Covfefe Plaza

10 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Politics, Pop Culture

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Cole Spring Plaza, Corporate Influence, Corruption, Gentrification, Greater Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce, Growing Older, Housing, Isiah Leggett, Lobbying, Montgomery County, Moving, Noise Factor, Public Parking, Ross Management, Silver Spring Maryland, Space, United Therapeutics, Unither, Urban Sprawl

Cole Spring Plaza (w/atrium in permanent renovation) with Photoshopped spray paint, July 9, 2017. (Donald Earl Collins).

Well, actually, this post is about Cole Spring Plaza, the luxury apartment high-rise that me and my pregnant wife moved into in 2003, and recently moved out of with our nearly 14-year-old son at the end of June 2017. In all, we lived in the building in downtown Silver Spring for fourteen years and a month, or 5,144 days. For half of those days, it was a pretty good to solid place to live. Although there were a decreasing number of luxuries in our two-bedroom, two-bathroom flat on the eleventh floor, the apartment was a roomy one and our neighbors were friendly. And I could get a good night’s sleep many nights (when I wasn’t sleep-deprived from the first 1,859 days of Noah’s life, 2003-2008). Or, short of that, I could count on getting an afternoon nap, a short after-work nap, or weekend naps to recover.

By the winter of 2011-12, I couldn’t count on that anymore. Not with United Therapeutics and their endless construction projects, underway off and on since 2005. They had torn down their old headquarters adjacent to the Montgomery County Public Parking garage on 1200 Spring Street to build a state-of-the-art solar and geothermal powered monstrosity, including an underground garage. For seven weeks between December 2011 and February 2012, the construction workers pounded away with jackhammers on granite boulders as I attempted to work and teach online at home. I nearly lost my sanity.

Cole Spring Plaza, circa spring 2012 (before new double-paned windows; with trees & bushes in atrium), Silver Spring, MD. (http://www.australiansquashtour.org/).

This, of course, was not Ross Management’s fault, the property managers for Cole Spring Plaza. Nor was the onsite property manager to blame, seeing that they had nothing to do with the jackhammers. What was their fault was that no one in the building had double-paned windows, ones that could seal the noise of downtown Silver Spring and of major construction sites out of our flats. Ross finally replaced our windows in July 2012, but only after it became obvious that more tenants than usual had started moving out.

The granite boulders ordeal was but a symbol of the accumulation of the problems with our living arrangement at Cole Spring Plaza. None of these problems would’ve been a deal breaker for us when we first moved in back in May 2003. After four years in our previous luxury apartment, a 700-square-foot, one-bedroom place, the 1,350-square-footer that was our flat in Cole Spring Plaza seemed spacious. Sure, we knew that it didn’t have a washer and dryer in the unit, or valet parking, or a dry cleaning service on the premises, or a community gym or business office. But it did have the space we needed.

It only became obvious after a few years why the “luxury” part of the sell to us regarding Cole Spring Plaza was a lie. The developers had built the high-rise in 1967, apparently with the idea that it would be a hotel at first. But with Silver Spring not exactly a business or tourist attraction a half-century ago, they settled on the luxury high-rise idea. In the thirty-six years before we moved in, little to no work had been done to replace old plumbing, to repair the central ventilation system, to make washers and dryers available in each flat, or to give each apartment its own central air and heating. This Oscar Madison-Felix Unger setup may have been the definition of a luxury high-rise back in 1973. But in 2017, was a higher end version of my time at 616 (a bit of an exaggeration — the rent was/is way too damn high!). The result of what we did know, combined with the numerous little things we didn’t know, meant a gradual decrease in the quality of living in our place over fourteen years.

The plumbing issues meant for hard water stains that messed up our clothes when we washed them in the building, so by 2011, we were washing them off site. The lack of central ventilation exacerbated my sleep apnea and asthma symptoms, meaning less sleep over time. By 2012, there were two full months out of the year that we didn’t use our HVAC, one month because it was too warm for heat, the other because it was too cool outdoors for air conditioning. It was clear to me by the time our son had finished elementary school that it was time to move.

Spring Colesville public parking (the garage we used off-on for 12 years), Silver Spring, MD, January 23, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins).

But, move where, exactly? Did we want to stay in the area, or, especially with most of my job interviews taking me to Boston, California, Philly, and Baltimore, did we want to move out-of-town? Would we end up moving, but would I be stuck in long-distance marriage and fatherhood? That was always the main issue for me.

Aside from that, so much had changed since the spring of 2003. A large reason for the choice that we made in Cole Spring Plaza was because we didn’t own a car in 2003. We had looked at the Nissan Xterra and Volvo XC90, but because we lived so close to a Metro stop, we hadn’t seriously considered buying one. That is, until our son came along. We hadn’t looked at other options because for us, there didn’t seem to be that many.

United Therapeutics project after removal of last of garage, Silver Spring, MD, October 27, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins).

Finally, after Cole Spring Plaza decided that the best way to attract new tenants was to tear down fifty-year-old trees and decades’ old bushes and build a new atrium in June 2015 (which still isn’t complete), me and my wife both knew it was time. That, and United Therapeutics getting another sweet deal from Montgomery County Council Executive Ike Leggett and the Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce. After six years of negotiation, the county sold them the parking garage conveniently located across the street from Cole Spring Plaza for $10.2 million. In the twelve months since, Whiting-Turner tore down this garage and has mostly laid the foundation for a six-story, 120,000-square-foot building. That, and the electrical and water and sewage work around the building, left us — and especially mostly working-from-home me — feeling under siege.

United Therapeutics project, Silver Spring, MD, June 19., 2017. (Donald Earl Collins).

So we looked, at places in Baltimore, but mostly, between Rockville, Silver Spring, Takoma Park, and even in Bethesda (whose lily-Whiteness I can’t stand), and settled for a town home a couple of miles from our old place. Here, the loudest thing I’ve heard so far is a garbage truck and birds fighting over food.

I wouldn’t recommend Cole Spring Plaza to anyone except to college students, especially if five of them want to room in a two-bed, two-bath flat (I met at least two groups of students doing exactly that). The building, like the rest of downtown Silver Spring, has changed, and not for the better. The building is in disrepair, and will likely get bought out by United Therapeutics in the coming decade.

This isn’t a story of gentrification, for Silver Spring has been a mix of upwardly mobile ethnicities for decades, especially in downtown. No, this is another story of cash-strapped municipalities, the lobbying of Chambers of Commerce, sweet deals for politicians lining their pockets, and corporations encroaching on residential areas. And the story of a family who should’ve moved into a town home three years sooner.

Aside

Leaving Mount Vernon

26 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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"Emotion (Ain't Nobody)" Remix (2014), "Swimming Pools (Drank)" (2012), Child Abuse, College, Domestic Violence, Emotions, Family, Kendrick Lamar, Leaving, Loneliness, Maverick Sabre, Moving, Pitt, Politics of Respectability, Poverty, Respectability Politics, Self-Awareness, Self-Discovery

I left for Pittsburgh and for the University of Pittsburgh on this day/date twenty-eight years ago, my first trip on my own. It was my first trip out-of-state since my Mom took me and my brother Darren on a bus trip to Pennsylvania Amish country in June ’78, nine years earlier. At 5:51 am on the last Wednesday in August ’87, with my older brother Darren’s help — and with my Mom and three of four younger siblings watching us from the living room window — I packed my luggage, Army sack, and two boxes of bedding and materials into a Reliable Taxi. We headed for East 241st to meet up with my dad. From there, we took the 2 Subway all the way to Penn Station, with enough time to board and get all of my stuff on the 7:50 am Pennsylvanian train to the ‘Burgh. For the second time in a row, my dad was sober, and gave me a glassy-eyed hug and shoulder squeeze. Darren was both sad and happy to see me go.

Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian train pulling out of Altoona, PA station, heading east for Philly, NYC, uploaded February 2013. (Dustin F.; http://www.northeastrailfans.com/).

I’ve gone over the trip to Pittsburgh and my transformation from a seventeen-year-old with the pent-up emotions of someone who hadn’t left May 31, 1982 behind throughout my eight years of blogging and through my memoir. I’ve written about moving on to Pittsburgh before. What I haven’t really written about fully is how I thought and felt in leaving Mount Vernon, New York behind. The short answer is, I was somewhere between terrified, joyous, embittered, and sad to go, and all at once.

I was terrified. It was my first trip on my own, to a city I’d never been to before, to a university I never visited prior to saying yes. I could meet people who might catch on that I was someone who had spent the previous six years with few acquaintances, much less friends. I was hopeful, but had zero idea what to expect.

But I really was happy to leave. Between my decade living at 616, the abuse, the poverty, the Hebrew-Israelite years, the constant ridicule, the years in Humanities, the constant work of watching after Mom, my dad, my siblings, I was through. Throw in a summer of obsession with and emasculation by Phyllis, and five years of realizing that I needed to get out, and going to Pittsburgh was a no-brainer. Heck, if I’d been a bit smarter about my application process, I could’ve just as easily applied to the University of Washington, Stanford, Northwestern, Georgetown, Michigan, University of Toronto and UPenn and almost certainly gotten in. It didn’t matter where I was going, really. I just needed to go and find my myself, and my education with that.

That last year or so in Mount Vernon had let me know that even with an academic scholarship (after a private investigation) from Columbia, staying would’ve been a huge mistake. Between the silent disdain and snickering of Black teachers at Mount Vernon High School around my sullen presence and the whole Estelle Abel episode at the end of four years of torment. Add to that the years of Black middle class folk talking at me about how my life was so much better because they marched or protested somewhere before I was conceived, or because they prayed for me. Add to that this insistence that I “give back to the community.” As if Black Mount Vernon had given me anything but a hard way to go since I was knee-high to a boil weevil.

Viewing and wake service for Heavy D, Grace Baptist Church, Mount Vernon, NY, November 17, 2011. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images; https://cbsnewyork.files.wordpress.com/).

As I saw it, the only difference between the vapid, seething facade of White liberalism among paternalistic White Mount Vernonites and the false smiles and frequent excoriations of Mount Vernon’s Black middle class was skin color. They drank deep from swimming pools full of what we now call respectability politics, born out of a need to be good examples to the world, like Kendrick Lamar described in “Swimming Pools” (2012). (Pour up [drank], head shot [drank]…faded [drank]). This isn’t the same as doing the right thing at the right time or speaking truth to power. You make money, wear nice clothes, drive a nice car, stand up straight, look a White man in the eye while firmly grasping his hand. And apologize for not being as assimilable as you pretend. It was 100%, USDA-approved bullshit, and it smelled like it a lot of days, too.

I was sad to leave, too. There was a part of me that still wanted to fit in, out of loneliness, if nothing else. I still liked Clover Donuts and some of the breakfast places on the South Side. I longed for some sort of acceptance, an acknowledgment that I was a real person, even though that would’ve required being around real people at 616, and in Humanities, and in the rest of Mount Vernon. I knew that I’d miss the close proximity to The City. I’d put my hopes and dreams in a place in which I knew I couldn’t afford to stay, literally and figuratively. That longing would come to haunt me in the coming year, but I’d eventually learn, I could always visit New York.

October in Portland

14 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work

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Career, Career Decisions, Grantmakers for Education, Great Recession, Jobs, Moving, Portland (Oregon), Self-Reflection, Underemployment

Panoramic shot of Hawthorne Bridge and downtown Portland, Oregon, October 14, 2013. (http://en.wikipedia.org).

I know, I know. It’s November. But this post is still relevant. Five years ago last month, I made one of the toughest career decision I’ve ever faced, and certainly the toughest this side of the twenty-first century. I turned down a job that looked in many respects like a really good fit with my career goals and experiences, a job that on the surface would’ve paid pretty well. My decision to not take this job wasn’t made in a vacuum — this was October ’08, after all, when the US economic slowdown truly became the Great Recession here and around the world. But as it turned out, there are things more important than a higher salary and a job that looks good on a curriculum vitae.

Grantmakers for Education had interviewed me four times in six weeks between August, September and early October ’08. The first three were telephone conversations with various staff members, including the executive director. I already knew of their work through my college access and retention initiative at Academy for Educational Development (AED – now FHI 360). I interviewed for GFE’s program director position, which would’ve made me second or third in charge within the organization. Through interviews and research, I knew that GFE had been around since ’97 as a spin-off from the work of the Council on Foundations — meaning it had some support from the private foundation community. I also knew that they had a total staff of seven people.

But, most important, I knew that GFE’s offices were in Portland, Oregon. It wasn’t a deterrent for me. After all, my wife and I had agreed that any job search of mine would invite the possibility of making a geographic move. The cities, though, had included New York, Philly, Boston, Chicago and Seattle (with some considerations for Toronto and the Bay Area), not Portland specifically. In my mind, Portland, though definitely different from Seattle, was close enough.

By the time I flew out for my in-person interview with GFE on October 2 and 3, ’08, I did feel quite a bit of pressure riding on my interview and the decisions I’d make if offered the job. For one, I’d been privately predicting the economic slide that we now call the Great Recession since ’02. As a result, my consulting work for the second half of ’08 had all but dried up. I was teaching only one class at University of Maryland University College that fall, meaning that we would be going pretty deep into our savings to get through the end of the year. And though Boy @ The Window had attracted the attention of a few literary agents, the Great Recession had affected their businesses and their willingness to take a chance on a not-so-well-known author.

“Great Recession: It doesn’t feel over,” Bob Englehart, Hartford Courant, September 29, 2010. (http://blogs.courant.com).

With all that on my mind, it was a wonder that I could focus on anything at all, much less the final interview. Yet I did, and in the process, met with a wonderful staff and found Portland a rather interesting city.

So I wasn’t surprised the following Wednesday that GFE called me to offer me the position. They gave me a low-ball offer, one that was only $5,000 more than I made at my last AED job, and far less than I made as a consultant (at least, when I had work as a consultant). But they did offer $8,000 in moving expenses. We went back and forth on salary and benefits over the next five days.

During that time, my wife and I talked at length about moving to Portland, Noah’s schooling (he was in kindergarten back then), and the negotiations. She finally revealed to me a couple of things I wished she had told me before my third interview. One, she wasn’t interested in moving to Portland (it reminded her too much of Pittsburgh, only without a sizable Black community). Two, she thought that GFE’s small staff and budget would limit my career and put a ceiling on my salary over time.

My wife didn’t want me to take a job and move out there by myself, with her and Noah here in the DC area. Nor did she want me to make a decision based on the momentary whims of the economy or because the job would be a relatively easy one for me. Ultimately, my wife reminded me that I preferred a challenge, work that could be exciting, that paid well, a community with a diverse nature, an organization that offered opportunities for the long-term.

Albert Einstein and his insanity definition, June 2013. (http://liveyourtruelife.org/).

On October 15, GFE came back with their final offer. It was somewhat generous. They increased the salary offer by ten percent, and offered $10,000 in moving expenses. In exchange, my salary would be capped for three years, and they wouldn’t pay into my retirement fund over that period (I’d have to add to it without them matching). They even offered to allow me to work from DC during October and November before moving in December.

Still, reading in between the lines, my wife was right. I could clearly see that if I’d taken this job, my marriage would’ve been over. Maybe not immediately, but it would’ve been a industrial-sized shovel full of dirt toward a buried coffin. The distance would’ve been too great to carry on anything resembling a family. As for my career, I would’ve faced a dead end in the intermediate term — forget about the long-term — financially and otherwise.

So I said “No” to GFE. I stared into the proverbial abyss, knowing that it would be a rough next few months. And it was. But I did pick up several steady consulting gigs in ’09 and ’10. My teaching schedule went from part-time to pretty much full-time by Fall ’10 (still an adjunct contract, though). I made sure that my wife was on board with a job not on our top-cities-to-move-to list before applying.

My decision was as much about finding the right position with the right organization as it was about ensuring the health of my marriage and my family. All have to be in sync on big decisions like this. I’m glad we have that clarity now.