South Brooklyn Profiles: Laura Frazier

Laura Frazier
Even if she doesn't say it directly, Laura Frazier finds herself in a tough spot. She is, in some only-the-facts-m'aam way, a daughter of the Gowanus Projects, the public houses that wait on the northern edge of the infamous canal they're named after, hoping for some Cinderella change of luck. She moved to Gowanus when she was two and claims it as her home, no reservations. But she also feels an increasing distance. Even though she still lives there she has little to say to some of the kids gossiping on the benches out front. "To tell you the truth, I dont talk to anybody there. Nobody knows me--we choose to be this way."
"We" is Laura and her twin sister, Lauren, whom she calls by her middle name, Crystal. The two go to movies together, hang out at home together; they even went to high school together, Edward R. Murrow, the city's high school of communications in Midwood. She's proud of having gone there, and when I mention a friend named Menscher who teaches English at Murrow, she enthusiastically takes on the voice she and friends must have used to greet him: "Mistah Menn-shuhhh!"
Gowanus means more to her, though, than the benchside gossipers. It's a place she needs to represent and at times defend. "it's not necessarily true that people in the projects are on welfare or are bad or lazy." These are claims she's heard made in classrooms at New York City Technical College where she's a sophomore studying nursing. "People who say those things don't witness what's going on."
Among the things Laura herself has witnessed: white people coming to the projects to buy drugs. "Then you go back home and think everything is peaches and cream." She understands drugs to be the venue of sad, small time businessmen, Willy Lomans in jeans who immediately spend the little they earn. Minimum wage is no better:"That's junk food money--you can't really buy anything with that." In the scores of new shops and restaurants on Smith Street, Laura sees the demise of the Gowanus Houses: "I heard a new art gallery is opening. How are you going to have an art gallery with the projects down the street? Something's got to go." And though she wants out of Gowanus -- "Too many drug dealers. I want a family and kids." -- she doesn't think the trade off of gallery for housing is fair.
In her apartment, her parents keep a wall of diplomas and certificates their four children have earned. Her mom, a nurse at New York Hospital, has told her she's waiting for the college degrees next. Laura and Crystal, a sophomore in accounting at Baruch, seem ready to oblige, but not just for themselves or their parents. Implicitly, Laura wants a degree to vindicate Gowanus too. "You can't blame anyone for your failure--if I want to get something, what's stopping me?" she asks, ignoring all she's already told me. It's Ben Franklin as channeled through Oprah perhaps, but it's working for her. "When you have a degree people look at you differently. A lot of people in the neighborhood respect me for what I do."

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This project is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Development Fund of BAC/Brooklyn Arts Council, Inc., which is made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.