WIRING THE UNWIRED

摘要

The second week ofAugust isn't ordinarily a time given over to novelty and ambition in New York. The air is a jellied vapor of sweat and refuse, and anybody who can afford to be elsewhere is. But the vast Queensbridge housing complex was an unlikely scene of neon-vested hustle. The six-story brown-brick apartment blocks along 41st Avenue had been encased in green scaffolding and draped with long, heavy bolts of cream burlap, which gave the blunt rectilinear forms a veil of anticipation. Queensbridge had been recently named the beneficiary of millions of municipal dollars for neighborhood development, and the attitude, a young press secretary from the New York City Housing Authority told me, was one of "all hands on deck." Workers mended the leaky roofs and repointed the brick facades. Permanent LEDs had been ordered to replace the broken sulfur fixtures; in the meantime, mobile arrays of large klieg lights had been set up in the courtyards and along the thoroughfares. CCTV cameras were going to be ensconced along the perimeters and above the entry-ways, and layered-access doors, like shuttle airlocks, were to be introduced along with key-fob admittance. Perhaps the most consequential upgrade, however, was invisible: the introduction of free, grounds-wide wireless broadband. The city chose Queensbridge as its pilot site in part because it's the largest public housing development in North America. It's also the most visible, a planned city in miniature just across the Queensboro Bridge from the towers of Midtown. The development, spread out on 50 acres of Long Island City waterfront between the bridge and the Ravenswood power plant, opened in 1940; it houses around 6,600 residents in 3,147 units among 26 buildings.The buildings were known at the time for their novel design-a Y-shape, instead of a simple cross, to provide for more sunlight-and for the clever cost-cutting measures taken in their construction. The elevators, for example, originally stopped only at every other floor. That infrastructure was haltingly modernized over the decades, but it had been a long time since the precinct had seen major coordinated capital improvements, and if the outside world had paid any attention to Queensbridge at all, it was because of the houses' towering hip hop emissaries of the '80s and '90s: Marley Marl, Mobb Deep, and Nas. Now many of the residents were skeptical. The neighborhood, only two subway stops from Midtown, had seen swift gentrification, and the worry was widespread that such remedial alacrity could only be for someone else's benefit. The rumor on the block was that the development was being prettified to be sold.