As the iC’s were wrapping up our day of shooting on Saturday we drive down Roosevelt Avenue in my old stomping grounds of Corona, Queens. The police had 111th Street blocked off and there were seemingly hundredss of people in the street. I thought to myself that we must be missing some awesome latino holiday. We had just finished having a meal at La Cabana which is a popular Dominican eatery on 103rd Street so we had all had our fried pork allotment for the year.
Just know that if there is a latino holiday upcoming you will be required to eat some manner of pork. Shouts to RAFI for eating mofongo. Even I WON’T eat that shit, but bless RAFI’s brave heart he went in on that joint hardbody, rather hard artery. We weren’t missing a holiday on 111th Street however. Some dude hacked up his wife and his son and had them stashed in the apartment’s closet.
Queens Man Charged With Murdering Wife, Son
*Soundwave: That shit was in the Owen’s family building*
Corona was such a fun place to grow up in when I was a child. The diversity of latin folks, asians, whites and everything in between gave me an early world view that would be destroyed by the time I got to middle school and learned that it wasn’t normal for a Black kid to have white friends (from outside of the neighborhood). The other magical mysteries of Corona have begun to fade as well. Visiting the old junkyards during the shoot also brought back a lot of memories about the neighborhood that I think I may have forgotten.
The Willets Point Blvd junkyards was the place that we would go to get bike parts from when we were younger. When BMX bikes became popular the junkyard streets were like our own private training course. Everything possible took place in the junkyards so you didn’t go in there alone. If you can remember the Fat Albert show then you can imagine a bunch of kids traipsing through the scrapyards looking for some summer adventure. When we got older and our means of transport went from bikes to stolen cars we came back to the junkyards to peddle instead of pedaling.
The thing that made me sad though was that the junkyards looked exactly the same as they did twenty plus years ago. The streets that were fucked the fuck up then were beat down even moreso. The neighborhood remarks of a shantytown in South Africa or India. There is so little infrastructure development in the area mainly because it serves poor people. Who do you think comes to the yards to have their cars fixed? People that can’t afford to go to a dealership or even a repair shop on the avenue.
The city has gotten along just fine ignoring this segment of the population because they pay their taxes and don’t expect to have rights anyhoo. I tried to buy a drink from one of the Salvadoran ladies that pushes their shopping carts through the yards. They ignored me as if I were the police. I was such an outsider to these women. That pissed me off. I hate being labeled as a doppelganger, but here I was in the yards now impersonating a working class person. Nevermind the fact that I was just in court this past week to resolve my arrest from a few weeks prior.
I’m torn in my emotions now from preserving the yards so that the poor and working class people that make NYC tick can have a place to have their cars fixed, or to just raze the whole neighborhood and let the asian money that has been developing Flushing move into Corona. One of the OG selling points the former mayor Giuliani had issued about reconstructing the new stadiums had been the notion that these sports team monuments would redevelop the neighborhoods they were nestled in. That ended up being politricks double speak, but I wonder now if this neighborhood couldn’t use a touch of the Disney-fication that the rest of NYC has been blessed with?
