It’s curious how memories come back in spurts. Late one night, over 20 years ago, – it would have been Labor Day Weekend, maybe even exactly tonight – I met up with a bunch of friends, most of whom were MTA workers. We drove out to a subway station in East New York somewhere on the 3 or L train – Sutter or Livonia, maybe.  I don’t remember what the reason was, but it doesn’t matter.

After, we drove through Brownsville and into East Flatbush, the streets came alive. People were in the street laughing, drinking, dancing. Calypso, Dancehall, Soca, Reggae was pulsating. The sound of steel pan in the summer night. You could smell the char of the jerk sizzling on the grill and see flags blowing with the breeze, illuminated by the street lights.

A friend of ours, who was of West Indian descent – his mother from St. Kitts & Nevis – explained to us that everybody was preparing for J’ouvert – the first time I truly understood what the word meant – and the carnival, the big parade on Eastern Parkway with the costumes. It was after midnight but the streets were ELECTRIC.  I wish I could have stopped the car to take it all in. It was one of the uniquely New York moments in the late 90s or early 2000s, when you could just stumble upon something – a party, a performance, a work of art.

This night could never happen again. Most of the pan yards and mas camps have been displaced or pushed deep into the outer fringes of East Flatbush, to East New York or Brownsville. The fetes that were in Crown Heights and Flatbush are there as well, or in Canarsie or even in parking lots in Jamaica, Queens.

The last West Indian Day Parade before COVID, it rained torrentially in the morning. I thought we’d never get there. But then, the rain let up. For a while, it did. We danced and stuffed ourselves and drank. Then it started to pour again and we left. But something about that afternoon left me ill at ease. I couldn’t tell you why, but I knew something was about to change.

On the way back to the Bronx on the 2 train, it hit me like a ton of bricks and I cried. Something told me that it would be a long time before we’d be back on the Parkway and that, when we were, it wouldn’t be the same.

This year makes over 50 years that the West Indian Day Parade has been on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn (it began as a much smaller event in Harlem in 1947.) But now, the gentrification is in full swing and all of this – not just the parade and J’ouvert – this whole community and culture is under siege. Things really have changed.

Private homes have been demolished to make way for mammoth “luxury” rentals. Roti shops, record stores, and bodegas have been replaced by “organic,” “artisanal” cafes and grocery stores. Ital restaurants give way to juice bars and vegan cafés (oh, the irony!) My first real job’s offices are now vacant, left rotting over Flatbush and Church.

The media does a great job of marketing carnival and J’ouvert as “one big street party.” To many of the newcomers descending on Brooklyn, Labor Day Weekend is simply a nuisance and the subject of dozens of 311 complaints. In reality, it’s neither.

Yes, carnival is a celebration. But it’s also a protest. A rebellion. The sound of the pan, the oil glistening on bodies, the colorful flags announce to the world, “We’re still here.”

But for how much longer?