Raise the Hammer

Was flipping through an old magazine in a waiting room this week and came across an article that I thought might make an interesting footnote to the question of authenticity (which is much more nuts-and-bolts than, say, something more nebulous like the Hawthorne effect):


By the middle of the 2000s... Brooklyn the place had become "Brooklyn" the concept: a template to turn any downtown-adjacent slum into a reasonable facsimile of Boerum Hill or Williamsburg.

Now you can find "Brooklyn" anyplace in the country — in the world — where a low-rise, run-down old neighborhood has been colonized by the pickle makers and baristas, the craft shoe shiners and the mustachioed young butchers. The YUTs, as Karen calls them: Young Urban Tradesmen. Nashville, Portland — both Portlands — the Northern Liberties of Philadelphia, Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, the Marais in Paris, world without end. Wherever you go, the faux-ethnic restaurants and the retro cocktail bars end up being full of pretty much the same (skinny, tattooed, meat-obsessed) people.

But is it really so bad? Sure, it's annoying, like any me-too movement is. But at least the YUTs are neat and constructive, things the punks and the hippies and the beatniks before them were most assuredly not. And while "hipster" urbanism might be artificial and even silly, there's another way of dealing with shabby old neighborhoods that happen to be sitting on prime real estate that's a hell of a lot worse. You can see it in Manhattan, where over the past twenty years bricks and brownstone have given way to high-rise apartment towers marching cheek-to-cheek up the Bowery (where some of the brick buildings torn down were almost two hundred years old) and Sixth Avenue, and big-box chain stores have replaced a great number of the quirky businesses that made Manhattan such an interesting place to be.

You can also see it on my block. Brooklyn is, of course, not just an idea but a physical place, and that place has many neighborhoods with quick subway access to Manhattan. In Williamsburg, that fact has turned the streetscape into a schizophrenic jumble of Pennsylvania mining town and Coral Gables, with tired aluminum-siding-clad frame houses mingled higgledy-piggledy with tall chunks of whatever it is they're teaching architects in condo school. Down the street from me, Willie Sutton's old rooming house was torn down in 2008 to be replaced by a high-rise by Robert Scarano, the architect who fucked up Williamsburg. When the real estate bubble burst, they stopped work on it. Its skeleton stands six stories tall and is uglier than anything there in 1986. There's another somewhat better high-rise across the street from me, and another on the way. Out my back window, I can see two more construction sites. Compared with the hulking things they're putting up, the old garage down the block, which techno-hipsters have turned into a showroom for MakerBot (it sells 3-D printer kits), makes me gaze on it with downright affection. Hipsters might be parasites, but at least they leave the host alive, if only to feed off it. Given a choice between a neutron bomb and a hydrogen bomb, I guess I'll take the neutrons. At least they leave an illusion of life.

I miss the old Brooklyn, the one nobody was paying any attention to. I miss it the most when I stare down Atlantic Avenue at the Barclays Center, whose construction used eminent domain to wipe out several blocks' worth of pleasant row houses, old industrial buildings full of artists and YUTs, and Freddy's, a former cop bar turned Bohemian that we named one of Esquire's Best Bars in America in 2006. I hear now that a Shake Shack is coming to the neighborhood, and maybe a Dave & Buster's, a T.G.I. Friday's, and a Panera. Even, they say, a Hooters. Once you've got all those people coming, you've got to keep 'em happy. O'Connor's, the dim, cozy, decrepit old bar around the corner I spent many a happy afternoon in, has closed down so they can add an extra floor and turn it into a sports bar for the arena crowd.

There's a freedom in being ignored. Away from the spotlight, Brooklyn developed something that people want, and now they're coming to take it away. Fortunately, Brooklyn is a large place, larger than "Brooklyn." As long as there are still Trinidadian doubles shacks in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights, outside the pickle belt, and Bensonhurst is still Sicilian enough to support Villabate, the greatest pasticceria outside of Sicily itself, I'll keep hope alive that city life doesn't have to be a theme park or a plastic desert.

http://www.esquire.com/features/regarding-this-brooklyn-0313