RB 9/5

From the Bank of America, take Orange Avenue five blocks south and then hang a right on Church Street. (You’re headed into oncoming traffic, but that’s all right.) Follow the WRONG WAY signs until you’re on the Parramore side of the I-4 overpass. You are now entering into propaganda architecture. It’s a form of urbane urbanism. It’s called gentrification.

Don’t go too far, though, because the City of Orlando is only a few years into the Parramore Revitalization. Within two blocks you might be locking your car doors in fear of the demographic—residents who soon won’t be able to afford living here, in their childhood neighborhood. The newly built City View Apartment Complex, retail space, and FAMU Law campus will see to that.

Not that any of these businesses are inherently wrong. It’s the supply-side theory on which they thrive that deprives: gushing with money at the corporate source the trickle-down effect creates exactly that—a trickle—by the time it reaches bottom. Then the corporations bring their friends and send more residents packing for the Postmodern Trail of Tears, these newly displaced people being products of a national economy whose strength has historic roots in the exploitation of their ancestors, products of an economy whose “underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and horror” (Fredric Jameson).

Maybe a white guy who is studying law at the
historically black FAMU will get a job with the
DA and then prosecute a black guy for
burglarizing the City View Apartment Complex. Our culture falls back on historicism, blaming the product of its underside and then building over proof of that underside with urbane urbanism. From where the convict stands, the anamnesis-inspired stairway rooftop of the Bank of America tower is always within his sight,
but mostly out of reach.