Wally Bazemore has been invested in the Red Hook community for his whole life. He has been a big part of Red Hook Groups Against Garbage Sites (GAGS), worked with local youth, helped get PAVE Instutite to the neighborhood, fought for a local bank, and been a general all around leader from before, during and since Sandy.
Bazemore’s family moved to Red Hook in 1955 bringing their young son. It was a mixed community in terms of ethnicities and income. As a child, he starred in sports and a Boy Scout.
In the summers Wally, his brothers, and his cousins would go down south to work on the family farms. He saw how food was grown, picked tobacco, and learned about sweat equity.
“In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a lot of families moved out, and crime shot up,” Bazemore said. “Many businesses closed down. People were afraid to come here, and cabs would drop us off at Court Street, leaving us to walk the rest of the way.
“Many of my friends and I volunteered to be in the military before we were drafted. I ended up serving in Vietnam, and 42 of us served, and 41 of us made it back.”
Upon returning to the neighborhood, a drug epidemic swept across the country including Red Hook. Bazemore remembers seeing a Life Magazine story listing Red Hook as the most dangerous place to live.
A turning point came in 1992, when Patrick Daly, the well-respected principal of P.S. 15, and who the school is named after today, was hit by a stray bullet while helping a student in Coffey Park.
“All of a sudden, people started realizing that the community was in decay,” said Wally.
“Suddenly, there was an urgency to make changes. We had to fight off Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who threatened to build an enormous trash-processing facility here.”
Groups against Garbage Sites, an advocacy group fighting for the neighborhood, was formed.
We are not standing for this.
A lot of us got involved with GAGS, including Lou and Pat Sones, Jay McKnight, Pete Morales, and John McGettrick. We had all types of respiratory diseases here, and we had everyone working together and fighting this and saying that we weren’t going to stand for this.”
The battle to prevent the facility from opening lasted approximately seven years, but in the end, Red Hook GAGS was successful, a massive victory for the community and something that united neighbors.
Bazemore took a leading role in the recovery and resiliency efforts that came to Red Hook after Hurricane Sandy. He was active at every local meeting, including the one time that Red Hook East and Red Hook West held a joint meeting at the Miccio.
Solidarity with New Orleans
“All of the money that was used to renovate the Red Hook Houses is money we got to rebuild after Sandy,” Bazemore said. “We went down to the areas affected by Katrina for a week in 2015 to show a brotherhood and sisterhood with people who were also hit hard by Mother Nature.
Sandy was brutal, but afterwards, everyone in the community was working together and helping each other out. As long as you were coming into the neighborhood to help, we welcomed everybody.”
Bazemore was a member of the board for PAVE Academy Charter School, which is located at 732 Henry St.
“We only had two schools here, and it’s so important for kids to have different options for education here,” Bazemore said.
“I wanted more opportunities for parents and for children to have a good education here. It took some time, but PAVE Academy opened and has been great, and now we also have Summit Academy and Basis.
This is what a community needs in order for the youth to grow, so having PAVE Academy open up was a win-win situation. It was refreshing, and at the same time, it gave me an opportunity to give back and contribute.”
Bazemore was also the first president of the Red Hook Lions Club. The Lions’ motto is “We serve,” and their mission is to “foster a spirit of understanding among all people for humanitarian needs by providing voluntary services through community involvement and international cooperation.” They work to serve youth, help during disasters, and spend their time serving their community.
The battle for a bank
“We helped bring a bank to this community,” Bazemore said. “It was crazy to have a community without a bank, so we went down to Wall Street and testified at the Federal Reserve. The McKnights and John McGettrick were also there. I kept it simple when I testified: ‘Why do we spend money (on transportation) to go get money?’ It was a very important process and a very important victory.
“We can’t always cry about what we don’t have. We need to fight to keep what we do have and work to bring in the things that we don’t have. No one is going to give us anything, but you can work together and fight to make a difference, and we want to pass that on to the younger generations.”
Peacemaker
Bazemore also worked with the Red Hook Community Justice Center. The Justice Center “works to strengthen Red Hook and surrounding areas by reducing the use of incarceration, improving public trust in justice, and collaborating with the community to solve local problems.”
“At the Court, we were the first peacekeepers in Brooklyn, We were trained by Navajo, Native Americans from New Mexico,” Bazemore said. “It was about learning to collaborate and work with youth to work out problems in a peaceful way.”
A role model
“Pete Morales, Andrea and I would take kids from Red Hook on college trips to places like Columbia University and West Point,” Bazemore said.
“We would take them on the catamaran and take them up the Hudson to show them the foliage and some of the history of New York. We would take them to baseball games, basketball games, and various museums. We wanted to let them see a piece of history and encourage them that they could make history.
“We took them to the UN so they could get to understand other cultures, so you never put anyone else down. You never know who you could be working for or working with one day. We wanted to expose these kids to a better life, and a life beyond just Red Hook.
Bazemore has been in Red Hook through some very difficult times and always worked to improve things.
“If you’re a part of the community, you should always find ways to help out and contribute to your community,” Bazemore says.
And he has done just that.
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