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Shirts to Cry By


Josh Haner/The New York Times
“The same smile he had in life,” said Darlene Price, wearing a T-shirt made in memory
of Damon Allen, “that’s the smile he has on his shirt.”
nytimes.com
By JOSHUA YAFFA
November 5, 2006
Central Brooklyn
THE faces staring out from the T-shirts printed in Ken Gordon’s shop on Nostrand Avenue are uniformly young, black and smiling. But they also share something tragic. These are the faces of the dead, victims of the violence that, despite lowered crime rates citywide, remains stubbornly endemic in parts of central Brooklyn.
“It’s a personal, physical touch that fills a void,” Mr. Gordon, a slight, 63-year-old Jamaican, said of the shirts he prints for the grieving at his Crown Heights storefront.
In a neighborhood where drugs, guns and unemployment prove as incendiary as ever, Mr. Gordon averages a couple of orders a month. And he has competition; his printing shop is but one of a handful in the span of several blocks that supply the grim market for this particular form of posthumous tribute.
Shirts are $6 or $7 apiece if a customer orders 100. Most do, often more if the victim was an especially well-liked figure, an innocent caught in the spastic cross-fire of the ghetto.
Demand was high — several hundred and counting — for a shirt Mr. Gordon made in honor of Damon Allen, a 33-year-old sanitation worker and father of two who was killed on Sept. 4. Mr. Allen was struck in the head by a stray bullet in the street after he left a birthday party.
“The same smile he had in life, that’s the smile he has on his shirt,” said Darlene Price, a friend of Mr. Allen’s mother who arranged for the T-shirts to be made.
Between simple lines of text — “In Loving Memory of Damon Allen: 1973-2006” — is a photograph of the victim grinning proudly and wearing the gold medal he had received from the city last year for rescuing a young girl and her father from a burning building.
The photographs that families and friends choose to memorialize their loved ones vary from professional portraits to candid street-shots. But they all convey the same haunting image of a person blithely unaware of how this forgotten snapshot will ultimately resurface.
“No one is planning to die tomorrow, so you’re not going to take a picture today,” said a clerk at Island Tees, a store a few blocks from Mr. Gordon’s print shop that produces a handful of these shirts every month.
It is a no-questions-asked, often same-day service. “It’s business,” said Kenneth D’Abreau, Island Tees’ owner, suggesting that making T-shirts commemorating a murder victim was not much different from making ones to mark a birth or a wedding anniversary.
Mr. Gordon, however, said he felt “a very emotional connection” with Mr. Allen — a man he had never met or even seen — while scanning his photo into a computer. “Why did such a young life have to be destroyed?” he asked.
It is a question asked with maddening frequency in vast stretches of central Brooklyn, where murder rates have remained resistant to the much-heralded decreases in violent crime in other, more gentrified sections of the borough. Nearly twice as many murders were reported in Crown Heights in 2005 as were reported there a decade earlier, a sharp contrast to even neighboring Bedford-Stuyvesant, where the number of reported murders decreased by nearly half in the same period.
“It’s crazy out here,” said Billy Behary, the owner of Billy’s T-Shirt Center on Fulton Street, the main commercial strip that separates Bedford-Stuyvesant from Crown Heights.
In September, a family brought Mr. Behary a picture of a man whom he recognized as a frequent customer. “He used to come around to buy T-shirts,” Mr. Behary said of the victim.
T-shirts are not the only way young victims of crime are remembered in the neighborhood; most stores also offer hats, buttons and coffee mugs that can be transformed into commemorative items. Graffiti murals have long served as an avenue for emotions otherwise left unexpressed.
“It’s the same thing as lighting a candle or putting out some flowers,” said a man who identified himself only as Buckwild and who had ordered a batch of shirts at Copy King on Rockaway Avenue after Darrell Holmes, a friend of more than 20 years, was fatally shot one night in July. Buckwild had also commissioned a mural to honor his friend.
“If you care about your people, you’re going to remember them for a long time,” he said as he stood in front of the mural on the corner of Park Place and Nostrand Avenue where Mr. Holmes is but one of dozens who are memorialized on the brick wall.
Memorial T-shirts are generally worn only at the wake and funeral, then tucked away to return on birthdays or anniversaries of the victim’s death. But some people, like Mr. Allen’s friend Ms. Price, wear the shirts as a regular demonstration of solidarity and sympathy.
“If his mother sees you walking down the street wearing the shirt, she’ll come up to you and kiss the shirt,” Ms. Price said. “It makes her feel proud to know that people love her son the way she loves her son.”
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company