Okay. I am just going to dive right into my story, which begins about 10 years ago in Brooklyn. I was living in a little Brooklyn neighborhood called Red Hook. Does anyone know Red Hook? Okay. So for those of you who don’t know, Red Hook is very close to Manhattan, but very isolated. So it’s surrounded on three sides by water. You might be able to see where this is going. It’s a climate change story, and on the fourth side by the Brooklyn Queen’s Expressway. It had no subway and it had one bus.

(00:47)
It was not a great bus. And New York City public transportation system is very reliable, but not on the B86. The neighborhood was pretty small, and it was mostly taken up by Brooklyn’s second-largest housing projects and a lot of Section 8 housing. And the other housing that was in the area were very narrow row houses that were built to accommodate stevedores and dock workers. So they were humble. They were not multi-million dollar renovated brownstones like in our neighboring Brooklyn Heights and places you might see on TV. These were much more humble.

(01:26)
Many of them had two stories with a downstairs that was rented out as a little studio or whatever. Part of what made Red Hook so special is that we had this main street, and so it felt really like a village in a way. Because we had a grocery store on that main street, we had a couple of bodegas, and then we had a laundromat. We had a Dominican hair blow place that was always filled with hair smoke, but you could get your hair turned straight for $12. Yes, and it was just one of those places filled with Spanglish and woman’s, the sounds of women. And Dollar Pizza.

(02:03)
That was not the crappy Dollar Pizza in Midtown, which is made from Styrofoam and cardboard. It was like real pizza, just smaller. That’s why it was a dollar. And if you really wanted a prohibition era cocktail and paella, you could get that there too. But that wasn’t all it was. Much of Brooklyn is only that at that point in time. But this neighborhood was truly a diverse mixture of artists and people living at or just below the poverty line. That was really the mix.

(02:35)
I lived in a building that had been, the first half of it was a can company, a can factory, and then later the Monarch Luggage factory company had bought and built on another side of it, and I lived on the Monarch Luggage side. So part of the appeal to me when I moved in there is that I wasn’t displacing anyone because it had been an operational factory until just after September 11th. No one lived there before me, except for squatters who were artists who eventually just started paying rent to the landlord.

(03:03)
And then it became a place where people lived. Across the street in one direction was a beautiful little park called Coffee Park that in the 80s had been really grown over and known as just a very dangerous drug haven. But then in the late 80s, early 90s, a regular old municipal employee with a real love for agriculture took it on as his personal project and literally pulled with his own hands, the crack pipes out and planted rose bushes.

(03:31)
And over the next couple of decades, it turned it into a Valhalla, a well-funded Valhalla, and this was right across the street from my very industrial neighborhood. It was a dream in many ways, and across the street this way were split-level Section 8 housing. And we lived in the hood, but for the hood it was idyllic. It was a very special time. And all of Brooklyn was changing, but Red Hook was staying the same simply because it was undesirable, because of the lack of the subway, how hard it was to get to and because it was mostly taken over by public housing. I loved living there.

(04:09)
So the city started telling us that there was going to be a storm, and they came around with school buses and megaphones telling us that we were in a low-lying zone. And everyone got these maps slipped under their door with Red Hook painted red. And I had no idea about zones, I had no idea about low-lying neighborhoods, but there were these pamphlets telling us everything we should do. We had to lift our electronics up off the floor. We had to make things safe. We had to get our pets and we had to get out. And most of the neighborhood did evacuate.

(04:38)
People went to shelters, many of them. A lot of people went to friends, a lot of people went to family out of state. My partner at the time, his mom was on Long Island, and she asked us if we would come there and be with her because the storm, we didn’t know what the storm was going to do and where it was going to do it. So we packed up our dog, we lifted our couch, we put it on folding chairs. We put the legs of our dining table in big coffee cans so that they wouldn’t get wet.

(05:02)
We rolled up our rugs. We did everything the pamphlet said. We emptied our fridge so it wouldn’t stink if the power went out. We did all the stuff and we drove to Long Island and absolutely nothing happened in Brooklyn. It barely even rained, but the power went out on Long Island where we were with my partner’s mom and her very nervous friend who was also in her 80. And then we couldn’t leave because we had two oxygenarians without power. And I spent most of the week listening to them have opinions about what I was eating and cheating at gin and Scrabble. That’s what I did for that week of my life.

(05:39)
Luckily, the nervous friend had an industrial-sized thing of Xanax open on the bathroom counter. So I might’ve helped myself to one or two. That was the saving grace of that very difficult week. I was very glad to be of service, but very glad when the power came back on and we got to go back to Brooklyn. Yes, nothing happened. We unrolled our rugs, we put our couches back down. Our life went on. A month later, they started beating the same drum. “There’s going to be another storm.” The boy had really cried wolf because not just did I, not just me, I didn’t want to go back to Long Island.

(06:15)
It was time for my partner’s brother to pick up the reins on that one. But it was also just a tremendous labor to do all that stuff. And our neighbors in the building, our neighbors in the rest of the neighborhood, no one was leaving. Everyone left the first time and no one was leaving the second time. There was also a big question mark about whether the storm would turn. What I now know that I didn’t know then was that the big mystery of that is that since weather has been measured, storms in this region at this time of year have 100% of the time turned and gone out to sea.

(06:48)
The question mark was whether the storm would blow in and hit the eastern seaboard, which it had never done before, and it’s directly, this change in the weather patterns was directly related to Arctic melts. No one was saying that at the time. They were just saying, “Will it or won’t it?” And they were also calling it a super storm because it was a super full moon, a high tide. Various things were aligning along with a storm that might turn right and might turn left. And they were calling it Sandy. And ring a bell for anyone? Hurricane Sandy.

Yeah.

Okay. So the only little indication that something might happen is that a pallet of sandbags were dropped off in the courtyard of my building that nobody did anything with because we’re all being cavalier and silly. The day of the storm, we were waiting. It was a waiting game. It had started to rain, nothing crazy. The wind had started to blow. Nothing crazy. We were waiting to see if this inundation was going to happen. And at some point, all of the neighbors were kind of lingering in the hallways and in the vestibule by the door.

(07:52)
And our super, Eduardo, who was the sleepiest human being I’ve ever known in my life, was rushing. And so this was our first indication that something was awry. We had never seen him rush for any reason, and he was rushing and his eyes were wide, and he said, “The water is coming.” And we were like, “What the fuck does that mean? The water is coming? What does that mean?” And we all snapped into action. I lived in a building with many artists and the priority became protecting the electricity room. So some of these artists came out with these big reams of plastic.

(08:28)
I’m not sure why they had them, but just silk-screening or photography, I don’t know, big sheets of plastic, dead bodies. That was another option. And we did an assembly line with these sandbags. We were throwing the sandbags, throwing the sandbags, and then people were lined up. The electric room was on the street with a garage style door, and we lined it with plastic and we put sandbags all around it. And a couple days later when I tried to help remove those sandbags, I could not lift even one single one, but the adrenaline was so high, we were tossing these things like no big deal.

(08:59)
And after we did that, everyone went back to their apartments and waited for the water to come. A couple minutes later, there was a knock at our door. It was friends of ours from the can side of the building. We were in the luggage side. And that side was maybe five steps down on the other side of the building. And they said, “Water has started to come into our apartment. We don’t want to watch it happen. Can we come in?” And we were like, “Please.” And I had one big window. It was a 10 foot by 10 foot arched window. It sounds beautiful.

(09:26)
The place was full of lead and asbestos, but I did have a beautiful apartment and a beautiful window. And we stood at my big lead lined asbestos window, and we watched the water come up. The water was sort of midpoint on the tires of the car, and all of the flashers of the cars started to come on. And then before we knew it, the flashers were submerged and the lights went out and all the neighborhood, except for our building, because we had protected the electricity room, and the lights went out. And so the only thing illuminating the street was this haunting underwater yellow, blinking, discordant yellow blinking.

(10:00)
Before long the cars were lifting up and I watched the cars float down my Brooklyn Street. And my window, if I had stood on the street and reached up tippy-toes with my hands, I’m not very tall, I could have just touched the bottom of my window. And that night I was able to reach out and touch the water. Yeah, the water was indeed coming. We were panicking. We were sweating. I remember I was sweating, and everyone sort of had a red face, and we were all breathing through our mouths.

(10:30)
I remember looking at the four of us all breathing strangely through our mouths. And I said silly things. I said, “Should I blow up the air mattress? We might have to use it as a raft.” And that didn’t seem like a good idea. And I was like, maybe I should pack us emergency to-go bags, which I ran around throwing things in bags, and the next day I checked, and it was entirely underwear and pistachios. That seemed like the thing at the time. Like not a passport, no cash. Yes. It was just panic.

(11:01)
And then finally my partner said, I think he said as, he realized as he said the words that we all needed to hear, “This isn’t Katrina.” What we had to remember is that levies did not break. The water was not coming in and staying. We weren’t going to have to punch our way through to the roof and wave for help. This was a tidal inundation. And the tide at some point was going to go out. We also had four floors above us that if we had to leave the apartment, we could take the dogs and walk. And so he brought us back to our senses in that moment.

(11:33)
And at that moment, we all kind of exhaled. And my dear friend who had come over from down the hall was a James Beard award-winning food writer who pulled from her tote bag, a king-size family pack of bodega brand, cheesy poofs, the trashiest possible food. And we descended on these cheesy poofs like savages. And we stood passing the bag back and forth, the four of us in front of the window watching trees and cars, and who knows what else, float down the street in Brooklyn.

(12:07)
A little while later, the cars began to settle cockeyed, sort of like pick-up sticks just everywhere. And before long, the flashers that had been submerged so hauntingly were out of the water again. And we looked around at each other and we were covered in orange grease. And we all had orange flakes on our shirts, but we hugged each other and settled in and kind of just held our heads in our hands by how apocalyptic that had felt. And we passed the night drinking wine and talking to each other. They slept over. And in the morning, we all got up. We made coffee, we still had power.

(12:44)
And the four of us walked outside together with the dogs. And the first thing to hit us was the overwhelming odor of gasoline and oil. All those car tanks had leaked. All the boilers on the first floors of apartments had been turned over. It was pungent. And we immediately went back inside and put plastic bags on our shoes and on all the dog’s feet. We walked around and the neighborhood was pandemonium. Cars had been floated into the metal grates of stores. There was no looting or anything like that, but it was chaos. It was true devastation.

(13:17)
The street sign poles were bent in half in many cases, and there was no power. So there was this real urgency to get all the drywall and everything that had been flooded from all of these homes and shops out as soon as possible. Because once it started to mold, that’s when things get impossible to fix. And so regular citizens were in strangers homes and businesses pulling sheetrock out of the walls and pulling things out. And the streets were just full of these 12, 15 feet high mounds of rubbish and wet garbage.

(13:54)
We learned later about the Rockaways, which that smell of gasoline, we were lucky because the Rockaways, which was right on the water, not only was flooded to the point where houses were lifted off of their foundation and placed next to it, but that whole neighborhood was on fire while it was flooding. The surface of the water was on fire, and mostly first responders lived in that neighborhood. It was a very blue collar neighborhood in the Rockaways with houses passed down for generations.

(14:18)
It was the place of firemen and cops and their neighborhood flooded and burned at the same time. It was devastating. Our neighborhood only flooded, and we would hear stories from our neighbors about being in their first floor apartments and crawling up to the storage loft and watching their couch float up to look them face to face. And they didn’t know if they were going to have to do that very thing of punching through if they could to the second floor. People thought they were going to die.

(14:43)
Time passed, relief came. All of that drywall was ripped out. Almost nobody had flood insurance. And those who did still, had to fight. Some aid came from other parts of the city. But the real stars of the show in Sandy were the Rockaways, the burning flood, and the Jersey Shore, because that’s where so many people vacation. People really didn’t care about Red Hook, in part because it was this undesirable neighborhood and in part because poor people lived there, a bunch of poor brown people lived in Red Hook for the most part, and a couple of cranky artists.

(15:16)
And it just wasn’t the fascination that it was in the other places. So money did trickle in, and there was a pretty powerful group of local business owners who demanded Bloomberg’s attention publicly and did get it. But the Dominican hair salon ladies, they never came back. The man who repaired our watches and did small leather work for us, never saw him again. Dollar Pizza, gone for good. And those storefronts sat empty for a very long time. And I didn’t totally understand it. Everything had been ripped out and replaced and repainted, and they were just sitting empty.

(15:53)
And what I realized was happening was carpet bagging. Those storefronts were now twice or triple the rent and landlords used this. It’s crisis capitalism at its finest. Landlords were using this to change the neighborhood. And when people did start filling in those stores, they were full of boutiques that sold purses for the median monthly income of the majority of the residents in that area. And I remember one place that was run by a darling woman who would bring her ancient beagle, and she handmaded gift cards, and she hand crocheted little baby booties.

(16:32)
That’s what she sold in her tiny little storefront before the storm. And after the storm, they sold slate cheese plates for $400 a piece. That’s how the neighborhood changed. And I think before that, I thought of disaster capitalism as something that happened far away. I thought about it as a problem of far away tropical places that were sort of undone by climate change and then big hotels were put up. I didn’t really know how it could happen on this small little scale where the heart of a neighborhood could be ripped out by water and filled in by people who didn’t belong there.

(17:14)
I left that neighborhood not too long after that. And I was asked to pose a question to you guys for conversation. So at this point, my question would really be, have you experienced climate change on a personal level as affecting your community in this way where there was maybe a distinct before and a distinct after or where a change happened as a result of climate in a way that was subtle or sneaky or slow?

(17:47)
Because I don’t know if I wasn’t there to it happen, if I ever would’ve been able to say, Red Hook changed because of Hurricane Sandy. I think I would’ve said Red Hook changed because it was bound to change. Because look at what’s happening in Brooklyn. But I know because I was there, and I wonder how many other things are happening like that around the world that we just don’t know about because we’re not there. And is my question answerable? Okay, that’s my story.