When the powers that be in NYC rebuilt the east end of the city collectively known as the Pit, they relied on a widely known philosophy of ‘do only what we need to do’. In this case that meant only redeveloping as much as was obviously unstable or otherwise corrupted be it through damage, magical intervention, time, etc. This way the areas they didn’t fully rebuild could be marked as classic or historical. That is how Brooklyn wound up being a hipster mecca over half a century ago. There was enough of the repurposed old to wipe that suburban shine off the new and to make it accessible to those new faces coming in. Oh, and they did a bunch of old school redlining to get rid of who they deemed undesirable.
This matters to me because of the fountain on 29th and 2nd. The fountain is a landmark and has been for as long as I’ve been alive, though not for the reasons that most people approach it. The fountain was dedicated to the memory of the 27 metahumans murdered in that part of the city during New York’s version of the Night of Rage. Little known secret: The published 27 number was a lowball account. The police records I came across indicated more than double that number of injuries incurred that turned out to be fatal. Anyway, the fountain was erected to show our connections to metahumanity in a meaningful way. The statue at the center shows a long-limbed troll walking with a human boy holding one of his hands and a human girl holding the other. There is a quote, by Ghandi of all people, etched around the base of the statue that reads, “
“If you want to take revenge and feed your hate, you will never be satisfied. Only love can eradicate hate, not hate by itself”
Weird, right? I thought so. I also did a lot more digging and discovered that the spot where the statue was built just happened to be near a secret entrance to the Manhattan underground that was supposedly concreted over when the the fountain was erected. I say supposedly, because it wasn’t. In fact, the quote was a direct message to the increasingly hostile meta population that, “hey, we got this, so chill okay?”
It did not go well.
Fast forward to the present and the underground still exists and so does that entrance, because it was easier for the city to refurbish that set of blocks into a new hipster haven than it was to tear it all down. So that’s where I went.
Some Thoughts:
- After drifting for a while, I decided it was important to get back to the key terms and situations of this story. Writing is like that more than it isn’t–you swim around a story, figuring things out in your head or on paper as you move, ever slow dang slowly, towards what is centrally the plot or the theme. I posted mine right at the beginning. I’m starting to make a little progress…