I was living in the Lafayette section of Jersey City at the time, just in from Communipaw Avenue on Van Horne, next to the Jackson Funeral Home, the largest black funeral home in the city and up the block from the Monumental Baptist Church. It was only a couple of weeks before Hurricane Sandy roared though at the end of October 2012, though no one knew she was coming at the time. I was at a meeting of the Morris Canal Community Development Corporation, chaired by June Jones, Executive Director.
One of agenda items involved adding a skate park to the Berry Lane Park that was closing in on a start date. I spoke in favor of it – indeed, I’d brought the idea to June a couple weeks before as it had been something I’d been pursuing for awhile – as did Musaddiq Ahmad and others. Musaddiq came up to me after the meeting and told me that if I wanted to see some interesting graffiti – which may have come up in the meeting as well, I don’t know, but somehow he knew of my interest – I should come down to a place on Pacific, just a couple of blocks away. Amazing graffiti all over the walls inside and in the alley out back as well.
As I recall what he said registered well enough, but it didn’t quite compute. Why not? Because I’d been photographing Jersey City graffiti for several years now and, while I certainly didn’t think I had it all, what Musaddiq was describing was a major cache of fresh graff right under my nose and I didn’t even some much as suspect it. But that’s how the world is sometimes. You just don’t know what’s right around the corner.
One day, I used to say to myself and anyone else who’d listen, I’m going to write a book called ‘everything you know about these people is wrong’. I have given up on the idea, and I expect anyway that someone else has already done it. What prompted the repeated thought was the way in which so little of what well known thinkers and artists did or said is actually reflected in public consciousness,
Novels set in New York and Berlin of the 1980s and 1990s, in other words, just as subculture was at its apogee and the first major gentrification waves in various neighborhoods of the two cities were underway—particularly when they also try to tell the coming-of-age story of a young art student maturing into an artist—these novels run the risk of digressing into art scene cameos and excursions on drug excess. In her novel A Lesser Day (Spuyten Duyvil, second edition 2018), Andrea Scrima purposely avoids effects of this kind. Instead, she concentrates on quietly capturing moments that illuminate her narrator’s ties to the locations she’s lived in and the lives she’s lived there.
