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A Citizen of the World, at Home in the Bronx
Housing and banking advocate Matthew Lee lived all over before settling down in the unglamorous Bronx. "There's something so real about the Bronx," Lee, 40, said.
(By Michael Powell -- The Washington Post)
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Matthew Lee, 1999.
Talking in a rat-a-tat-tat stream, Lee leads you up creaking steps of a once-abandoned tenement. One night a decade ago, he and the tenants clipped the padlock on the door and seized the place and renovated apartments by hand.
Lee steps onto the black tar roof and smiles as if on the lip of the Grand Canyon. Our view is of elevated subway tracks -- a No. 5 train clattering out of a tunnel, a baseball field, more tenements, a barbed-wire-ringed youth prison and, way in the distance and framed neatly between two housing project towers, the Empire State Building.
"You can see pretty much the whole world from up here," Lee says.
So how'd he get here? Lee remembers being 12 years old and skipping rocks in sandy lots in Dubai and living with his mother in Paris after his father divorced them. He drops out of Harvard after two years and spoons soup at a Catholic Worker kitchen. He does poetry readings at homeless shelters, wanders east to Paris and south to El Salvador, where he nearly met his end at the wrong end of a gun held by a teenage soldier.
"To be honest, I've never unpacked it all," he says of his life. "Maybe I think if you're fully adjusted to this world we live in, what does that say about you?"
He got a law degree from Fordham University (without getting a BA). This allows him to serve as executive director of Inner City Press, which releases the lending reports, and as general counsel for Fair Finance Watch, which operates out of the same apartment.
Newspapers and wire services write of Lee's reports. Academics as far off as Vancouver praise the quality of analysis. An official at a multinational bank in New York asks to speak on background and curses Lee's name.
How big is Lee's "staff"?
He puts a forefinger to his lips.
"Sssssssh," he says. "No point in giving away that information."
Lee lives off the remains of fellowships past. He's applied for another grant, worth about $75,000. "Wouldn't that be great?" he says. "I could live on it for three years."
We walk down 138th Street, past painted statues of the Virgin Mary and Honduran restaurants. Lee points out the Teatro Puerto Rico, where Tito Puente banged his timbales. Now it's the Iglesia Universal. There's a warehouse and Lee recalls a long-ago scandal connected with it, thieving pols stealing from poor people.
"I'm sorry to go local on you, but it was scandalous." He catches himself. "It still is scandalous. I've really got to investigate that again. . . ." As Lee wrote recently of a failed but glorious battle to save a Bronx apartment building on Home Street from the wrecker's ball:
"Now it's in the past tense. Though memory is always present: they oscillate."
