Dominic Umile

At night we and our neighbors showed up at one another’s doors, drank beer and whiskey and tequila and talked about art and poetry and traded Harpers for Mother Jones and learned more about psychedelic music; we developed a fondness for Erik Satie together. We scoped out dollar-beer nights on Bedford and free gallery openings on Kent and Wythe or in West Chelsea.

But when I met my wife—I actually came out from California to go on our first date—she was living in Brooklyn, on Bergen St. near Flatbush. We took the subway there, and I just remember it being so dramatic to go from the frenetic, noisy bustle of Manhattan and to come up out of the subway and be in a neighborhood that was extremely quiet and peaceful. I was taken by how beautiful the streets were: the brownstones, all the trees that were up above. I think, in that moment, there was the first glimmer in my mind that Brooklyn could possibly be a place I’d want to live after being on the West Coast my entire life.

Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bengali descent who has now denounced his work as an informant, said police told him to embrace a strategy called “create and capture.” He said it involved creating a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD. For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests.

It was normal to be poor. Everybody was. But that didn’t mean you were impoverished, as long as you had books.