A Peach grows in Brooklyn

 I'm looking forward to Peaches. Not the one who lived with Feist, but the new restaurant in Bed-Stuy. It does not look as if it will change the face of dining in New York, but it interests me in a couple of ways. Most notably, it's clearly Southern inflected, but unlike some places in the very same metropolis, it does not seem to be doing a cutesy and overwrought version of that idiom. I'm eager to try the watermelon and country ham app., and I imagine it would not be the kind of place where the servers would be required to say "y'all."

The other ish comes up in a broader context of gentrification. TONY touts the opening thus: "The lineup will be market-driven (so no promises that you’ll find those fried green tomatoes on the menu if you make the trek out to do-or-die territory)..." which elicited the comment
“do or die territory”? are we really still saying that? While I’m happy to see some new businesses livening up the neighborhood, I’m disappointed that old prejudices and uninformed assumptions are still alive and well.

It raises a few interesting questions. My first encounter with the phrase "Bed Stuy - Do or Die" was when Spike Lee used it to welcome Flava Flav to his neighborhood on the B-side of the 12" of "Fight the Power" (also worth digging up for Flav's thoughts on George Michael's R&B Grammy. It also comes up on Gang Starr's "The Planet." It's ambigious, as it suggests pride in the effort it takes to live there, but does also suggest the violence that was endemic to the neighborhood.

Things have changed in Bed Stuy since then, or at least there was no calamari with aioli or sumer squash salad in the offing back in Radio Raheem's day, and there is now. It's a small thing, but in an age of Neighborhoodies and Cafe Press and suchlike, the politics of the neighborhood nickname are interesting. Sez Wikipedia, in 2005, someone launched a campagn to replace "Bed Stuy - Do or Die" with the less catchy "Bed Stuy - and proud of it." The question I have is is this Bed Stuy makeover a legitimate effort by its residents to make people cognizant of a new social reality, or is it part of a gentrifying campaign for the benefit of Park Slope economic refugees? On a related note, if you're a white guy who went to, like, Oberlin, and you and your wife buy a brownstone on the fringes of Bed Stuy, are you allowed to say "do or die"? If there's arugula on the menu, is the restaurant "do or die territory" at all?

I welcome answers to these questions, and will offer by way of extrapolation from my own home town, that I curse the day the publicist was born who came up with "The Ladder District" as a name for parts of the Combat Zone and Downtown Crossing that suggested fewer hookers and black teenagers, respectively, and more "small plates" and blueberry mojitos. For a control, when Savin Hill gets gentrified, it will be interesting if the architects and such continue to refer to it as Stab and Kill.

Comments

[New Orleans survivor]

Bed Stuy and proud of it? Sounds like white people to me.

[cinetrix]

Yeah, try fact-checking the so-called Ladder District for Boston Magazine back in the dizzay and being told by the publicist for whatever the joint with the Indian name was that shed named it up. Talk about a sty in the Naked Eye.