Point of View
P.O.V.
by Meryl Meisler
"Was the other art teacher killed?"
I could only imagine why a teaching position opened in Bushwick the week before Christmas vacation of 1981.
My Board of Education file number was finally up to the top of the list; the letter stated I could accept the offer to be a full time appointed pedagogue (with benefits) at Roland Hayes Intermediate School 291 on Palmetto Street in Bushwick or go to the bottom of the waiting list. Why was I so anxious about leaving my part time teaching job in East New York to go to Bushwick? On that fateful night in August 1977, while getting ready to dance the night away at Studio 54, the lights went out in NYC and afterimages of looting and fires in Bushwick were forever burned into my brain.
First impressions- reminisces of news wire photos of Beirut after the bombings, people living amongst ruins. It was incredible, kids trying to learn and enjoy day-to-day life in the midst of chaos and despair, amazing teachers with the sense of duty to provide structure and purpose within a neglected neighborhoods shattered cinderblock fortress surrounded by fallen timber, crumbling concrete, broken bricks and ashen cinders.
Shunned by the eyes of media attention for four years. Bushwick seemed to have hit the skids. To me the neighborhood's natural light was so beautiful; kids were kids and the vacant buildings whispered stories. I taught in Bushwick from 1981 to 1994; it was never boring to say the least.
Walking to and from the subway everyday was an adventure, no telling who would be hanging out or what would show up on the street or in a strewn lot. I took pictures in my mind but wasn't so quick to carry a camera because the previous June, while photographing on the last day of school in the Lower East Side, a classroom intruder threatened to use a gun if I didn't give him my medium format camera.
By February, I could no longer resist; and started carrying an inexpensive point and shoot pocket camera loaded with cheap transparency film and developed in the least costly way possible. My route was rhythmic and limited, walking in the morning from the Myrtle Avenue Station up Palmetto Street. After school I might cross over Wilson or Central to go down Gates Avenue and head back to the subway. When I bought a car, the walk was to and from the parking lot two blocks away. On Open School nights or meetings at other schools, I might venture a few blocks over to exotic streets such as Bushwick Avenue, Chauncey, Menahan, Covert and Starr.
My own classroom had no windows, but if sent to cover a class for an absent teacher in a room with a window, I took my little camera. The photos are like a wink, quick sketches of the places and people in this small section of Central Bushwick. Some of the kids I knew from school, most of the people are strangers whom I politely asked permission to take their picture; the buildings stood waiting for their portraits, never knowing when they could stand no more.
In 1985 I had an exhibit School and Surroundings; the gallery visitors didnt seem to get the metaphors and allegories I saw. For example, to me the rooms of an abandoned building were a honeycomb, a vestige of the lives, loves and work that once buzzed within; so slowly over the years I revisited the photographs, literally extending the realities with paint and mixed media. Most of these photographs have never been printed or even been out of their boxes before.
Revisiting Bushwick in 2007, I felt like Jimmy Stewart coming home to Pottersville in Its a Wonderful Life.
Bushwick is buzzing.
June 2, 2007
