st-paul-MN-1008.jpg
In a lengthy article in New York Magazine’s 40th Anniversary issue in which he points out, among other things, that economic downturns in New York City have had silver linings in the past, Kurt Andersen reflects on the changes in Carroll Gardens over the last two decades.

The progress of gentrification wasn’t only a result of the precinct-by-precinct diminution of crime. My bit of Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens, was a very safe (and almost entirely white) working- and middle-class quarter when I arrived in 1990 with my wife and baby daughters. Nor were we exactly pioneers; a couple of editors had already renovated our brownstone. But at some moment between the eighties, when I knew exactly two people in Brooklyn, and the end of the century, when at least half the younger people of my acquaintance were living there, the borough not only lost most of its stigma but acquired an unprecedented aura of stylishness. It was an emergent rebranding as alt-NYC, driven first by the invisible hand (cut-rate real estate just across the river) and then by the self- propelling presence of more and more People Like Oneself. I can peg the tipping-point moment fairly precisely in my neighborhood: As I waited to vote in 1992, I was the demographic outlier in the polling-place crowd of retired longshoremen and their relatives; when I returned in 1996, almost every voter in the place, I swear, was some kind of writer or graphic designer or MTV producer a decade or two my junior. And the following year, all at once, Smith Street changed from a dreary Poughkeepsiesque stretch where we went only to catch the F train to—abracadabra!—a groovy restaurant row thick with recently expatriated young Manhattanites. Manhattan is not over, certainly, but for the city’s creative class New York is no longer a one-borough town. Brooklyn has become St. Paul, maybe, to Manhattan’s Minneapolis, rather than Compton and Glendale to its Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

We prefer the analogy to London, but then again, we’ve never been to St. Paul.
Boom-Bust-Boom Town [New York Magazine]
Photo by MNkiteman


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. A LESSON IN LOGIC
    courtesy of your friend z

    proposition: A is to B as C is to D

    responses that do not undermine the proposition:

    A is not like C!

    B is not like D!

    C sucks!

    D sucks!

    the person who advanced the proposition sucks!

  2. fatlenny – no doubt there aren’t many relationships that truly compare. and i absolutely agree – there’s not a (surviving) transit system in the country that can match nyc’s, and that’s one reason you’ll never have city pairs that can simultaneously be as distinct but as interdependent as nyc and its boroughs. but i think sf and oakland gets closer than most others.

  3. I don’t have any statistics to back it up but my sense is that the Bay cuts off Oakland from SF a lot more than the East River does NYC. Oakland is very far from a borough of SF – compare subway lines extending to Brooklyn compared to BART lines going to Oakland. Or compare how Oakland was once the poorest city in the U.S. while SF was thriving. Brooklyn’s fate is much more closely tied to Manhattan than Oakland’s is to SF. Oakland is closer to a poor version of Stamford than it is to Brooklyn.

    And SF is not nearly as constrained for space as Manhattan. There are plenty of cheap neighborhoods on the outskirts (or south) of SF that are still available to low earners.

    I’ve never been to St. Paul but I think there are probably very few relationships in the world like that between Brooklyn and Manhattan, to say nothing of the cultural diversity that only exists in this city’s boroughs.