El Puente
El Puente was founded in Williamsburg in 1982, expanding into Bushwick in 1992. This building, which is owned by St. Barbara’s Church, was once a convent for the church’s nuns. El Puente has spent the past nearly 30 years as a home for Bushwick youth, providing access to leadership training, arts programming, and adults that genuinely put on for them.
The mural on the building is called “A World Without Violence”, and was painted in 2006. The tree casting the shadow on the building in the recent photo was planted over 20 years ago as part of a clean air initiative aiming to address crazy asthma rates in Bushwick. Her name is Miel (which means “honey” in Spanish).
El Puente Poem
Welcome to El Puente
At the heart of Central Ave,
right between Bleecker and Menahan
This building? It’s owned by St. Barbra’s Church
Santa Barbara – patron saint of artillerymen, miners,
She ushers in the fireworks
Workers of warfare, heat making metal malleable
Moveable, like the minds of these kids
Like El Puente
Tryna sharpen the spirit of the hood
I grew up in this building
Not in the same sense as Flako, or the youth I work wit
I grew into myself here
Underneath the watchful second-story eyes of el viejito
Warm as grampa’s avena
In the middle of the stove every Saturday morning
El Puente was the oatmeal in the middle of the stove
During the Saturday mornings of my post-youth
Reliable and unwavering
Soul food sprinkled in canela, you feel me?
When I say that I grew up here
What I really mean is I grew in here
Into a mentor – dique the kids be lookin up to me Flak, can you believe that?
Into an artist – they say those who can’t do, teach. I say double down on the bag and do both
And into me
On these Bushwick streets
I was re-introduced to myself.
I’m from the City
Downtown Chelsea, to be exact
And not the part you think of when I say that
I’m from 2 avenues west of where your mind goes
Elliot-Chelsea Houses
Brown brick & river water
Back when the High Line was called
The Dead Tracks
Strewn with weeds and rusted aerosol cans
Before Primo’s bright yellow bodega
Got turned into a Dunkin Donuts
Before the deli owned by the arabs on 10thave
stopped selling 50 cent sodas
When I asked Ock why, he said:
“They attract the wrong kinda crowd”
Read: poor people.
So I’m familiar with the struggle
Of feeling like you don’t belong where you were born
But enough about me.
El Puente’s been around since the Bad Old Days
Of the early 80’s,
Arisen of the rubble of gang violence and bureaucratic collapse
And the foul shit poverty makes us do to each other
It was born and baptized in the South Side
In the shade of the Williamsburg Bridge
Last gasp turned breath of fresh air
Stained glass cast paint stroke shadows
On the floor of an abandoned church
An ode to what could - and would - be.
In 1977, Howard Cosell proclaimed
during game two of the World Series
That “ladies and gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning”
What the 37.2 million viewers watching couldn’t have known
Is that 17 miles away, Bushwick was an inferno of its own
Flames ravaged, heat wreaking havoc
White ash littering sidewalks like
Some kinda fucked up inverse snow storm
But where destruction lives
Creation looms
Saint Barbra’s Church almost didn’t make it
Not even God’s house is fireproof
But it’s still here. They saved the pulpit and
When El Puente Bushwick opened, they used
The wood to build the dance studio floor
And that has kinda been the model
For El Puente over the last 37 years
Take the rubble and rebuild something
that wasn’t there before
Plies on prayers
and windmills all over the hardwood
Of God’s favor.