From the moment you load the page of New York Magazine’s award-winning multimedia story “One Block,” you feel like you’ve been invited to hang out on this little stretch of Brooklyn’s MacDonough Street. A video banner at the top cruises down the block, like you’re in a car looking at its brownstones with cozy stoops and hoping to get a parking spot. An old photo catapults you back to the tight-knit neighborhood in the 1970s, when block parties kept the street bustling with life—and some of the younger people in the picture, we learn, might even still live there.
These features would no doubt feel at home in a standard text-based story. But at the bottom of the page, several doors open and strangers appear; at this point, the piece suddenly becomes more interactive. These strangers literally present themselves to the reader. Yet, they’re not strangers to one another, which is part of their allure. We are, in fact, the strangers.
“One Block” showcases the narrative possibilities in multimedia journalism that simply aren’t present in more one-dimensional reporting (whether it be text, video or audio). The immersive, interactive result is a tantalizingly granular and “nonpartisan” take on a single block of Bed-Stuy that nonetheless raises some pretty complicated issues regarding race, gentrification and urban life.
There are endless ways to read this story—none of which is more correct than the others. The point is, rather, that you’re the reporter, poring over your notes and annotations. You’re the one who has to create a mental map of these characters’ relationships to one another—and what they mean for this small pocket of New York City in the midst of great change.
[pq full]There are endless ways to read this story—none of which is more correct than the others. The point is, rather, that you’re the reporter, poring over your notes and annotations. You’re the one who has to create a mental map of these characters’ relationships to one another—and what they mean for this small pocket of New York City in the midst of great change.[/pq]
In other words, there’s virtually no implied author -- to borrow a term from literary theory -- aside from the lingering sense that we are somehow authors of a very intimate experience to which we might otherwise never have access.
Here, the hyperlink represents a human connection; at any given moment, you can choose to follow one to the other side, where you’ll meet a resident of the house across the street, get a neighbor’s take on what life in Bed-Stuy used to be like, or even learn how to play skully. (An explanatory sidebar—complete with a sketch of two children playing the game—pops up when you hover over the highlighted word “skully” in Milton Miles’ conversation.)
This is not the type of story that you digest in one sitting. No, you let the details about these characters’ lives percolate. When you come back to it, you can pick up where the narrative-in-flux left off—whether it’s on the sidewalk talking to “Brother” Spears or on Wilma Ector’s porch, listening to her recall the homegrown peaches she used to give away to neighbors.
In this way, the techniques used in “One Block” resemble those used in fiction—particularly because the flexible narrative allows for varied interpretation. But whereas in fiction the order of events does matter, here, it really doesn’t—what matters is that we keep returning to fill in the gaps of our knowledge. To become part of the community.
“One Block” taps into an idea that one of Macdonough Street’s residents articulates so well: It’s essentially a ghost story. It captures the arc of what a place once was, and what it is becoming—and what that means to the generations of people who have called it home.
Here’s Brooke Vermillion’s story:
The man who was selling this house, Arthur, was a painter and an interesting character, but he didn’t get along with the neighbors. Arthur haunts the house sometimes. We see ghosts here. And a lot of other people have seen them, including Brother’s son, Jamie. They have really distinct personalities. There’s Ada Youngblood, who used to own the house in the ’50s. She doesn’t like it when we do construction projects. She shows her displeasure by walking back and forth on the third floor really fast—clop, clop, clop, clop, kind of angry. There’s Henry, Arthur’s brother, who’s this really calming, nurturing presence, who kind of looks in on you every once in a while. He spends most of his time in the third-floor closet. There’s a weird trickster ghost that is actually kind of terrifying that is in a bedroom where a friend of mine used to stay. [My friend] woke up in the middle of the night once and saw these two 19th-century boys playing with a ball in the center of his room. And then he saw me as a ghost, as an old lady hovering above him, screaming. And I saw this Elizabethan-style disembodied head, kind of laughing. We also see a lot of light orbs in the house.
Brooke’s profile gives you the option to read Daniel “June” Farquhar’s story next—he’s a tenant of Brother Spears. Together with Gregory “Doc” Walker, the three men spend most days on Brother’s front stoop, keeping vigil on the neighborhood.
The men say they’re part of the “originals”: those select few who’ve lived their entire lives on the block. June, Doc and Brother drop some pretty wonderful lines, including “Matt’s got the complexion for protection” and “I got love everywhere I go.” They give out well-meaning nicknames to new arrivals on the street. They stop crimes. Still, they miss the old days. “Before, we had more unity,” Brother says. As Doc puts it, “The value of the houses is going up, and they’re building nicer stores. But it’s not for us."
This collection of testimonies felt to me like the crossroads of “One Block”: the point at which we begin to understand what this street is all about, and what’s at stake —regardless of when you actually arrive here in the course of your browsing. Of course, given the story’s pick-your-adventure flow, for other readers this turning point might come at a different time, with a different set of characters.
“One Block” illustrates how real people’s lives are affected by the changing tenor of life on a single block. Rents rise and fall, new families move in, longtime residents grow closer and yet further from one another. We see how collective memory shapes us (who remembers what?) and that, no straightforward narrative could do justice to this network of relations, beliefs and desires.
Nor could it get away with throwing in a recipe for sweet potato pie for good measure.
