Editor’s Note: Students in the Fall 2020 Advanced Reporting class produced stories about Tampa Bay neighborhoods, people and other places for a series called On the Street Where You Live.
I always dreamed of the day I move into my first house and join a community.
Perhaps the neighbors would look out their windows as the moving truck pulls in, anxious and excited to meet the new community members.
Maybe, as it happens in movies, we’d get a knock on the door and open it to smiling faces and a tray of cookies. Or do I bring them the cookies?
Admittedly, I would require some training in neighborly etiquette, but whether I was doing the baking or not, I was certain someone would get cookies. Unfortunately, I discovered life is nothing like the movies.
“There is no ‘community’ anymore,” says Robert “Bob” Coderre. My chocolate chip hopes vanished.
Coderre and I live in the Grant Park neighborhood in Tampa’s east district, where East Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and N 50th Street connect.
Ironically enough, as we sit in what could pass as a neighborhood clubhouse, Coderre tells me there is no community. Fit with barstools you have to climb up into, Harley Davidson memorabilia at every repositioning of my eyesight, a real traffic light suspended from the ceiling, ‘80s rock blaring out of an old boombox radio and a fridge stocked with Busch beer, he had extended and converted an open garage into your typical local biker bar. (Also, something perhaps less relevant to the story but indeed an egregious omission to withhold from the painting of the scene: there were adorable cats everywhere, climbing onto, and at times falling from, high heights in his bar. Bob’s wife tends to the neighborhood strays).
Coderre is the neighbor directly across from my house and the only one who introduced himself to my wife and me. He has lived in this neighborhood for 47 years. I have for nine months.
“Neighbors don’t know neighbors anymore,” said Bob. “They stay in secluded, to themselves, they don’t want to be friendly or know each other like they use to.”
This has certainly been my impression. I don’t speak much to my neighbors and hadn’t spoken at length, even with Bob.
“I always growed up, you help your neighbors,” he said. “I used to be the part of the neighborhood association.”
Why was this was my first time hearing of a neighborhood association in Grant Park?
According to their page on the neighborhood link, they reestablished the Grant Park Association in 1999. I await a response from the provided email on the Tampa Registry, but the website doesn’t appear to have been active since 2001.
“Oh, yea! We had a strong Grant Park civic association,” said Bob.
I looked up as he disappeared into the back of his bar, muddled around for a bit and emerged with a piece of paper so old and tattered I thought it might turn to dust if he placed it on the counter too roughly.
Dated December 13, 2000, it was a certificate that read: “In appreciation of your Civic Leadership and Dedication to the Grant Park Civic Neighborhood and Citizens of the City of Tampa,” signed Mayor Dick Greco, Neighborhood Liaison Julie Harris and Chairman, City Council Charlie Miranda.
“They would come to the meetings occasionally and let us know how things were,” Bob said. “Charlie did it quite often, I was dealin’ with him and Bob Buckhorn.”
Former Mayor Bob Buckhorn was on the city council at that time.
Former Mayor Dick Greco came one time while Bob was with the association.
“Yea, it caught me off guard, but we had a little election and they elected me president,” said Bob.
In a neighborhood where 73% of people are black, they decided to elect a southern drawl, Harley Davidson-riding white “country boy” — in his own words — to be president of their neighborhood association. One wonders if this truly took place in the same country that seems more divided than ever. “We never fought, we agreed on most things, we fed each other big spaghetti dinners and had donation dinners. We got a lot done together for our community, it’s ‘cause of the association they finally got fencin’ put up all around the park for the kids and speed bumps put in the roads.”
As he described the association, my mind drifted back to movie-land where the whole neighborhood is together, eating, talking about serious issues, brainstorming solutions and improvements to the area and doing all the things that make a neighborhood a community. But isn’t Bob showing me that it doesn’t have to only exist in the movies?
Well, it’s not only the responsibility of the everyday citizens to build unity in their communities, it is the responsibility of our public servants as well.
“You can’t even count on the police anymore,” said Bob. When they had the civic association they would discuss the violence that surrounded drug dealing activity in the area. The former USF and Florida Center for Community Design and Research project “Community Atlas,” founded in 2006, now defunct, described Grant Park as an impoverished, struggling area where 40% of the residents are below the poverty line.
“Your house use to be duplex buildings but they had to tear them down, it was like a drive-through drug store,” said Bob. “Probably 14 years ago people that were dealing drugs there were jealous about the people that were dealing in the duplexes right down here, they had a shootout. My mom’s house got hit.”
Luckily no one in his family got hurt.
“Back then, they had what they called C-O-P: Community Oriented Police,” he said. “And they were assigned to a neighborhood and it was somebody in here all the time and they got to know the people and I think that was a good thing.”
He said they built trust with the community. “They showed people here respect, and that went a long ways.”
But now, he does not feel that sense of community with the police or with his neighbors.
A part of me is skeptical; maybe it’s just this neighborhood. 40% of the people in Grant Park live under the poverty line, the crime here is frequent, 2020 is the year of social distancing, maybe it’s just a fluke, or perhaps these people are too stressed and too busy. But if it was just as violent and impoverished then as it is today, why does the former neighborhood he describes still seem more unified than today?
Bob says it’s the culture that is different.
“10, 20 years ago people were more free back then,” he says. “Nowadays people are scared to say anything, so they stick to themselves.”
Is the white picket fence, neighborhood potluck, American sense of community no longer part of our culture? Do we actually live in communities or just condensed areas of proximal solitude?
I couldn’t even try to count the number of times my parents sent me next door to our neighbor, Miss Penny’s, to ask for butter or sugar if we ran out and couldn’t get more that day. If Miss Penny wasn’t home, I’d go to her next-door neighbor, or across the street to Harry’s or down the street to Kenny’s if Harry’s family wasn’t home. Now I don’t even know my neighbor’s names. If we don’t even talk enough to ask each other for sugar, how are we ever going to tackle our community issues together?
