This is a complex weekend. Passover for some, Easter for others. Good Friday was a holiday and yet plenty are working and many are taking Monday off. Accountants are working straight through. For an expatriate under-employed lapsed Catholic, however, this weekend is not much different than all others. Nothing applies, as Joan Didion would say.

Noon spin class on Friday was filled with the usual array of bored-looking ectomorphs and chiseled men prepping for summer at Fire Island. The instructor surprised us with a special Good Friday edition of Studio Cycling™ (all the classes here are trademarked)—the Jesus Christ Super Spin. Yeah! I never imagined a dance version of Mary Magdalene’s “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”, but it makes so much sense. Okay, so we didn’t make it to the obligatory three hour mass this afternoon, but the body is a temple, no?

Formerly known as “the gym”, the membership-only unemployment drop-in centre is full all day, every day. This should come as little surprise, with 663,000 more jobs lost last month here in the US and unemployment spiking at 8.5 per cent—the highest level since 1983. Frankly, I think it’s great to see so many people revving up their dopamine levels and getting buff while they linger in the bread lines.

For others, a more classic tool of escapism and procrastination prevails. Online video gaming is up 27 per cent versus a year ago, with visitors spending an average 42 per cent more time on the sites. A new game called “Layoff” gives players the chance to rightsize their own workforce, hitting the bank bailout option to start over.

Nevertheless, there is a certain coolness in numbers. At a park in the Lower East side, the Unemployed Olympics provided a recent afternoon of frivolity. The purpose was “just to get unemployed people psyched that they’re unemployed.” As one participant put it: “all the cool people in New York are unemployed right now.”

These days are a blessing and a curse. More time to go to the gym, spend with your kids, read books. No income to pay the membership fees, send those kids to private school or enroll in that creative writing symposium at, ahem, Columbia in June, for example. Aye, there’s the rub. Only the lucky few ever have both time and money simultaneously.

Meanwhile chocolate bunnies are on the market, which is reason enough to get psyched… happy Easter, happy Passover and a big Obama-style shout out to the atheists this weekend.

by Edward Wilkinson-Latham

The first thing I notice after disembarking the plane in West Palm is the herd of wheelchairs and electric buggies gathered like an assembled posse. Polyester-clad blue rinses and vintage toupées battle in slow motion to be the first to climb slowly upon these complimentary electric chariots, as the nonchalant airport employees dressed in light green blazers and peach pink trousers watch with blank expression, their eyes dulled with tedium of seeing another plane load of aged lizards searching for warmth. What they crave is some drama, like someone who needs carting off the aircraft, bound and gagged after expressing a nasty dose of air rage. Hell they look so bored they’d probably be happy with a school party of ADD kids with hyperactive disorder.

The Intracoastal Waterway separates the city of West Palm from the more affluent Palm Beach; a 26km long spit of some of the most expensive sand in the world jutting out from the mainland like a dangling penis with erectile dysfunction. Once over the bridge, convertible Bentleys, Porches and Mercedes patrol the green palm fringed boulevards. As well as these prestige vehicles there are the well kept “Jew Canoes”—near mint ’80s luxury automobiles driven by the undead, their tufts of silver hair barely visible over the steering wheel. They veer across the central yellow line with addled nervous aggression in their eyes as they nearly career into another oncoming vehicle. Car parks at sunset can seem like dodgems at a fun fair.

These days around Palm Beach you occasionally make out small white signs no bigger than a bill envelope, stuck in the turf outside the odd picture perfect mansion. These are the barely visible and tasteful ‘for sale’ signs which over the past few months have become more numerous, proof of the recent economic downturn and the familiarity of locals with the conman of the century—Bernie Madoff. Bernie used to have a lot of friends down here. [more]

[Photo: Brokers With Hands On Their Faces Blog]

The fine folks over at NPR’s This American Life just won a Peabody Award for “The Giant Pool of Money,” an impressive, easy-to-follow report explaining how the subprime mortgage crisis came to be. They’ve also put out similarly excellent episodes covering the crises in banking and credit markets. If you’re at all baffled by financial reporting these days, give them a listen.  Everything else makes a lot more sense afterward.

And if you can’t get enough crisis, check out Planet Money, their similarly smart and entertaining thrice-weekly podcast and blog.

There’s an amusing article in this month’s GQ about what it’s like to work for former pro-baseball player Lenny Dykstra and his near-bankrupt The Player’s Club magazine. The article’s called “You Think Your Job Sucks? Try Working For Lenny Dykstra”. You can probably guess what it’s like for yourself.

It’s not a flattering portrait of Dykstra. He’s chronically hours late. He’s a braggart who’s comically obsessed with status symbols. He lashes out at anything he perceives as a threat to his position or a slight to his intellect. He gobbles ice cream sundaes and Twizzlers, stays up for days on end and talks a game very long on promises and very short on substance. In other words, he seems wholly unfit to run any kind of business.

But what’s most amusing is that a very similar description appeared in  “Nails Never Fails”, an article that ran around this time last year in The New Yorker. Only in that piece, Dkystra’s personality and behavior just seem like the odd quirks of a brilliant financial mind and, “Baseball’s most improbable post-career success story.”

In hindsight, several things in The New Yorker story should’ve tipped us off to the fact that perhaps Dykstra’s success wasn’t being evaluated very critically. The glowing endorsement from Jim Cramer.  The fact that AIG was Dykstra’s partner in annuities he hoped to sell to pro athletes.

But what stands out most is that we really shouldn’t have needed hindsight to tell us that Lenny Dykstra had not, in fact, suddenly become a genius.  Here are a couple of descriptions of Dykstra from The New Yorker:

“He is lumpy now… His hands tremble, his back hurts, and his speech, like that of an insomniac or a stroke victim, lags slightly behind his mind. He winks without obvious intent.”

“Dykstra’s laptop stalled. Like many latecomers to computing, his instinctive reaction, when faced with a balky Web page or a frozen screen, is to click furiously and open more windows, thereby exacerbating the problem.”

Other articles mention his “83-0 record” at picking stocks in his column “Nails on the Numbers” for thestreet.com but none stops to consider that picking one rising stock a week, particularly in a booming market, really isn’t all that hard. Never mind that it’s since come out that he might not have been doing much picking himself.

But until the market crashed, everyone seemed to overlook that it was still Lenny Dykstra we were talking about. He was successful, we believed, not because he was lucky, but because he was smart, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

And for every story I’ve heard or read recently that includes a quote like “We should’ve known there was going to be trouble when consumer debt in the US exceeded the GDP,” I can’t help but think there’s an easier indicator: when this man

is being held up a as a financial genius and no one is questioning it, well, you’re probably in for a bumpy ride.

The willingness of the press to ignore the fact that Lenny-fucking-Dykstra is suddenly a financial genius has a nice echo in the willingness of the press during his playing days to ignore his thirty-pound weight gain—mostly muscle—and accept his explanation of “real good vitamins.”

[Photo: Financial Post]

Every crisis needs a pithy slogan or defining epigram, as Kat referenced in the previous post about the revival of “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters from WWII Britain. Thankfully, we may have one already for the global mess we now find ourselves in, courtesy of Latvia’s finance minister.

From The Economist:

Amid the wreckage of Latvia’s retailing industry, which has declined 17% year on year according to the latest figures, one item is selling well: T-shirts with seemingly mysterious slogans such as “Nasing spesal”. Latvians are glad to have something to laugh about, even if it is only their finance minister, Atis Slakteris. In an ill-judged foreign television interview, using heavily accented and idiosyncratic English worthy of the film character Borat, he described his country’s economic problems as “nothing special”.

New contributor Kat Kensington will be blogging from her lofty perch in New York for as long as she can afford the rent.

Counting our blessings, we have our health. We have our friends. We still have our ability to see a world in a grain of sand. (No? Well, maybe some of us.) And yet the financial turmoil of households, institutions and governments everywhere is causing personal anxiety of very public proportions.

The British government, facing an equally stressed-out population in the days leading up to World War II, did what governments did in those days: they issued some some bold-faced propaganda. Intended as a message from King George VI to his people, Keep Calm and Carry On was designed to keep those famously stiff upper lips from quivering so damn much. Over the past few years the resurrected poster has been knocked off in cheerful candy colours, developing a bit of a cult following in trendy design circles.

Last November I spotted a framed version at a luxe furnishings shop in SoHo. In light of my dwindling disposable income, the $295 USD price tag held me back. Obviously for the best, since several editions around the walls of the shop have not had the desired effect of carrying on for the boutique’s owners. In the face of a sad Christmas season followed by February—which is annually the cruelest month for retail sales—the store is closing. The elegantly framed poster can now be yours for a mere $118 USD.

It’s dark here in Gotham. The Village Voice just reported 30 restaurant closings in February. Those are just the ones at which villagers would consider eating. “Closed for renovations” has become a euphemism for “not yet willing to admit closed forever” and nobody has paid full-price in this city for anything since early December.

How are you, people greet each other. Seems normal, but it isn’t. The standard greeting is suddenly imbued with new meaning. No really, how are you? How are you affected by all this, do you still have a job? A macabre cloud of black humour hangs over Friday after-work gatherings for drinks. It’s hard not to be freaked out by this.

New York has always been aspirational. You know how it goes: If you can make it here you can make it anywhere. The lure of limitless possibility, the sense as you walk down the street of what your life could be. Live here for awhile and you can spot it in others; you see the glowing, upturned face of a tourist and you know he’s thinking about moving here one day. New New Yorkers are facing their biggest test yet, but those of us who came here and are now struggling to pay the rent are reminded that New Yorkers have always struggled to pay the rent.

To be a New Yorker is to be resilient. As a story in New York magazine last spring put it, “This is exhilarating. This is exhausting. This is what New York is all about.”

(Photo: Heidelberg Project, Michael Takasaki)

Following up on last post: In Detroit, at least, there’s already a number of projects underway that are designed to staunch the bleeding in neighborhoods struggling with urban decay and foreclosure. Boing Boing led me to James Griffioen’s marvelous set of photos of the abandoned Detroit Public School Book Depository, which led me to his passionate, excellent blog; it describes several initiatives reclaiming once-derelict homes and neighbourhoods and putting them back to productive use, including:

The Power House Project, which is converting a foreclosed house into one capable of generating power to sustain itself and supply power to those around it.

The Yes Farm, a group of transplanted San Franciscans trying to turn a street into an art and gardening community.

And the Georgia Street Community Garden, which has planted gardens on the lots of now-demolished houses and are rehabbing an abandoned store to become a community centre and store to sell the food they grow. They even have movie nights in the garden.

Addendum: Yves Marchand and Roman Meffre’s website has other photos of Detroit not included in the Time essay.

More from the Heidelberg Project:

[Photo: Heidelberg Project]

While staying in Detroit, we head out toward 8 Mile and stop at the Heidelberg Project. It’s a two-block public art exercise that consumes the sides of houses, empty lots, the sidewalk, and even the trees of a long depressed, black (but once racially integrated) Eastside Detroit neighborhood. Tyree Guyton, who grew up on Heidelberg St., launched the project in 1986 as a way of revitalizing his ‘hood through low-budget DIY creativity and it’s since become an ever evolving outsider art installation.

Guyton, who believes Detroit never really recovered from the riots of 1967, was disillusioned after returning home from his military service—finding a neighborhood (known as “Black Bottom”) seemingly beyond repair, and, as far as wider America was concerned, beyond care. He began by painting bright pop-art polka dots on houses, and artfully affixing them with detritus collected from surrounding vacant lots.

The site vibrates with energy and a playfully anarchic spirit. But while it’s ostensibly about restoring pride of place to the residents—and attracts 275,000 visitors a year to an area that people were once afraid to walk through—it still feels like the deeply personal work of its creator, eliciting a conflicting stew of reactions.

Heidelberg St. is not simply a feel-good restoration project; there is a palpable anger on the flip-side of its hopeful communitarian face, backed by an affinity for the grotesque. Guyton’s paintings on salvaged planks of wood, his welded sculptures and conceptual set pieces (stray, incongruous items assembled together just so, like the flag and phone on ironing board at top), riff on themes such as war, displacement, addiction and poverty almost as often as they seem to engage in pure silly fun. And because Guyton has a fixation for certain objects and images—brightly-coloured polka dots, painted numbers, shoes, chairs, crudely drawn faces, television sets, children’s dolls, stuffed animals, the word “God”, telephones, bicycles—there’s a perverse kind of unity to the whole scene.

Guyton was there while Mike and I were milling around on Heidelberg St. We introduced ourselves; he was polite and asked where we were from, but he was obviously preoccupied with the next idea he was working on. It’s a never-ending piece, a fragile, self-contained world, that he obsessively keeps adding to.

(Note: We’ll throw up more images from the Heidelberg Project in coming days.)

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Many are now looking to Detroit as an indicator of what many struggling cities in America’s post-industrial northeast may soon look like—or in the case of Cleveland, already do (see the feature in last week’s New York Times Magazine on how Cleveland is dealing with the foreclosure crisis). TIME Magazine has just posted a photo essay by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre on Detroit’s many derelict, long vacant, but once magnificent twentieth century buildings (Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline).

(Photo: Michigan Central Depot, from Forgotten Detroit)

In addition to visiting the Heidelberg Project, we spent a couple hours scoping out the architectural decay. The most iconic of its ruins is probably the Michigan Central Depot, once the city’s main train station, now a hollowed-out shell that really does look like the last building left in a war zone. (When you cross the Ambassador Bridge and go through Customs it’s one of the first things you notice—this stolid, once stately, monolithic slab you can see right through.) A Detroit preservationist who hosts an excellent web archive called Forgotten Detroit, says, “I like to view [the MCD] as the ultimate symbol of the automobile’s complete triumph over public transportation.” Which, thanks to recent events, gives the building a whole new layer of irony, tragedy and resonance.

Maybe the MCD needs a Heidelberg Project of its own. Hell, so does the whole city. For that matter, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more Heidelberg Projects—ingenious, intensely personal, quotidian stand-offs against the backdraft of history—all across the country.

More scribblings from recent trip to New York City, in part for book-related research. & in part to confirm that what happened on November 4 actually did happen. (Pics from Lisa K.)

November 10, 2008
Paying sporadic attention to the news one item stands out: Gun and ammo sales are booming surging (insert your own punning headline here). It would appear some folks are afraid that the new socialist president is intent on stripping the citizenry of their armaments, so they’re stock-piling. A store in Houston reported that sales on the Saturday preceding election day were seven times higher than for a typically healthy one.

We hit a few more galleries and the trip’s art highlight ends up being the exhibition DOWN by Kehinde Wiley at Deitch Projects. Seven monumentally-scaled paintings that riff on historical images of fallen religious and warrior icons by situating urban black men in heroic poses—sacrificial, ecstatic, sanctified while often tricked out in bling and hip hop gear. The colours vibrate and the scenes are startling for being both so modern graphic and yet classical; epochal mashups enhanced by the floating latticework of textile patterning (patterns based on the kind of designs once found on African-produced textiles for the European market). They’re subversive but seem to have a sense of humour about themselves. And their scale is overwhelming; the largest painting is 24 feet across.

We also check out shows by Andreas Gursky, Phillipe Parreno, Zak Smith and Bill Jacobson.

Which has me wondering: how goeth the art market? Not well I discover by perusing the previous day’s New York Times.

“Works by a wide range of artists failed to sell at a Christie’s auction in New York [on November 5], and items that did go fetched disappointing prices… The contagion has infected the art world. Collections from the estates of two New York philanthropists were expected to generate at least $104 million in sales; they brought in $47 million.”

Tuesday, November 11
President George Bush is in town for Veteran’s Day.

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It’s estimated that New York has already lost 45,000 finance-related jobs. Those terminated can console themselves at one of the now hot & happening Pink Slip Parties, which function as both networking events and drunken gripe-fests. Beer comes cheap at only $2 for a Bud. Former hedge-fund manager Mike Grimm said farewell to a $500,000 annual salary only a couple weeks ago. Mike tells the New York Post: “No one is an investor anymore. Everyone’s a speculator.”

Wednesday, November 12
Several interviews today, but the one most pertinent to current events is with William Easterly, an economist at New York University who specializes in development and foreign aid. In his book The White Man’s Burden he gamely takes on the many failings of not only traditional development models and big-letter aid agencies, but also the overly ambitious and technology-centred solutions proposed by Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Development Goals. He’s not saying the Goals are themselves are unworthy, only that the methods we keep employing to get there don’t work. Easterly pushes for a more modest, flexible, bottom-up, trial-and-error approach that considers what works in one political, cultural and economic context may not necessarily work in another.

But Easterly doesn’t restrict his criticism to well-meaning NGOs and international development agencies. He’s pointing out all the ways in which our interventions have gone awry in the developing world, which includes the sorts of policies forced upon countries by the IMF and World Bank, through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and the like. Which brings us to the current moment—the IMF had been struggling to overcome its bad reputation and make itself relevant again when the financial crisis landed its lap. Now it’s suddenly an active lender again, to Iceland, Pakistan, Hungary, Ukraine, and others. I asked Easterly what he thought about the return of the IMF.

“I’m afraid they’re going to go back to the old models—the course of conditionalities. The anti-globalization types who talk about neo-liberal economic policies as such a bad thing, I sympathize with them a lot but disagree at the same time. On one hand I believe that a lot of neo-liberal economics is common sense, time-tested stuff that works in the long-run to promote prosperity… But it’s not some kind of ideological dogma that you rigidly apply, and it’s certainly not something to be coercively imposed by outsiders. Because the moment something goes wrong, and things always go wrong along the way, you get a wave of xenophobic populists come to power who say it’s all the fault of evil foreigners and their ideas. You’ve just set back the cause of trying to find sensible ideas for economic management. Instead you get this pendulum of extremes.”

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Afterward, I make the move from hotel to home, relocating myself and travelling things to a friend’s place on the Upper West Side. But there is bad news: Her husband was laid off today from the company where he had worked for ten years. The economy in general, and slumping sales in particular, were cited as the reasons why. Over dinner he’s distracted and not very hungry; he keeps migrating to his laptop as he’s sent out some messages to friends and family, and, I suppose, is seeking some comfort or counsel in their replies. As he’s a foreign national, there is also the matter of his soon-to-be cancelled work visa. And they have a one-year-old baby.

Thursday, November 13
George Bush is still in New York. As if to say: you won’t be rid of me so easily! He’s making a speech to a forum hosted by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which I’m watching simulcast on a local television station. It takes a vigorous bout of arm pinching for me to again re-affirm the utter meltdown of the past couple months. And there’s Bush delivering his dispatch from bizarro world: on the one hand he’s justifying his administration’s de facto nationalization of many major U.S. banks while advising against any new substantive measures to regulate global financial markets.

He insists that the crisis “was not a failure of the free market system,” but, presumably, some greedy, loose nuts operating inside of it. Which sounds something like the argument that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” while neglecting to mention the regulatory conditions and business culture that enabled/encouraged the reckless behaviour.

Scribblings from recent trip to New York City, in part for book-related research. & in part to confirm that what happened on November 4 actually did happen. balloon alley image by Lisa K.

Thursday, November 6
Two days after Obama’s election and there remains a palpable cloud of euphoria that glides above Manhattan streets like a giant happy soap bubble, delivering a sloppy kiss to every citizen it bumps into. The president-elect’s face on banners, T-shirts, stenciled graffiti, buttons, his name even dotted out in red light bulbs against the face of an apartment building facing the Williamsburg Bridge, each bulb occupying the window slot of a different unit (talk about unanimity).

Wall Street, and the fresh troubles it has sired, feels temporarily walled or moated off from the rest of Manhattan. Until it’s quitting time and all those glum, anxious faces take to the subway for parts uptown and suburbia.

A weird, bi-polar moment.

Friday, November 7
The image above is but one of the many signs here that Americans can, for this passing moment, attach any and all hopes or aspirations to the Obama image. What’s your wish? Personally, I’m pulling for more banjo, smoked meat and that the outdoor ice rinks stay open longer this year.

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Lisa K. and I take in the large Elizabeth Peyton show at the New Museum (the new building for which is amazing—minimal white boxes tiered haphazardly atop one another). Peyton is an American portraitist whose paintings typically feature her hipster friends, romantic historical figures or pop celebrities as her subjects. Her style, most conspicuously influenced by David Hockney, is quite fetching—sensual, borderline androgynous figures done in colourful, heavy oils, showing the deft hand of a fashion illustrator. But the uncritical nature of her practice, with its seeming adoration for fancy pop cutey boys, feels very one-note and betrays a certain shallowness that wears after a while. Too much of it is the familiar youth, celebrity and beauty stuff: Live Fast, Die Young & Leave a Beautiful Corpse Whatnot. Having said that, the show is hugely entertaining and the pictures themselves are beautiful and often intimately tiny.

Most promising, her recent paintings do show in an interest in age beyond the beautiful corpse, including one of septauganarian poet John Giorno and another of a weary-looking Matthew Barney perhaps doing his best Van Gogh impersonation (above). And a new one added to the show only yesterday: a portrait of Michelle Obama with her daughters.

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Walking past Grand Central late at night, we encounter an angry white male, youth category, bedecked in the hip-hop stylee exclaiming “Obama! Obama!” with more aggression than glee.

Saturday, November 8
Much of the day is spent gallery-hopping in Chelsea. Most notable: Julian Faulhaber’s exhibition Lowdensitypolyethylene at Hasted Hunt (image above). At first glance his hyper-real, supersaturated depictions of austere, geometric, unpeopled modern environments seem like fabrications or reconstructions—but they are actual images of recently completed spaces, yet to be fully turned over to human usage, lit only with available ambient/artificial light. There has been no post-production work on the photos. The images are abstractly gorgeous, luminous, unearthly and more than a little creepy. Like sets for a Kubrick movie imagined, but never made.

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Today, I learn belatedly that Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal has died. You will know Rosenthal best as the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s Casino, in which Robert DeNiro starred as Las Vegas casino mogul Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein. Rosenthal was a low-level East Coast hoodlum before bringing his chutzpah to Vegas and the gambling scene. He eventually ran four major casinos simultaneously, hosted his own television variety show, wrote newspaper columns, and, most importantly, revolutionized the gambling industry’s business model by demonstrating just how much money could be from sports betting.

He was also one of America’s luckiest men: Casino’s final scene, in which Rothstein/Rosenthal survives a car bombing, is true to the facts. He walked away only lightly charred thanks to a metal plate installed beneath the driver’s seat for reasons that had nothing to do with his own protection, and the fact he hadn’t fully closed his door before keying the ignition.

Rosenthal’s passing seems apropos now, as we endure the long denouement of that elaborate shell game known as the Credit Economy Death Cycle. He was famous for ensuring the customers of the casinos he ran were surrounded in decadent luxury and treated to a good show—even as they lost their shirts. And he knew his maths: Sports Illustrated called him the “greatest living expert on sports handicapping.” On his own website (which you must check out, it’s so American! of a certain vintage), he unabashedly described himself as both a “Game Theorist” and a “Las Vegas gangster”… Shall I resist making a crack about how appealing his C.V. would have looked on pre-bailout Wall Street?

Sunday, November 9
Window shopping & day dreaming. In Soho we pop into the Moss design store where I encounter, for the first time, the Buildings of Disaster series by Constantin and Laurene Boym—architectural miniatures of landmarks famous for the tragic or catastrophic events that occurred therein. The Watergate Hotel, the Dakota in front of which John Lennon was assassinated, Three Mile Island, Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, Chornobyl, the Ford Theatre, the Paris underpass where Princess Diana’s speeding limo crashed…

From the Boyms’s website: “Some of these buildings may have been prized architectural landmarks, others – non-descript anonymous structures. But disaster changes everything. The images of burning or exploded buildings make a different, populist history of architecture, one based on emotional involvement rather than on scholarly appreciation. In our media-saturated time, the world disasters stand as people’s measure of history, and the sites of tragic events become involuntary tourist destinations.”

Which doesn’t sound entirely implausible or pomo-stupid. Except some of the pieces have now been re-issued in limited gold-plated editions that retail for thousands of dollars apiece. And that seems to me more purposefully tacky than subversive, a cynical rather than playful critique of event collectibles. Especially as the retailer brags of the many celebrities who possess items from the collection.

Pictured above from the gold-edition BoD collection, clockwise from top left: World Trade Center, Neverland Ranch, Watergate Hotel, OJ Simpson Car Chase, The Pentagon, Oklahoma City Federal Building, Waco, Unabomber Shack.

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I head off on a long stroll, trawling eastward along East 4th to Alphabet City. The closer you get to Avenue D, the more Puerto Rican and Dominican becomes the neighborhood. Colourful murals dedicated to deceased young people adorn several walls. There are some lovely and wild community parks and gardens, mostly tended by volunteers. It’s a relief to discover there are still some scrappy Manhattan neighborhoods such as this, as the rest of the island is reupholstered into a high-priced theme park or mall.