Local Writer Reflects On Lark Cafe Robbery Experience And Gentrification

Writer Chaya Babu was one of the nine in a writers’ group that was robbed at gunpoint at Lark Cafe on Church Avenue last November. She has recently written a long piece in Open City reflecting on that experience and what it means for her and the neighborhood as a whole.

She describes the moment when the masked man entered Lark Cafe:

I assumed the stranger was a vendor stopping into businesses, maybe even a high school kid selling candy. Soniya Munshi, sitting to my right, later said she thought the same thing — DVDs, maybe flowers. But then, he swiftly crossed the space between the door and our table and pulled out the gun. A silver revolver held level with our faces. It happened so fast that the image of the candy-seller didn’t quite evaporate. I thought it was a joke.

Chaya goes on to describe trying to help the police try to track down the man who stole her computer among other electronic devices and what it seeing that process showed her about current policing in New York.

Inside, with the others, I began to cry. I had been driven around to see whether unlucky black strangers in hoodies could possibly be someone I was in the same room with for mere seconds, whose eyes had been his only visible facial feature, and whose hands were the only part of him I had really looked at.

Jennifer got pulled out one more time to check out another guy. She later said that the officer in the car she was taken in was aggressive with her, goading her to decide whether or not the individual could be our gunman, though she said she didn’t know.

She also ruminates on the way the incident was portrayed by the media and how the neighborhood reacted to this and other robberies that took place last fall.

When we lost our things at the quivering hands of a young gunman and then later saw ourselves represented in the broad strokes painted by news reports, many of us in the group agreed that in some respects we identified more with our robber than with the characters we were portrayed to be.

Although it’s long, the entire piece is an important and worthwhile read. Check it out here.