latinx community is also struggling, according to a recent Latino Decisions poll, which found that 35% of respondents had lost a job, 29% owned a small business that was on the brink or had already gone under, and 43% had trouble making rent.

Nate Palmer for TIMEBrightwood resident Carol Lightfoot, 73, stands on her front porch on May 22.

But for people in the capital who have watched friends and neighbors get sick, rushing back to normal life isn’t necessarily the answer. Next door to the testing site, Carol Lightfoot, 73, and her brother George, 69, watch neighbors line up for nearly half a mile from the front porch of their peeling 1800s-era Victorian home, which in its day hosted salons for members of the black intelligentsia like W.E.B. Du Bois. When the Lightfoots realized they could get tested for free, they lined up too, as the siblings share a host of serious health conditions, including diabetes, hypertension, and asthma.

Lightfoot has empathy for people who have lost income during the pandemic, but calls the primarily white protestors she’s seen on TV dismissing the virus “ridiculous,” adding that they’d likely feel differently “if it was a member of their family or friends who came down with it.”

As Trump continues to push for reopening, homemade posters have appeared on a handful of D.C. lamp posts across the District. “Coming soon to your City: Trump Caskets,” the signs say, with an image of the President grinning over an open coffin. It’s a snapshot of how some District residents view Trump’s handling of the pandemic, says longtime Washington, D.C.-based public radio host Kojo Nnamdi. Many African Americans here see the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on their community as part of a wider pattern of neglect by the Trump Administration, he says. “These are people who are convinced that President Trump does not have the interests of poor and people of color at heart. They think that President Trump prefers to err on the side of the major corporation, the big banks, and the business community.”

Nnamdi, now 75, predicts the pandemic will renew the movements for black equality that first inspired him to travel to the U.S. from Guyana as a college student and briefly join the revolutionary-minded Black Panther Party. Policy analyst Huddleston, 29, agrees. “It just reflects the disregard for black life and black bodies to say that we know that there are specific communities being decimated and devastated, economically, health wise, etc. But we’re still going to open anyway because the show must go on,” she says.

Mayor Bowser sees this crisis as an opportunity for Trump to reach out to the nation’s black community. “If there is ever a place where we could really look at the disproportionate impact on African Americans, it’s D.C., she says. “I think Trump gets that this is an issue that he can lean into for African Americans. I don’t know if he knows what the answer is.”

In Brightwood, nobody is talking politics. Juan and the other residents standing in line to get tested are just focused on getting through this crisis, like Clinton on his early morning sanitation shift. He may have to get out and help the public every day for a living, but in his private life, Clinton says he is planning to stay from public places for a while. “You gotta choose. What’s best? The economy? We need to get it back together so people can work, but you also gotta be safe,” he says. “It’s out there.”

— With reporting by Chris Wilson

Please send tips, leads, and stories from the frontlines to virus@time.com.

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[cmusoa-udbs]

As a last post in the series that started with the Firehouse Apartments, I have received differing, valuable opinions from longtime Pittsburgh residents about density of housing since I first joined the UDBS. Due to our sites 315 and 317 North Saint Clair Street sharing a lot line, the possibility to build two units as one duplex would drastically reduce the building cost. However, would a potential loss in sale value negate the savings? Although Miranda used RSMeans to estimate a difference in construction costs, I could not find any correlation on Zillow or Trulia on whether a duplex unit was worth less. To find out which building type was appropriate for these lots would mean investigating who the intended clientele was.

College students from upper-middle class backgrounds such as myself and other studio mates tend to see apartment living as being temporary since we have grown up in suburbs where home ownership is the norm. We live in apartment buildings after moving out of our parents’ homes and bounce from place to place until we can buy our own houses. Due to our upbringing, we also tend to assume that apartment dwellers of lower economic standing have no choice but to live there, that anybody would rather live in a single-family home. Because we don’t usually spend many years in the same building, we fail to establish connections with our neighbors and we assume the same is the case for all apartment dwellers. This is why we had perceived a duplex to be perhaps less valuable than two detached houses.

However, my friend at the Firehouse apartments told me that she preferred renting an apartment specifically because she didn’t have to leave the house to see her neighbors, and that maintenance was never something that she or her mother had to take care of themselves. It shows that even for some folks for whom home ownership may be deemed inappropriate for one reason or another, an apartment can still allow them to be part of a strong community. When tenants can afford to stay long-term in an apartment, and when the building is maintained well enough that residents are not inclined to leave, people in and around the building can function as one big, happy family. This was exactly what my neighbor in South Oakland said of my current apartment building during her childhood, before its decline into blight and then a slight escalation to low-quality student housing. Whether properties fall into the hands of for-profit landlords who are most focused on maximizing their bottom line, the effects extend beyond the walls of the buildings themselves.

In contrast, I also spoke to someone who advocated for single family housing. Tasha, the custodian for our floor in the studio, lives in Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar. Having gotten to know her well over the past year and a half, we sometimes talk about issues we are studying in the studio, and I have also met some of her family members and close friends. On night, she brought her spiritual parents to the studio after church to show them some of the information we had displayed on the walls. Her spiritual father and I ended up talking about the old RE_CON 01 housing proposal from May, and how we had explored splitting it into up to three separate units for low-income affordable rentals or disability-accessible modules. One of his responses was that in his experience, the people he knew overwhelmingly preferred to live in single-family homes. He used Urban Renewal and failed public housing such as Cabrini-Green as an extreme example to illustrate how, in his words, the mere idea of sharing a building with other households could lead some residents to feel as if they were “packed like rats.”

During the final studio review on December 3rd, one of our questions for Sarah Madia and other reviewers experienced in real estate was how buyers in the current Pittsburgh market valued duplex houses compared to single-family detached houses. Sarah replied with more information to add to the pot, which was that in Lawrenceville where lots are narrower, people see more value in rowhouses because the extra few feet inside the house can make a huge difference in the quality of the space. To share a wall with another household was a reasonable compromise for six feet of extra width.

[ionecoffman]

Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

Image above: Kiarra Boulware and her niece at Penn North, an addiction-recovery center in Baltimore

One morning this past September, Kiarra Boulware boarded the 26 bus to Baltimore’s Bon Secours Hospital, where she would seek help for the most urgent problem in her life: the 200-some excess pounds she carried on her 5-foot-2-inch frame.

To Kiarra, the weight sometimes felt like a great burden, and at other times like just another fact of life. She had survived a childhood marred by death, drugs, and violence. She had recently gained control over her addiction to alcohol, which, last summer, had brought her to a residential recovery center in the city’s Sandtown neighborhood, made famous by the Freddie Gray protests in 2015. But she still struggled with binge eating—so much so that she would eat entire plates of quesadillas or mozzarella sticks in minutes.

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As the bus rattled past rowhouses and corner stores, Kiarra told me she hadn’t yet received the Cpap breathing machine she needed for her sleep apnea. The extra fat seemed to constrict her airways while she slept, and a sleep study had shown that she stopped breathing 40 times an hour. She remembered one doctor saying, “I’m scared you’re going to die in your sleep.” In the haze of alcoholism, she’d never followed up on the test. Now doctors at Bon Secours were trying to order the machine for her, but insurance hurdles had gotten in the way.

Kiarra’s weight brought an assortment of old-person problems to her 27-year-old life: sleep apnea, diabetes, and menstrual dysregulation, which made her worry she would never have children. For a while, she’d ignored these issues. Day to day, her size mostly made it hard to shop for clothes. But the severity of her situation sank in when a diabetic friend had to have a toe amputated. Kiarra visited the woman in the hospital. She saw her tears and her red, bandaged foot, and resolved not to become an amputee herself.

Kiarra arrived at the hospital early and waited in the cafeteria. Bon Secours is one of several world-class hospitals in Baltimore. Another, Johns Hopkins Hospital, is in some respects the birthplace of modern American medicine, having invented everything from the medical residency to the surgical glove. But of course not even the best hospitals in America can keep you from getting sick in the first place.

It was lunchtime, but Kiarra didn’t have any cash—her job, working the front desk at the recovery center where she lived, paid a stipend of just $150 a week. When she did have money, she often sought comfort in fast food. But when her cash and food stamps ran out, she sometimes had what she called “hungry nights,” when she went to bed without having eaten anything all day.

When I’d first met Kiarra, a few months earlier, I’d been struck by how upbeat she seemed. Her recovery center—called Maryland Community Health Initiatives, but known in the neighborhood as Penn North—sits on a grimy street crowded with men selling drugs. Some of the center’s clients, fresh off their habits, seemed withdrawn, or even morose. Kiarra, though, had the bubbly demeanor of a student-council president.

She described the rough neighborhoods where she’d grown up as fun and “familylike.” She said that although neither of her parents had been very involved when she was a kid, her grandparents had provided a loving home. Regarding her diabetes, she told me she was “grateful that it’s reversible.” After finishing her addiction treatment, she planned to reenroll in college and move into a dorm.

Now, though, a much more anxious Kiarra sat before her doctor, a young white man named Tyler Gray, who began by advising Kiarra to get a Pap smear.

“Do we have to do it today?” she asked.

“Is there something you’re concerned about or nervous about?,” Gray asked.

Kiarra was nervous about a lot of things. She “deals by not dealing,” as she puts it, but lately she’d had to deal with so much. “Ever since the diabetes thing, I hate hearing I have something else,” she said softly, beginning to cry. “I’ve been fat for what seems like so long, and now I get all the fat problems.”

“I don’t want to be fat,” she added, “but I don’t know how to not be fat.”

Kiarra resolved to get healthy after visiting a diabetic friend in the hospital who’d had her toe amputated. Kiarra’s own diabetes is already causing her vision to blur. (Jared Soares)

Kiarra’s struggles with her weight are imbued with this sense, that getting thin is a mystery she might never solve, that diet secrets are literally secret. On a Sunday, she might diligently make a meal plan for the week, only to find herself reaching for Popeyes fried chicken by Wednesday. She blames herself for her poor health—as do many of the people I met in her community, where obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are ubiquitous. They said they’d made bad choices. They used food, and sometimes drugs, to soothe their pain. But these individual failings are only part of the picture.

In Baltimore, a 20-year gap in life expectancy exists between the city’s poor, largely African American neighborhoods and its wealthier, whiter areas. A baby born in Cheswolde, in Baltimore’s far-northwest corner, can expect to live until age 87. Nine miles away in Clifton-Berea, near where The Wire was filmed, the life expectancy is 67, roughly the same as that of Rwanda, and 12 years shorter than the American average. Similar disparities exist in other segregated cities, such as Philadelphia and Chicago.

These cities are among the most extreme examples of a national phenomenon: Across the United States, black people suffer disproportionately from some of the most devastating health problems, from cancer deaths and diabetes to maternal mortality and preterm births. Although the racial disparity in early death has narrowed in recent decades, black people have the life expectancy, nationwide, that white people had in the 1980s—about three years shorter than the current white life expectancy. African Americans face a greater risk of death at practically every stage of life.

Except in the case of a few specific ailments, such as nondiabetic kidney disease, scientists have largely failed to identify genetic differences that might explain racial health disparities. The major underlying causes, many scientists now believe, are social and environmental forces that affect African Americans more than most other groups.

To better understand how these forces work, I spent nearly a year reporting in Sandtown and other parts of Baltimore. What I found in Kiarra’s struggle was the story of how one person’s efforts to get better—imperfect as they may have been—were made vastly more difficult by a daunting series of obstacles. But it is also a bigger story, of how African Americans became stuck in profoundly unhealthy neighborhoods, and of how the legacy of racism can literally take years off their lives. Far from being a relic of the past, America’s racist and segregationist history continues to harm black people in the most intimate of ways—seeping into their lungs, their blood, even their DNA.

When Kiarra was a little girl, Baltimore was, as it is today, mired in violence, drugs, and poverty. In 1996, the city had the highest rate of drug-related emergency-room visits in the nation and one of the country’s highest homicide rates.

Related Event

On June 13, tune into Healing the Divide: An Atlantic Forum on Health Equity, where the author, Olga Khazan, will discuss health disparities in Baltimore.

With her father in and out of jail for robbery and drug dealing, Kiarra and her mother, three siblings, and three cousins piled into her grandmother’s home. It was a joyous but chaotic household. Kiarra describes her grandmother as “God’s assistant”—a deeply religious woman who, despite a house bursting with hungry mouths, would still make an extra dinner for the addicts on the block. Kiarra’s mother, meanwhile, was “the hood princess,” a woman who would do her hair just to go to the grocery store. She was a teen mom, like her own mother had been.

Many facets of Kiarra’s youth—the fact that her parents weren’t together, her father’s incarceration, the guns on the corners—are what researchers consider “adverse childhood experiences,” stressful events early in life that can cause health problems in adulthood. An abnormally large proportion of the children in Baltimore—nearly a third—have two or more aces. People with four or more aces are seven times as likely to be alcoholics as people with no aces, and twice as likely to have heart disease. One study found that six or more aces can cut life expectancy by as much as 20 years. Kiarra had at least six.

She and others I interviewed recall the inner-city Baltimore of their youth fondly. Everyone lived crammed together with siblings and cousins, but people looked out for one another; neighbors hosted back-to-school cookouts every year, and people took pride in their homes. Kiarra ran around with the other kids on the block until her grandma called her in each night at 8 o’clock. She made the honor roll in fifth grade and got to speak in front of the whole class. She read novels by Sister Souljah and wrote short stories in longhand.

Yet Kiarra also describes some jarring incidents. When she was 8, she heard a loud bop bop bop outside and ran out to find her stepbrother lying in the street, dead. One friend died of asthma in middle school; another went to jail, then hanged himself. (Other people I spoke with around Penn North and other recovery facilities had similarly traumatic experiences. It seemed like every second person I met told me they had been molested as a child, and even more said their family members had struggled with addiction.)

Kiarra told me she got pregnant by a friend when she was 12, and gave birth to a boy when she was 13. Within a year, the baby died unexpectedly, and Kiarra was so traumatized that she ended up spending more than a month in a psychiatric hospital. When she came home, her boyfriend physically and sexually abused her. He “slapped me so hard, I was seeing stars,” she said.

She took solace in eating, a common refuge for victims of abuse. One 2013 study of thousands of women found that those who had been severely physically or sexually abused as children had nearly double the risk of food addiction. Kiarra ate “everything, anything,” she said, “mostly bad foods, junk food, pizza,” along with chicken boxes—the fried-chicken-and-fries combos slung by Baltimore’s carryout joints.

At first, she thought the extra weight looked good on her. Then she started feeling fat. Eventually, she said, “it was like, Fuck it. I’m fat.” As her high-school graduation approached, she tried on the white gown she’d bought just weeks earlier and realized that it was already too tight.

Kiarra didn’t know many college-educated people, but she wanted to go to Spelman, a historically black college in Georgia, and join a sorority. Her family talked her out of applying, she said. Instead, she enrolled in one local college after another, but she kept dropping out, sometimes to help her siblings with their children and other times because she simply lost interest. After accumulating $30,000 in student loans, she had only a year’s worth of credits.

So Kiarra put college on hold and worked at Kmart and as a home health aide—solid jobs but, as she likes to say, “not my ceiling.” She longed for a purpose. Sometimes, she had an inkling that she was meant to be an important person; she would picture herself giving a speech to an auditorium full of people. But she remained depressed, stuck, and, increasingly, obese.

She began doing ecstasy, and, later, downing a pint of vodka a day. She remembers coming to her home-health-aide job drunk one time and leaving a patient on the toilet. “Did you forget me?” the woman asked, half an hour later. Kiarra broke down crying.

Soon after, she checked into Penn North for her first try at recovery. This past year’s attempt is her third.

Kiarra lives in Sandtown, the Baltimore neighborhood made famous by the Freddie Gray protests, where heart disease and cancer are the leading killers. (Jared Soares)

Sandtown is 97 percent black, and half of its families live in poverty. Its homicide rate is more than double that of the rest of the city, and last year about 8 percent of the deaths there were due to drug and alcohol overdose. Still, its top killers are heart disease and cancer, which African Americans nationwide are more likely to die from than other groups are.

The way African Americans became trapped in Baltimore’s poorest—and least healthy—neighborhoods mirrors their history in the ghettos of other major cities. It began with outright bans on their presence in certain neighborhoods in the early 1900s and continued through the 2000s, when policy makers, lenders, and fellow citizens employed subtler forms of discrimination.

In the early 1900s, blacks in Baltimore disproportionately suffered from tuberculosis, so much so that one area not far from Penn North was known as the “lung block.” In 1907, an investigator hired by local charities described what she saw in Meyer Court, a poor area in Baltimore. The contents of an outdoor toilet “were found streaming down the center of this narrow court to the street beyond,” she wrote. The smell within one house was “ ‘sickening’ … No provision of any kind is made for supplying the occupants of this court with water.” Yet one cause, the housing investigator concluded, was the residents’ “low standards and absence of ideals.”

When blacks tried to flee to better areas, some had their windows smashed and their steps smeared with tar. In 1910, a Yale-educated black lawyer named George McMechen moved into a house in a white neighborhood, and Baltimore reacted by adopting a segregation ordinance that The New York Times called “the most pronounced ‘Jim Crow’ measure on record.” Later, neighborhood associations urged homeowners to sign covenants promising never to sell to African Americans.

For much of the 20th century, the Federal Housing Administration declined to insure mortgages for blacks, who instead had to buy homes by signing contracts with speculators who demanded payments that, in many cases, amounted to most of the buyer’s income. (As a result, many black families never reaped the gains of homeownership—a key source of Americans’ wealth.) Housing discrimination persisted well beyond the Jim Crow years, as neighborhood associations rejected proposals to build low-income housing in affluent suburbs. In the 1990s, house flippers would buy up homes in Baltimore’s predominantly black neighborhoods and resell them to unsuspecting first-time home buyers at inflated prices by using falsified documents. The subsequent foreclosures are a major reason so many properties in the city sit vacant today.

Some of Baltimore’s rowhouses are so long-forsaken, they have trees growing through the windows. These dilapidated homes are in themselves harmful to people’s health. Neighborhoods with poorly maintained houses or a large number of abandoned properties, for instance, face a high risk of mouse infestation. Every year, more than 5,000 Baltimore children go to the emergency room for an asthma attack—and according to research from Johns Hopkins, mouse allergen is the biggest environmental factor in those attacks.

The allergen, found in mouse urine, travels through the air on dust, and Johns Hopkins researchers have found high levels of it on most of the beds of poor Baltimore kids they have tested. When kids inhale the allergen, it can spark inflammation and mucus buildup in their lungs, making them cough and wheeze. These attacks can cause long-term harm: Children with asthma are more likely to be obese and in overall poorer health as adults. Getting rid of the mice requires sealing up cracks and holes in the house—a process that can cost thousands of dollars, given the state of many Baltimore homes.

The mice, of course, are just one symptom of the widespread neglect that can set in once neighborhoods become as segregated as Baltimore’s are. One study estimated that, in the year 2000, racial segregation caused 176,000 deaths—about as many as were caused by strokes.

All summer, Penn North’s aging air conditioners strained against the soupy heat outside. For Kiarra, the first few months at the recovery center felt like boot camp. The staff woke the residents before 7 a.m., even if they didn’t have anywhere in particular to be. Kiarra’s days were packed with therapies: acupuncture in the mornings, meant to help reduce cravings; individual meetings with peer counselors; Narcotics Anonymous sessions, in which dozens of strangers slumped on metal folding chairs and told stories of past drug binges.

Once a week, Kiarra would leave her post at the front desk and walk across an empty playground for an appointment with her psychotherapist, Ms. Bea (who asked that I not use her full name). Kiarra would climb the steep, narrow staircase of Penn North’s clinical building, then stop at the landing to catch her breath.

Ms. Bea’s goal was to help Kiarra understand how her substance abuse, her weight, and her difficult childhood were interconnected. Like many young people in Baltimore, Kiarra had spent her life trying to attain ordinary things—love, respect—that seemed always to skid beyond her grasp. She wanted male attention, but then she got pregnant. The baby made her happy, but the baby died. Her siblings started having kids and she loved them, but she was jealous. She fell into a deep-sink depression. She’d eat a second dinner, then get so drunk that she’d scream at her friends. She’d realize that she was going to wake up to a blistering hangover and would keep drinking. It was coming anyway, so why not? “Struggle days,” she called these times.

During one appointment in August, Kiarra told Ms. Bea that she had been attending Overeaters Anonymous meetings by phone. Something another member had shared, about why people are sometimes reluctant to shed weight, had stuck with her. “He was saying when you lose the fat, you lose a part of you,” Kiarra recalled.

A few years earlier, she had founded a club for plus-size women called Beautiful Beyond Weight, with some of her best friends. The goal was to help overweight women feel better about themselves. They put on fashion shows that she described as “Beyoncé big, but on a Christina Aguilera budget.” She worried that if she lost too much weight, the other girls in the club would think she was a hypocrite. She decided she would aim to be “slim-thicc”—not too skinny.

“So imagine if you were a size 14,” Ms. Bea said. “What would be happening here—with you?”

Ms. Bea was trying to help Kiarra see how she sometimes uses her size as a form of protection, a way of making her feel invisible to men, so that she could eventually work through her fear.

In Kiarra’s experience, disappearing could be useful. She told me that once, when she was 17, before she had gotten so big, she met a guy in an online chat room. She went over to his place, where they watched TV and started having sex. But then—the skid—his three friends barged into the room and raped her. She fled, half-dressed, as soon as she could.

“Yeah,” Kiarra said, envisioning herself many sizes smaller. “I wouldn’t be able to take it.”

Kiarra has trouble concentrating sometimes, and she thinks the reason might be that she and her brother were exposed to lead from old paint. When Kiarra was 6, her grandmother heard that a girl living in another property owned by the same landlord had been hospitalized. She took Kiarra to get tested. The results showed that the concentration of lead in her blood was more than six times the level the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers elevated—an amount that can irreversibly lower IQ and reduce attention span. Kiarra, too, was hospitalized, for a month.

Scientists and industry experts knew in the 19th century that lead paint was dangerous. “Lead is a merciless poison,” an executive with a Michigan lead-paint company admitted in a book in 1892. It “gradually affects the nerves and organs of circulation to such a degree that it is next to impossible to restore them to their normal condition.” But as late as the 1940s and ’50s, trade groups representing companies that made lead products, including the Lead Industries Association, promoted the use of lead paint in homes and successfully lobbied for the repeal of restrictions on that use. Lead-paint companies published coloring books and advised their salesmen to “not forget the children—some day they may be customers.” According to The Baltimore Sun, a study in 1956 found that lead-poisoned children in the slums of Baltimore had six times as much lead in their systems as severely exposed workers who handled lead for a living.

In speeches and publications, Lead Industries Association officials cast childhood lead poisoning as vanishingly rare. When they did acknowledge the problem, they blamed “slum” children for chewing on wood surfaces—“gnaw-ledge,” as Manfred Bowditch, the group’s health-and-safety director, called it—and their “ignorant parents” for allowing them to do so. In a letter to the Baltimore health department, Bowditch called the lead-poisoned toddlers “little human rodents.”

Even after stricter regulations came along, landlords in segregated neighborhoods—as well as the city’s own public-housing agency—neglected properties, allowing old paint to chip and leaded dust to accumulate. Some landlords, seeking to avoid the expense of renovating homes and the risk of tenant lawsuits, refused to rent to families with children, since they would face the greatest risk from lead exposure. Poor families feared that if they complained about lead, they might be evicted.

Partly because of Maryland’s more rigorous screening, the state’s lead-poisoning rate for children was 15 times the national average in the ’90s; the majority of the poisoned children lived in the poor areas of Baltimore. In some neighborhoods, 70 percent of children had been exposed to lead. The city’s under-resourced agencies failed to address the problem. Clogged by landlords who hid behind shell companies, Baltimore’s lead-paint enforcement system had ground to a halt by the time Kiarra was poisoned. According to Tapping Into The Wire, a book co-authored by Peter L. Beilenson, the city’s former health commissioner, Baltimore didn’t bring a single lead-paint enforcement action against landlords in the ’90s. (A subsequent crackdown on landlords has lowered lead-poisoning rates dramatically.)

When Kiarra was 14, her family sued their landlord for damages, but their lawyer dropped the case because the landlord claimed he had no money and no insurance with which to compensate them. Kiarra remembers her grandmother not wanting to give up, demanding of the lawyer, “What do you mean there’s nothing you can do?”—only to get lost in a tangle of legal rules she didn’t fully understand.

On a hot Saturday this past August, Kiarra brought her nieces with her to work and corralled them in the front office. She was babysitting that day, and staffing was short at the center. The girls climbed restlessly on the stained office chairs and under the tables.

Kiarra is close with her family. She spends much of her free time texting her favorite sisters on her cracked cellphone, and she talks to her grandmother every few days. Any familial strife upsets her deeply: She can vividly recount a long list of times her mother disappointed her. Then again, sometimes she feels like she’s the one who has let everyone down, with all her drinking and dropping out.

Near the end of the day, Kiarra’s cellphone rang. It was her father, calling to yell at her because she hadn’t come to see him recently. “I’ve been busy,” Kiarra told him.

When Kiarra was little, and when her father wasn’t incarcerated, he had provided for his children—unlike many dads she knew. She’d sought his approval by researching Islam, his religion, and trying to reconcile it with the strict Christianity of her grandmother’s home. A few years ago, she tried to impress him by joining a tough-seeming social club that turned out to be too much like a gang. (It “wasn’t a good fit,” she told me.)

On some level, she still respected her father. But he had an explosive personality and struggled with depression and addiction. Kiarra told me he taught her what men are supposed to be: fierce protectors who sometimes turn their wrath on the women in their lives.

Kiarra usually tried to see her father’s outbursts as a cry for help. But today, she decided to confront him. Their conversation escalated as they accused each other of failing at fatherhood and daughterhood.

“How many of my plays have you been to?,” Kiarra demanded.

Her father launched into a tirade. “I will come for your fucking dumb ass!,” I overheard him yell at one point. “You going to respect me!”

“Respect works both ways,” Kiarra said. “I’m not that little girl that’s gonna let you slap the shit out of me.”

What bothered Kiarra most was that her father had never hit his other daughter that way, so why her? Why did it feel like he was always rejecting her? (Her father later confirmed that he had hit her as a child, saying, “Discipline is a must, whatever form you choose.”)

As he continued screaming—“I’m gonna put your fuckin’ head in the dirt”—Kiarra’s eyes glazed over. “Death gotta be better than here,” she said.

She hung up, then wiped away tears. Just today, he had called her at 12:30 a.m., 3:48 a.m., 7:47 a.m., 11:24 a.m., 3:33 p.m., and 4:44 p.m. One time when she didn’t answer the phone, Kiarra said, he showed up in person at Penn North.

Her father called back, rambling less coherently than before. “How much of my life did you spend incarcerated?,” Kiarra asked him. When she was little, she would go out hustling with him. “I was 14 fucking years old seeing dead fucking bodies, and you’re talking about where the fuck did this drinking shit come from?”

Kiarra hung up, this time for good. Then she wept. “As long as I’m fucked up, this man is cool, but as soon as I decide I want to get my fucking life together it’s like …” Her voice trailed off. She turned and told me she wanted to go to McDonald’s. “McDonald’s is killing me,” she said, “but it’s a special treat.”

She ordered her usual—a McDouble and a McChicken, along with a sweet tea—and waited silently amid the beeping of the cash registers.

Most of the people I met at Penn North were optimistic and surrounded by fiercely loyal friends. But their lives also seemed, like Kiarra’s, unrelentingly stressful. Between the hugs and handshakes, I heard a lot of trepidation. I have to move again … Where will I go? Will I get this job at Target? Will I ever walk again? Will I get to eat today?

Research shows that this kind of day-in, day-out worry can ravage a person’s health. Certain stressful experiences—such as living in a disordered, impoverished neighborhood—are associated with a shortening of the telomeres, structures that sit on the tips of our chromosomes, which are bundles of DNA inside our cells. Often compared to the plastic caps on the ends of shoelaces, telomeres keep chromosomes from falling apart. They can also be a measure of how much a body has been ground down by life.

Some researchers think stress shrinks telomeres, until they get so short that the cell dies, hastening the onset of disease. Different kinds of prolonged emotional strain can affect telomeres. In one study, mothers who had high stress levels had telomeres that were as short as those of a person about a decade older. Another study found that children who spent part of their childhood in Romanian orphanages had telomeres that shortened rapidly.

Arline T. Geronimus, an expert on health disparities at the University of Michigan, has found that African Americans have more stress-related wear and tear in their bodies than white people do, and the difference widens with age. By measuring telomere length in hundreds of women, Geronimus estimated that black women were, biologically, about seven and a half years older than white women of the same age.

Unrelenting stress also affects our daily behaviors: Stress causes some people to eat more, especially calorically dense foods, and to sleep less. On average, African Americans get about 40 minutes less sleep each night than white people do. Among women in one recent study, poor sleep alone explained more than half the racial disparity in cardiovascular-disease risk.

Living in a dangerous neighborhood like Sandtown requires a vigilance that can flood the body with adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones are supposed to kick in only long enough for us to get away from an immediate threat. If they trickle through us constantly, they can raise the risk of heart disease and compromise the body’s immune system.

These kinds of changes in body chemistry aren’t limited to people living in poverty. Even well-off black people face daily racial discrimination, which can have many of the same biological effects as unsafe streets. Thomas LaVeist, the dean of Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, has found, for example, that even among people earning $175,000 a year or more, blacks are more likely to suffer from certain diseases than whites are.

In an emerging field of research, scientists have linked stress, including from prejudice, to compounds called methyl groups attaching to our genes, like snowflakes sticking to a tree branch. These methyl groups can cause genes to turn on or off, setting disease patterns in motion. Recently, a study linked racial discrimination to changes in methylation on genes that affect schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and asthma.

Several studies also show that experiencing racism might be part of the reason black women are about 50 percent more likely than white women to have premature babies and about twice as likely to have low-birth-weight babies. Researchers think the stress they experience might cause the body to go into labor too soon or to mount an immune attack against the fetus. This disparity, too, does not appear to be genetic: Black women from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are less likely to have preterm births than African American women are, possibly because they’ve spent less time living in America’s racist environment.

Kiarra Boulware (Jared Soares)

Throughout the fall, Kiarra kept her doctor appointments, and she began working out at the small gym at Penn North, placing a picture of Chrissy Lampkin, the curvaceous girlfriend of the rapper Jim Jones, on her treadmill as motivation.

But wasn’t losing much weight. Like most Americans, she got advice from her friends on what to eat—but that advice at times proved confusing and contradictory. She tried a boiled-egg diet, which left her with hunger pangs and a lot of leftover eggs in the fridge. She went seven days without meat but wound up eating more starches, which sent her blood sugar soaring.

One bright day in late September, Kiarra returned to Bon Secours to see Ebony Hicks, a behavioral-health consultant who, like Kiarra’s doctor, works through Health Care for the Homeless, a Baltimore nonprofit that cares for the very poor. Hicks began by asking Kiarra what her goal was. Kiarra said getting down to an even 200 pounds “would be awesome.” Her weight remained, stubbornly, about 150 pounds higher than that. But she stayed optimistic, writing down Hicks’s aphorisms about needing to be patient and not expecting immediate results—“Anything overnight usually lasts about a night!”—in a notebook she’d brought with her.

Gently, Hicks asked Kiarra what she had eaten that day.

“French fries,” Kiarra said.

“All you’ve had is french fries?,” Hicks asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

It was 3:30 in the afternoon.

They walked to a room across the hall, and Kiarra stepped onto a scale.

“I gained two pounds,” she said quickly, “so now I’m depressed. I eat too much.”

“We have to work on getting you more regularly eating throughout the day,” Hicks said.

Kiarra asked whether “detox tea,” something she’d heard about from a friend, was healthy.

“You can detox with lots of fiber-filled vegetables,” Hicks said.

“What’s that?,” Kiarra asked.

Hicks pulled up a web page describing fruits and vegetables that contain fiber. She listed them off one by one.

Would Kiarra eat avocados?

No.

Coconut? Also no.

“I do eat berries,” Kiarra said. “Let’s put that down.”
Kiarra doesn’t know why she dislikes so many fruits and vegetables. Her grandmother cooked healthy meals, putting turkey in big pots of greens for flavor. She had a rule that you could never leave the table without eating your vegetables. Kiarra would fall asleep at the table.

Hicks gamely pressed on. “Peas? You like peas?”

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Kiarra said, grimacing.

“Chickpeas,” Hicks offered. “You ever ate hummus?”

“What is hummus?”

Fried food has long been Kiarra’s legal high—cheap, easily acquired, something to brighten the gloomiest day. It is also one of the few luxuries around.

Predominantly black neighborhoods tend to become what researchers call “food swamps,” or areas where fast-food joints outnumber healthier options. (Food deserts, by contrast, simply lack grocery stores.) One study in New York found that as the number of African Americans who lived in a given area increased, so did the distance to the nearest clothing store, pharmacy, electronics store, office-supply store. Meanwhile, one type of establishment drew nearer: fast-food restaurants.

That’s not a coincidence. After the riots of the 1960s, the federal government began promoting the growth of small businesses in minority neighborhoods as a way to ease racial tensions. “What we need is to get private enterprise into the ghetto, and put the people of the ghetto into private enterprises,” President Richard Nixon said around the time he created the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, in 1969. As Chin Jou, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, describes in her book, Supersizing Urban America, fast-food companies were some of the most eager entrants into this “ghetto” market.

Fast-food restaurants spent the next few decades “rushing into urban markets,” as one Detroit News report put it, seeking out these areas’ “untapped labor force” and “concentrated audience.” In the 1990s, the federal government gave fast-food restaurants financial incentives to open locations in inner cities, including in Baltimore. The urban expansion made business sense. “The ethnic population is better for us than the general market,” Sidney Feltenstein, Burger King’s executive vice president of brand strategy, explained to the Miami Herald in 1992. “They tend to have larger families, and that means larger checks.” (Supermarket chains didn’t share this enthusiasm; in part because the widespread use of food stamps causes an uneven flow of customers throughout the month, they have largely avoided expanding in poor areas.)

Fast-food executives looked for ways to entice black customers. Burger King made ads featuring Shaft. KFC redecorated locations in cities like Baltimore to cater to stereotypically black tastes, and piped “rap, rhythm and blues, and soul music” into the restaurants, Jou writes. “Employees were given new Afrocentric uniforms consisting of kente cloth dashikis.” A study from 2005 found that TV programs aimed at African Americans feature more fast-food advertisements than other shows do, as well as more commercials for soda and candy. Black children today see twice as many soda and candy ads as white children do.

The marketing and franchising onslaught worked, and the diets of low-income people changed dramatically. Before the rise of fast food and processed foods, many low-income black families grew their own food and ate lots of grains and beans. In 1965, one study found, poor and middle-income blacks ate healthier—though often more meager—diets than rich whites did. But over the next few decades, the price of meat, junk food, and simple carbohydrates plummeted, while the price of vegetables rose. By the mid-’90s, 28 percent of African Americans were considered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to have a “poor” diet, compared with just 16 percent of whites.

At Carver Vocational-Technical High School, which Kiarra and Freddie Gray attended at the same time, only about a third of students go on to enroll in college—yet another factor that could be contributing to the area’s low life expectancy, given that college graduates outlive high-school dropouts in every racial category.

One reason college graduates live longer, researchers believe, is that education endows people with the sense that they control their own destiny. Well-educated people seek out more nutritional information because they’ve been told they can achieve anything—why not perfect health, too?

Kiarra, by contrast, wasn’t yet sure what she could accomplish. She wanted to live up to an image in her mind of a “fly, crazy, daring, dream-chasing girl,” but she cycled between getting excited about new possibilities and being flattened by setbacks. Sometimes, she would dream of turning Beautiful Beyond Weight into a business—one that would sell T-shirts and caps with empowering messages for plus-size women. But she wasn’t really sure how to do that.

When Kiarra felt especially adrift, she would visit Steve Dixon, Penn North’s director, in his tiny office at the end of the hall, and ask him for advice on finding her purpose. He would tell her to pray and meditate. “When you pray, it’s like you’re talking to God,” Kiarra told me once. “But when you meditate, it’s God talking to you.”

Kiarra sometimes asks Steve Dixon, the director of Penn North, for advice on how to find her purpose in life. (Jared Soares)

In November, some combination of prayer, meditation, and research led Kiarra to enroll in a medical-assistant training program. The class added another $7,000 to her student-loan debt, but Kiarra seemed to thrive in it, and a few weeks before Christmas, she was excitedly planning her post–Penn North life. Once she had her medical-assistant certificate in hand, she would move to Philadelphia, get a job at Temple University, and take classes to become a registered nurse. Eventually, she hoped to become a nursing professor. That future held everything she wanted: helping people, being a leader, making her own money, having her own place.

Feeling chipper, she decided to browse the wigs at a nearby store, stroking the hairpieces and whispering to the best ones that she would be back for them on payday. She had a new reason to get dolled up: a truck driver, “fine as wine” and with no kids—and, accordingly, no messy entanglement with another woman. She tried to boss him around, but he told her to mind her own business, and she kind of liked that. His birthday was approaching, and she wanted to take him someplace fancy. She would wear a black dress, and he would wear a black suit.

To help pay for everything, Kiarra decided to register as a Lyft driver. All that was required was a $250 deposit; she began calling around to different relatives to raise the money.

Twenty-seventeen, she thought, had been her best year yet.

A few weeks later, a bitter cold settled through the East Coast, and Kiarra’s sunny mood had faded. Things had ended with the truck driver over some mean Facebook posts and the fact that he’d lied to her about not having kids. She was also reconsidering her plans for the future, now thinking that instead of setting her sights on Temple, she should focus on graduating and finding a job—any job—that would pay well enough and provide insurance that would cover her extensive health-care needs. Her grandmother said driving for Lyft in Baltimore was too dangerous. She might not move to Philly after all.

But a new opportunity presented itself. Because of a change in her insurance plan, Kiarra had to switch doctors. Right away, her new doctor asked her whether she had considered bariatric surgery. Kiarra said she was scared of the complications, such as digestive problems and infections, but the doctor reassured her that complications are rare. She was interested in the gastric sleeve, a procedure that would dramatically reduce the size of her stomach, causing hormonal changes that would help her lose much of her body fat.

Kiarra still felt conflicted about losing her identity as an overweight woman. She couldn’t relate to the people on the Overeaters Anonymous calls who said they hated their bodies. She liked hers. “People say, ‘Hey, you’re fat,’ ” she said. “And I’m like, ‘That’s obvious.’ ” But she was motivated by her diabetes—which was already causing her vision to blur and her feet to tingle—along with the looming threat of other “fat diseases,” as she called them, frightening ones like heart failure. She figured that if she really wanted to have a successful plus-size clothing brand, she’d at least have to live long enough to see it happen.

She decided on the spot to go forward with the surgery, worried that she might change her mind otherwise. She signed up for the mandatory pre-op classes that prepare participants to eat just half a cup of food for every meal, at least initially, after the surgery. Her mother was nervous, but her sisters were all for it. Her grandmother told her to put it in God’s hands.

Earlier that month, Kiarra had organized a birthday party for her 2-year-old niece, Brooklynn, in Penn North’s community room, decking out the dingy yellow walls with pink balloons and ribbons. Within a few weeks, it was decided that Kiarra would gain custody of Brooklynn for a while so that Kiarra’s sister could go back to get her high-school diploma.

Kiarra was happy with this arrangement—she already sometimes referred to Brooklynn as her “daughter-girl”—and she began to see Brooklynn as a reason to stay on track. Juggling coursework and single parenthood exhausted her at times, but she wanted to be the successful role model for Brooklynn that she never had herself. In the chatty toddler who loved dress-up and Moana, Kiarra had found, if not her purpose, at least a purpose. “It feels like the Earth is full, you know?” she told me one day this spring.

Her new status as the child’s guardian meant that her stay at Penn North could be extended, through some alchemy of program definitions, for nearly another year. Staying on would mean cheap housing for Kiarra and Brooklynn, two people who desperately needed it.

With that settled, Kiarra turned her attention to the six-month process of hoop-jumping that was required to qualify for the gastric-sleeve surgery. The first pre-op class was an hour and a half long and took place at a hospital 30 minutes from Penn North. Kiarra thought the time commitment seemed excessive; with a smirk, she wondered aloud why the doctors couldn’t just tell her and the other patients, “Y’all fat. We gonna cut you up.”

But the doctors needed Kiarra to understand that the surgery was not something to take lightly. To qualify, she would have to get her sleep apnea and diabetes under control. She would have to keep a food journal, submit to behavioral evaluations, write an essay explaining why she no longer wanted to be morbidly obese. For the rest of her life, she’d need to wait 30 minutes between eating a meal and drinking a beverage. When one of Kiarra’s classmates said that after the surgery, eating too much would cause you to get violently sick for an hour, Kiarra recoiled a little.

All of the rules and obligations seemed more intense than Kiarra had expected. “Six months, you’re going on like 16 appointments,” she said. “Whoo, that’s a lot.” Given all she had to contend with, I wondered whether she would end up meeting the requirements—and, given the stakes, what might happen to her if she didn’t.

Tony Conn, a Penn North staffer with whom Kiarra is close, calls her a “wonderful, brilliant person.” Early on in my reporting, he told me her biggest flaw is that she sometimes doesn’t see things through to the end. “As soon as [something] looks like it’s gonna come to light, she’s like, ‘Okay, I did that. So let’s find something else,’ ” he said.

But lately, Kiarra had shown a new sense of calm and dedication. One day while she worked the front desk, an older man flirted with her as he signed the attendance sheet.

“When you look in the mirror,” he said, “and see how beautiful you are, what do you say to yourself?”

“We’ve come a long way,” she said quietly. “Let’s stay there.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

[econobitch]

Since he was a boy he has hated black men. A bitter hatred of black men that boiled in his mind and consumed him. Then last week, apparently, he decided to kill them. This was the mind-set investigators say they gathered of James Harris Jackson, a morose and seemingly directionless 28-year-old white man who lived in Baltimore and had been having trouble getting rooted since leaving the Army. He had registered few obvious traces of who he was and what he stood for. Those who intersected with him found him to be a disagreeable and solitary figure who waved away contact with others. By all accounts, Timothy Caughman, 66, was a benevolent man content with an unassuming life. He lived in a former single room occupancy residence that had been his longtime home. The son of a home health care aide and a pastor, he had worked in antipoverty programs in Queens. Religion and philosophy were constants in his conversations over unhurried meals of turkey bacon and grits at local diners. In recent years, he had caught the familiar New York infatuation with celebrities and delighted in collecting their autographs and pictures. On St. Patrick’s Day, Mr. Jackson boarded a bus in Washington and rode it to New York. There were black men everywhere, and he told investigators he contemplated going elsewhere, but settled on New York because of the flood of media there. His goal was to draw the widest possible attention to his murderous plan. He made his statement of what hate looks like late on Monday night when the authorities said he pulled out a sword and fatally stabbed Mr. Caughman. He had been scavenging for cans in Midtown Manhattan around the corner from his home. Presumably, Mr. Jackson had little intention of getting away with it. Just after midnight on Wednesday, he surrendered to the police and took responsibility for the murder. He was arraigned on Thursday in Supreme Court in Manhattan and charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime. He was ordered held without bail. The attack comes at a particularly anxious moment in America as hate crimes are on the rise in the country and especially in New York City. Both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo forcefully condemned the killing. At the arraignment, Joan Illuzzi, the prosecutor, said that Mr. Jackson was particularly offended by black men who were with white women. She told the judge that additional charges may be filed, including murder in the first degree, “as this is an act, most likely, of terrorism.” Dressed in a Tyvek suit, handcuffed and his legs in shackles, Mr. Jackson sneered several times as the charges were read. At one point, he gazed at the ceiling as though bored. He did not enter a plea. Sam Talkin, Mr. Jackson’s defense lawyer, declined to comment on the specifics of the case. “We just need for the dust to settle,” he said. If the information put forth by the authorities is accurate, he added, they will have to deal with Mr. Jackson’s “obvious psychological issues.” The investigation into Mr. Jackson is still in its early stages and much remains unknown. But pieces of his life — and of the man he is accused of killing — were beginning to come together. Thus far, investigators have not linked Mr. Jackson to any white supremacy or hate group. Their sense is that he’s a discontent, not unlike many others who carry out senseless killings. But he was blunt about his prejudices when questioned by detectives. According to a law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity since the investigation is continuing, “He told the cops, ‘I’ve hated black men since I was a kid. I’ve had these feelings since I was a young person. I hate black men.’” Mr. Jackson told detectives, according to the official, that his intention was to keep on killing, the first attack being a springboard. At one point during his interrogation, he said he thought about grabbing a police officer’s gun and using it to shoot others. Investigators have not yet determined the origins of this hate. Mr. Jackson told them that he had written his beliefs down and was going to deliver his writings to The New York Times. “He said, ‘Listen, I wrote this all down, it’s in my laptop,’” the law enforcement official said. He apparently grew up in Baltimore. In 2007, he graduated from the Friends School of Baltimore, a small and prestigious Quaker day school. Matt Micciche, the head of school, said the campus community was “shocked and saddened by the news of this horrific attack.” “Our school — and the Religious Society of Friends — has a long history of commitment to diversity, racial equality, social justice and nonviolence,” Mr. Micciche said in a statement. “The entire Friends School community extends our deepest sympathy to the family and friends of Timothy Caughman.” In March 2009, Mr. Jackson joined the Army and served at various locations in the United States, working in military intelligence. He was deployed to Afghanistan between December 2010 and November 2011. Afterward, he was stationed in Baumholder, Germany, before being discharged in August 2012, when his rank was specialist. During his service, the Army said, he received several awards. It’s unclear what he did after leaving the Army, though he seemed lost. In the spring of 2015, he was nearly evicted from an apartment building in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood for falling behind on his rent, according to Marcus Dagan, who was filling in then as the building’s manager. Speaking by phone from Omaha, where he now lives, Mr. Dagan said Mr. Jackson occupied a one-bedroom apartment and was at least six months in arrears. Mr. Dagan described him as a “slob” and a “deadbeat,” who refused to let anyone inside his apartment and never engaged in the building’s social atmosphere. “He turned into the tenant from hell,” Mr. Dagan said. He began eviction proceedings, but Mr. Jackson left before they were completed. The apartment, Mr. Dagan said, was the most disgusting thing the person hired to clean it had ever seen. “He definitely had some issues of some kind,” Mr. Dagan said. “How do you describe it? He was off.” Yet he said he had never heard Mr. Jackson say anything that could be construed as racist. “Never had an intimation of that,” he said. “When you shake hands with somebody you can guess the character,” he said. “In his case, you’d get like three fingers and a cold fish.” Mr. Jackson’s most recent address was a three-story house wedged into a narrow street lined with rowhouses in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore, just west of Johns Hopkins University, a historic area that is filled with restaurants and shops. No one answered the door at the home on Thursday. A patrol car from the Baltimore Police Department was posted outside. Members of Mr. Jackson’s family appeared to be together in his parents’ home in a gated community several miles away. On Thursday afternoon, his family issued a brief statement through a lawyer: “Our family is shocked, horrified and heartbroken by this tragedy. We extend our prayers and condolences to the family of Timothy Caughman. We have no further comments at this time and ask that our privacy be respected.” After Mr. Jackson got to New York last Friday, he checked into the Hotel at Times Square on West 46th Street, using an assumed name. As far as the police know, he attacked no one else during those first days. As best they can tell, he was hunting. His weapon was a sword, and he carried two smaller knives. From surveillance cameras, investigators managed to track some of his movements, though there are gaps. In one video, he can be seen tailing a black man. When detectives questioned Mr. Jackson, they said he acknowledged zeroing in on that man but didn’t strike because there were too many people around. Late Monday evening, he found a target on a Midtown street corner. Timothy Caughman was bent over some garbage. Like many New Yorkers living spare lives in their retirement years, Mr. Caughman was once someone else, his identity not defined by empty pockets and a modest address. He was born in Jamaica, Queens, and grew up in a comfortable apartment in the South Jamaica Houses. One of his cousins said the family has roots in Georgia dating back to the 1700s when their ancestors were first brought to America as slaves. He was the son of Tula Caughman, a home health care aide for wealthy residents of nearby Jamaica Estates, and William Caughman, the pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church. Growing up, he was called Hard Rock, for he knew his way around a boxing ring — and a street fight. “He was known in the community as not to be someone who started a fight, but if you started it, he finished it,” said one of his cousins. According to Seth Peek, another cousin, Mr. Caughman earned an associate degree at Brooklyn College and went on to further schooling in Staten Island. For several years in Queens, Mr. Caughman ran a division of the Neighborhood Youth Corps, a federal antipoverty program designed to provide part-time jobs to poor youths. “He probably gave out about two or three thousand jobs to people in the community,” said one of his cousins. He also freely contributed homespun advice on how to excel: “‘If you know that someone is going to be somewhere, and you want to meet them, you got to be there an hour early,’” the cousin recalled Mr. Caughman instructing him. Later, he held a succession of jobs, including as a concert promoter. He was particularly proud of booking an early gig by Earth Wind & Fire, before they attained fame, his cousin said. For the last 20 years, he lived in a room at the Barbour Hotel on West 36th Street that now houses formerly homeless people transitioning to permanent housing. Svein Jorgensen, the chief executive of Praxis Housing Initiatives, which manages the Barbour, said that of the 100-odd residents, Mr. Caughman was one of the few who were actually permanent tenants and not part of the transient program. In reports of the murder, Mr. Caughman was incorrectly assumed to be homeless. “He was an extremely gracious individual and respectful of his neighbors,” Mr. Jorgensen said. He read avidly, and mainly kept to himself. He was a recycler of redeemables, his currency for his modest wants. His relatives said he viewed this as an entrepreneurial undertaking, a way to keep active and help pay for his room. He did maintain a social media presence. He had a Twitter account, and in his profile he defined himself as a can and bottle recycler, autograph collector and a good businessman. He said he aspired to visit California. On his Twitter feed, sandwiched between posts about celebrity culture, are links to articles about preventing cholesterol in babies and others about autism, echoing his broad interests. Among those aware of his fandom is Shari Headley, an actress who most recently played a district attorney on Tyler Perry’s “The Haves and the Have-nots” television soap opera. She held a live chat on Twitter every Tuesday, and she said Mr. Caughman rarely missed one. One day he requested a photo of her, and she mailed him an autographed photo. “What kind of world are we living in right now?” she said, overcome with emotion. “What a harmless guy. He spends his days just wanting to take pictures with celebrities.” When Ms. Headley’s character on “The Haves and the Have-nots” was killed off recently, she said Mr. Caughman was downcast, wishing it weren’t true. When her agent told her Mr. Caughman had been stabbed, she hoped the same thing. Late Monday evening, as Mr. Caughman rooted through trash on Ninth Avenue, near his home, a white man in a dark coat approached him from behind. He said nothing. The man withdrew a sword from beneath his coat. A woman heard commotion, but didn’t realize what was actually happening and she ran off. But she told detectives she heard Mr. Caughman say, “Why are you doing this? What are you doing?”

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New top story from Time: As Washington D.C. Weighs Reopening, African Americans in the Nation’s Capital Brace for the Worst

It’s just past 7 a.m. as Tavis Clinton’s sanitation truck pulls to a stop in an alley in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Petworth, its streets lined by aging rowhouses and the occasional glass-and-metal gentrified upstart apartment complex. The 41-year-old sanitation crew chief, who like the other members of his three-man team is African American, navigates the massive orange city truck through the narrow lanes, his mouth covered in a star-spangled bandana. His colleagues jump off, grab a couple of wheeled bins and swing them in a practiced arc onto a mechanized arm that tips the refuse into the truck. The team then skates the bins back behind the still-quiet homes and sprints to the next set, panting through their face masks in the former swampland’s late spring heat.

Sanitation workers like Clinton show up before dawn to start their 6am shifts, wrapping themselves in masks, gloves, neon jackets and vests, and a take-no-prisoners esprit de corps to get through exhausting shifts removing the locked-down city’s refuse. The streets have been emptier but the trash is heavier with so many staying at home during the coronavirus pandemic. The three-man crews pack into the truck’s cab, where no social distancing is possible. When Clinton gets home to his wife and five children, he sprays his clothes his disinfectant and then scrubs hard in the shower before going anywhere near them.

“It’s tough,” Clinton says. “I just have to trust in my crew that once they leave work, they are home and they’re not out socializing, because it’s all our health at once.”

Clinton and his crew are part of the essential workforce that has kept America’s capital running during the pandemic, most of which are African American, according to the city. It’s one of the reasons officials say the African American community here has been so hard hit by COVID-19: While African Americans make up nearly 47% of the District of Columbia’s population, and account for 46% of the city’s COVID-19 cases, they also account for more than 76% of the city’s deaths.

Nate Palmer for TIMETavis Clinton disinfects his truck before beginning his route on May 22.

Now, as the District’s officials weigh reopening non-essential businesses as early as Friday, they worry its black and brown residents, who are being disproportionately impacted by the virus, will bear the brunt of a second wave of infections once people leave their houses. Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser knows she has to both bring back business and minimize the health risk to the largely black and Latinx workers doing the work on the pandemic’s front lines. Latinx are the second highest risk group for COVID-19 in the U.S.; in the District, they make up 11% of the city’s population and 25% of infections. “You don’t get to open up and be successful if people are scared for their lives,” Bowser tells TIME.

The virus’ disproportionate impact on the District of Columbia’s black community in particular reflects a broader pattern across the United States. Nationwide, African Americans comprise just 12.3% of the country but nearly 26.3% of the COVID-19 cases and 22.7% of deaths, according to CDC data. (At least 30% of states’ test results compiled by the CDC failed to record race.) A high rate of underlying conditions like diabetes and heart disease, coupled with historically lower-paid jobs, have put many African American communities at greater risk from COVID-19, experts say. The skewed toll “spotlights the underlying inequalities and extra burdens that black communities have historically had to deal with in this country,” former President Barack Obama said in his May 16th commencement speech for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Until this week, Washington, D.C.’s startlingly high proportion of African American deaths has helped make the city has a national outlier in its stay-at-home orders. On May 13, Bowser extended D.C.’s the order to June 8th, while nearly all other states moved toward some kind of reopening. Her caution proved prescient: the metropolitan D.C. area had the highest rate of positive COVID-19 tests in the nation on May 22, just ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, according to White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx. But after the holiday, Bowser told reporters on Tuesday that cases were again dropping, and some non-essential businesses could begin to open by Friday if the trend continued downward.

Patrick Semansky—APD.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, right, speaks during a news conference about the coronavirus inside the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on May 11.

Drew Angerer—Getty ImagesA woman wears a mask as she walks past a bus stop on 14th Street in downtown Washington, D.C., on April 15, 2020.

Bowser’s caution has put her at odds with the President living in her city limits who has been actively urging the country to get back to business. She is trying to walk a diplomatic line with the Trump Administration, since D.C. needs federal funding to bridge a nearly $725 million-dollar budget shortfall spurred by rising social-welfare costs and falling tax income due to the pandemic. But she doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that she thinks President Donald Trump’s push to reopen overlooks the needs of some of the most vulnerable Americans. “There is this kind of a callous calculation happening that surprises me,” she says. “It’s kind of like, ‘Well, this COVID is killing old people and, Oh, well. It’s killing black people, and poor people and essential workers. Oh, well.’”

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‘This death that’s going around’

For many of the early rising members of D.C.’s sanitation crews, COVID-19 has brought both a sense of renewed pride in their crucial work and a creeping sense of dread. “The public comes out when they are coming through the alleys, kids waiving at them,” says Earl Simpson, 43, the associate administrator of D.C.’s collection division. “I think the citizens really appreciate us being out there collecting the trash and recycling.”

Nate Palmer for TIMERetired sanitation worker Maurice “Pony Man” Queen, 72, stands in the hallway at the Department of Public Works Solid Waste Collections Division on May 22.

But some have already left the job out of concern for their safety. Fear of the virus drove one of the city’s longest serving sanitation workers, Maurice “Pony Man” Queen, 72, to finally retire on April 3, after his “50 years, 7 months and 22 days of service.” He started the job just after Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, where the reverend had traveled to support a protest by black sanitation workers. He says he never missed a week’s work until coronavirus struck. Now he’s worried about the young men he mentored who are still on the job. “We’re gonna have some more people die before all of this is resolved,” Queen says. “And I’m just hoping and praying that none of my family members or anybody that I know will be a part of this death that’s going around.”

COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting African American communities across the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Many inhabit the low-income, densely packed neighborhoods with a large number of multi-generational homes, which helps spread the virus, says Danyelle Solomon, vice president of race and ethnicity at the Center for American Progress (CAP). Other factors include type of employment, lack of a financial safety net and pre-existing health conditions, she says.

African Americans make up about a third of some of the service industry’s public-facing jobs like taxi drivers and barbers, according to CAP research. That’s in part why less than one in five black Americans, and less than one in six Latinx Americans able to work from home, Solomon says. And for every $10 a typical white family has in the bank, a typical black family only holds $1, according to CAP research. “Wealth allows people to respond to that unexpected emergency like COVID-19,” she says, “resources you can draw upon when you’re not pulling a paycheck.”

When it comes to health, CAP’s analysis shows that 28% of people of color between the ages of 18 and 64 in the U.S. — or more than 21 million people — have a pre-existing condition, like asthma, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes, that could put them at higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19.

Nate Palmer for TIMESanitation worker Vincent Walker sits below a portrait of Mayor Muriel Bowser inside the Department of Public Works Solid Waste Collections Division.

In Washington D.C., Mayor Bowser, who is 47, says the virus has been “efficient against underlying conditions that you see in the African American community, like diabetes and high blood pressure and heart disease.” She says it has also hit those who don’t have the luxury of staying home, and those who live in multiple-generation households that are getting more crowded as families double up when they can’t make rent because of lost wages. “Less than optimal health decisions, coupled with the inability to isolate, has put black and brown communities right in the crosshairs of COVID-19,” Bowser says.

Others say criticizing African Americans for lifestyle choices that lead to pre-existing conditions smacks of blaming the victim. Washington’s most populous black neighborhoods, concentrated in Wards 7 and 8, are food deserts, says Doni Crawford of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, with only three large supermarkets serving 160,000 people. Decades of inequitable city planning also come into play, with homes in black and brown communities often located in more densely packed neighborhoods, or near warehouse or industrial districts, due to zoning practices, the 30-year-old affordable housing analyst says. “When you’re living close to a trash site, that negatively impacts your health.”

All these factors are further complicated by a historic distrust of doctors felt by many members of the African American community, says Dr. Michael Fauntroy, 54, associate professor of political science at Howard University, who studies African American political behavior. For many, that is rooted in the notorious Tuskegee experiment, he says, which started in 1932 when unethical U.S. Public Health Service researchers told African American men they were being “treated for ‘bad blood,’ a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue,” according to the CDC. Instead, they were being studied as syphilis consumed them, and infected their loved ones, long after a cure was found.

Lingering suspicion — and the prejudice African Americans continue to encounter in the modern health care system — has made some people reluctant to seek out care. It also means it can be hard to dislodge bad information, Fauntroy says, like the rumor in the early days of the pandemic that blacks couldn’t catch COVID-19. The Howard University professor recalls hearing that rumor repeated by one of his best students. “I almost lost my mind,” Fauntroy recalls, “because it’s just the single most illogical thing you can think of.”

‘Disregard for black life and black bodies’

Mayor Bowser is mindful of that history. As it became clear that D.C.’s black community was being hit hard by COVID-19, she reached out to fellow African Americans through a trusted voice, enlisting D.C. resident and former First Lady Michelle Obama to record a message that went out to denizens of the District via robocall and through social media in mid-April. It urged non-essential workers to stay home and explained where people could get free coronavirus testing. (An Obama spokesperson says she’s recorded similar messages for other major African American cities and broadcasters during the pandemic as well.) The robocall helped drive up numbers of people getting tested, Bowser says, putting the District in the top 10 states or territories in terms of people tested per capita, according to the District’s Director of the Department of Forensic Sciences Dr. Jenifer Smith.

Nate Palmer for TIMEEmery Heights Park on a cloudy day in Washington, D.C., on May 22.

But cases have still been spiking in some of the city’s low-income neighborhoods, so Bowser’s team has been setting up pop-up sites that offer free testing for essential workers, people in high risk categories, or people who think they may have been exposed. At the first one, on a sunny Saturday on May 16, a line of masked residents waited next to a mobile lab near a charter school in Brightwood, a neighborhood in northwest D.C. that was once home to a pre-Civil War community of free African Americans. Today it’s a cross-section of black, Latinx and Amharic families, and is situated within the District’s Ward Four, which has the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the city.

Juan, a plumber, stands in line to get tested because his boss is in the hospital with COVID-19. “I have four children in the house,” he says. “I have to make sure that everything is okay.”

The economic impact of COVID-19 people in low-income neighborhoods like Brightwood is putting people at higher risk of infection in D.C., health care workers say. Homes that were already tight are now even more crowded as families move in together to save money. “A lot of people have lost their jobs, and the people that didn’t lose their jobs have lost hours,” says Maria Gomez, RN, president and CEO of Mary’s Center, which is providing the pop-up center’s testing services. To save rent, families are doubling up. “So one family that already was crowded in an apartment is moving in with another one that was already crowded.”

A few blocks away, on the neighborhood’s main drag, most businesses are closed, other than a funeral home and the occasional pharmacy or liquor store. One of the few open shops is Elsa Ethiopian Kitchen, where Elsa Yirge, the 45-year-old owner, works behind the counter. Her husband Beniam Belay greets drivers from Uber, Seamless and Grubhub in a bright African-print face mask, to the sound of an Ethiopian soap opera playing on a wall-mounted TV.

He says business has been down 80% since the pandemic hit. Just before COVID-19, the business leased more space upstairs to hold tables for up to 40 guests. Now, they don’t know how they’ll pay rent at the end of the month. The restaurant applied for a loan through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the emergency federal program designed to help small business owners struggling under the shutdown. “We never heard back on our loan application,” Elsa says. When asked what they’ll do, she just shrugs, a grim look on her face.

Stimulus measures meant to bail out small businesses struggling under stay-at-home orders haven’t had the impact on minority-owned businesses that advocates would like to see, according to Crawford and co-author Qubilah Huddleston’s research for the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. Only a quarter of PPP loans could be used for expenses like rent, while three-quarters of the aid was structured to cover staff paychecks. “More than 90% of black businesses nationwide are sole proprietorships with no employees,” Crawford says. The Latinx community is also struggling, according to a recent Latino Decisions poll, which found that 35% of respondents had lost a job, 29% owned a small business that was on the brink or had already gone under, and 43% had trouble making rent.

Nate Palmer for TIMEBrightwood resident Carol Lightfoot, 73, stands on her front porch on May 22.

But for people in the capital who have watched friends and neighbors get sick, rushing back to normal life isn’t necessarily the answer. Next door to the testing site, Carol Lightfoot, 73, and her brother George, 69, watch neighbors line up for nearly half a mile from the front porch of their peeling 1800s-era Victorian home, which in its day hosted salons for members of the black intelligentsia like W.E.B. Du Bois. When the Lightfoots realized they could get tested for free, they lined up too, as the siblings share a host of serious health conditions, including diabetes, hypertension, and asthma.

Lightfoot has empathy for people who have lost income during the pandemic, but calls the primarily white protestors she’s seen on TV dismissing the virus “ridiculous,” adding that they’d likely feel differently “if it was a member of their family or friends who came down with it.”

As Trump continues to push for reopening, homemade posters have appeared on a handful of D.C. lamp posts across the District. “Coming soon to your City: Trump Caskets,” the signs say, with an image of the President grinning over an open coffin. It’s a snapshot of how some District residents view Trump’s handling of the pandemic, says longtime Washington, D.C.-based public radio host Kojo Nnamdi. Many African Americans here see the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on their community as part of a wider pattern of neglect by the Trump Administration, he says. “These are people who are convinced that President Trump does not have the interests of poor and people of color at heart. They think that President Trump prefers to err on the side of the major corporation, the big banks, and the business community.”

Nnamdi, now 75, predicts the pandemic will renew the movements for black equality that first inspired him to travel to the U.S. from Guyana as a college student and briefly join the revolutionary-minded Black Panther Party. Policy analyst Huddleston, 29, agrees. “It just reflects the disregard for black life and black bodies to say that we know that there are specific communities being decimated and devastated, economically, health wise, etc. But we’re still going to open anyway because the show must go on,” she says.

Mayor Bowser sees this crisis as an opportunity for Trump to reach out to the nation’s black community. “If there is ever a place where we could really look at the disproportionate impact on African Americans, it’s D.C., she says. “I think Trump gets that this is an issue that he can lean into for African Americans. I don’t know if he knows what the answer is.”

In Brightwood, nobody is talking politics. Juan and the other residents standing in line to get tested are just focused on getting through this crisis, like Clinton on his early morning sanitation shift. He may have to get out and help the public every day for a living, but in his private life, Clinton says he is planning to stay from public places for a while. “You gotta choose. What’s best? The economy? We need to get it back together so people can work, but you also gotta be safe,” he says. “It’s out there.”

— With reporting by Chris Wilson

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