Neighborhood

Shortly after 7 this morning I took a long walk around my neighborhood. I’ve lived here since August but haven’t walked enough, I guess because many of the streets are lined by highways or housing projects. Some of them, though, are lovely, especially as the sun is rising. And even along the highway, the occasional 100 year-old building survives and suggests what it was like here once.

People — maybe mostly realtors — say Mott Haven is the Williamsburg of the future. It isn’t yet, and it may never be, although it’s true that someone will eventually do something with all of the empty factories. Perhaps build lofts, maybe just tear them down. In the seventies landlords who couldn’t sell their buildings here would set them on fire for the insurance money.

Anyway, forget the future. I’d like to spend some time in Mott Haven of the pre-seventies past. It turns out three of the former factories on my block made pianos, and though two of them are abandoned, one is now residential. I know a little about the residential one because I live in it. The rest of them are just sitting there, waiting for something to happen.

Vocals on all our demos are done. We go into the studio for real at the end of February.