The Stoop

New York, NY - Peter - Friday, June 14th, 2002 : goo

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It's odd, but the stoop is quite a social device. I live in one of the quickly gentrifying sections of southwest Spanish Harlem; there, the stoop is one of the only legitimate areas of socially equal ground. All over the neighborhood, the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans hold ongoing beefs. The Harlem-generation blacks resent the gentrifying whites and the college kids, who all hate the hipsters, who resent the rich West Enders over off Broadway. Its all quite complex and fascinating.

But the stoop doesnt differentiate. The only rule seems to be that one only sit on the stoop of one's own building; each building's variety of tennants taking to the stoop at dusk; the rumpled old holdouts from the days of rent control, the hustlers, the grad students, the hashers hashing, the drinkers clinking bottles of Olde English; smokes being shared, bottles passed, ingenius and profound conversation being spewed in countless dialects and levels of fluency, all participating, all laughing.

Its the sort of personal interaction that can't happen in the streets or on public trans, the kind of thing you only share in those odd moments of solidarity on the stoop.

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Peter: well, you could try searching the web for it.

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