brutalism, it's not just for architecture students any more

thursday night someone threw a brick through the front door of the bike shop that i work at, a month ago a college student was shot to death in front of a community center while standing with a group of people, but no one saw anything and to top it all off i got to watch six squads worth of cops cordon off a basketball court sized area with police tape while an ambulance came and took someone away across the street yesterday.
welcome to the west bank.
not the one in palestine, the one in minneapolis. city council calls it "cedar-riverside", rednecks call it "little mogadishu" and about 8,000 people call it home.
about a block from my shop's front door is the largest public housing complex in minneapolis "riverside plaza" aka "the crack stacks" or "the ghetto in the sky", a multi-building highrise mostly housing east african immigrants and refugees these days, a block away in the opposite direction is the university of minnesota's west bank campus, head south down cedar ave and you've got a mixture of halal markets (think muslim east african bodegas), restaurants, small businesses and bars, east on riverside you've got the hard times cafe, the former viking bar and north country coop and eventually fairview riverside hospital and augsburg college.
not surprisingly you get a weird mix of folks on the west bank. clean cut folks attending the carlson school of management at the u buy coffee drinks from the president of the black label bike club at the hard times, east african elders and street-punk fashionistas from the triple rock social club could compare notes on mohawk tinting vs. beard henna-ing, old hippies kick it with credit card bikers at the joint and the cabooze...you get the point, it can be a little surreal.
that was a long and slightly pretentious tangent so i'll get back to my point.
shit can get kind of gnarly over here and the local news stations don't help. every time that something happens it seems like it becomes a chance for some local pundit to opine about the shortcomings of the "somali community" or some smug d-bag to propose that the neighborhood be burned to the ground. go read the comments on any of the local news outlets after some kid gets killed here and you'll see some cold, cold shit. it's like "full metal jacket", some ignorant jerkoff with a charles bronson take on community policing shooting their mouth off about a neighborhood they've never been to and a community they know nothing about from the safety and anonymity of the internet.
i call bullshit.
i bike through or past the crackstacks almost every day and don't get me wrong, it can be hairy but find me a neighborhood ANYWHERE that doesn't have it's share of hooligans, drunks, hoodlums and juvenile delinquents. i do mean anywhere by the way, even in the lily white suburbs and small towns of america, it's just that there it may be dismissed as "good ol' boys" or "white trash" depending on which way the wind is blowing at the moment. rich kids pick on poorer kids in suburban high schools, the locals hate the townies, and jets and sharks have viciously choreographed, finger snapping rumbles in the streets of our fair cities.
violence happens, it's in our national blood. you can argue that we descend from a group of religious fundamentalists so rabid that they killed people for "witchcraft" on one side and from cutthroat capitalists so single minded that they displaced, killed and enslaved millions on the other. the story of our civilization is the same as many others, it's just that we killed more people, more recently than most. we treat issues of class as issues of race, issues of gender as academia and poverty as a law enforcement problem and none of these approaches have done much to solve anything.
the problems on the west bank are huge and require context that most people don't have, put together a huge immigrant community from a region that has been plagued with government instability and corruption along with near ceaseless warfare for most of the last 30 years, a widening culture/generation gap between non-english speaking african expatriate elders and a westernized, american born youth couple that with a neighborhood whose median income drops by about $26,000 when the sun goes down everyday and you get get a lot of room to fuck up.
all that said, i love this neighborhood. i've been working here for the last 7 years and hanging out since i was a teenager. yeah there are thugs, drunks and crime but there's also families, churches (ok...mosques, but that's still a church!) and people working at making their neighborhood better and all the internet vigilantes and "safe-city" pundits would do well to keep that in mind.
p.s. i just figured out how to do that whole "links in the blog" thing. sweet eh?