November 3, 2009

Closing Bell: Gentrification Indicators

Over on Nostrand Park, they're trying to put together a list of indicators that your neighborhoods being gentrified. The author suggests three (including coffee shops and blogs) and luckily no one's mentioned flea markets yet. Other suggestions?
Photo by rymerster

Posted by Brownstoner at 4:00 PM | Comments (99)
Categories: Closing Bell, Gentrification

May 8, 2009

Rosie Revisited

First Rosie was on Brian Lehrer. Then we blogged about it. Then she led a panel at WNYC. Then New York Magazine cornered her and blogged it. Here's a clip from the New York Mag post:

Perez got pretty slammed on the Brooklyn blogs for her comments. “As much as I find Rosie Perez to be a decent actor, sexy and certainly part of NYC's charm, I must say comments like these make me want to kick her in the shins,” wrote one commenter on Brownstoner. We cornered Perez after the show, and she was happy to clear up what she worried was a hostile comment. “What I really wanted to say was that, yes, I’m nostalgic for the past, but I’m also excited about the present and hopeful for the future," she explained. "Things do change. Water always has to flow or else it becomes stale. But with change, you can bring along some of the good minerals that came from the top of the waterfall." She said she'd read some of the blogs and seen the nasty comments. "I think it’s their guilt of being the gentrifiers. They don’t know how to take it," she said. "But I had to look at myself and I realized it came off a little hostile, to be honest.”

Her parting words? "Even if you’re in a bad mood, just give me a nod.” We'll do one better: Come to the Flea tomorrow, Rosie, and we'll buy you a pupusa!

Posted by Brownstoner at 9:29 AM | Comments (158)
Categories: Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, Gentrification

April 22, 2009

"Life Deserved" Slogan Sets off Gentrification Debate

A post on Clinton Hill Chill last week (originally posted on blog With a Brooklyn Accent) that started with a deconstruction of the marketing slogan of a condo development in the area erupted into a debate about everything from race and class and to the efficacy of community organizations and the role of churches. The comment thread ultimately turns into a head-to-head between Putnamdenizen and a commenter known as X; their arguments show how easy it is for people to speak past each other and epitomizes why the emotionally-charged issue is so hard to discuss in a constructive manner. Thought-provoking reading, for sure.

Posted by Brownstoner at 10:52 AM | Comments (16)
Categories: Clinton Hill, Gentrification

April 6, 2009

Wrestling with Fort Greene's Transformation

In a first-person piece in The Times this weekend, artist Nelson George laments how Fort Greene has changed since he and his black artist contemporaries put down roots in the leafy brownstone neighborhood more than two decades ago. We're interested to hear how the essay struck readers. What we thought was missing from the article was an acknowledgment of the current generation of black artists and intellectuals in the neighborhood and how they feel about the composition of the neighborhood. A mention of a place like Madiba where the diversity of the area is on full display, for example, would have added some valuable context for his discussions of the clientele at the Brooklyn Moon. Then again, this wasn't meant to have been anything more than one man's coming to terms with the changes around him. Thoughts?
Fort Greene: Strangers on His Street [NY Times]
Photo by niznoz

Posted by Brownstoner at 10:00 AM | Comments (108)
Categories: Fort Greene, Gentrification

October 2, 2008

Brooklyn Manhattan's St. Paul, Not Compton

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

Posted by Brownstoner at 10:51 AM | Comments (32)
Categories: Brooklyn, Gentrification

September 12, 2008

Williamsburg Comes to Crown Heights?

The New York Sun took a look at Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights yesterday, noting that "bodegas, hair salons, and fast-food restaurants lining the section of Franklin Avenue that runs between Eastern Parkway and Atlantic Avenue, on the western boundary of Crown Heights, are slowly being replaced by organic markets, cafés, and clothing boutiques." One resident likened the newfangled street to Williamsburg, noting his own store has started stocking organic produce to please the new residents, moving in for the relatively cheap rent; one broker says apartments are about $300 less a month than similar pads in nearby Prospect Heights, and that retail rents can be $1 or $2 less per square foot. Not all residents think that if the street changes it will become a Bedford Avenue; Smith Street and 5th Avenue were invoked, as well, noting the new beer garden, Franklin Park (which apparently draws residents old and new to its halls), a fancy boutique, Point de Couture, a cafe and a tattoo parlor. A 21-year veteran is redeveloping his own building into a residential complex. Question: Is it possible for a neighborhood to shift like this without becoming Park Slope or Williamsburg, to withstand an influx of residents and retail and still be very much Crown Heights? If these new establishments manage to speak to those who've lived there for years, maybe we'll see an example of it. What do you guys think?
Franklin Avenue Changes as Crown Heights Shifts [NY Sun]
Houses, Crown Heights. Photo by gkjarvis.

Posted by Brownstoner at 10:27 AM | Comments (24)
Categories: Crown Heights, Gentrification

September 8, 2008

Do Generalizations About Harlem Hold for Brooklyn Nabes?

It was hard to read this weekend's NY Times story about the changing demographics in Harlem without considering the extent to which the article applied to some of the predominantly black neighborhoods in Brooklyn that have been attracting waves of white newcomers in recent years:

In the past few years, the “Village of Harlem,” as older residents still call it, has become a 21st-century laboratory for integration. Class and money and race are at the center of the changes in the neighborhood. Lured by stately century-old brownstones and relatively modest rents, new faces are moving in and making older residents feel that they are being pushed out. There have been protests, and anger directed as much at the idea of the newcomers as at them personally.

While this particular story focused on what it felt like for the white, middle-class arrivistes trying to make a home in a place that has been predominantly black for decades, it also touched on an aspect of gentrification that often gets overlooked— Middle-class black gentrification— as well as differing attitudes depending on generation. “Older blacks didn’t have any choice but to live in a black neighborhood,” said Mark Thomas, a 29-year-old African American man who recently moved from Atlanta to Strivers' Row. “So they get nervous when a white person wants to move in. But if you talk to young African-Americans, they want the neighborhood they live in to be integrated.” Do you think that's a fair generalization to make about neighborhoods like Clinton Hill and Bed Stuy?
In an Evolving Harlem, Newcomers Try to Fit In [NY Times]
Photo by rfullerrd

Posted by Brownstoner at 9:30 AM | Comments (45)
Categories: Bedford Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill, Gentrification

July 29, 2008

Onion: Gentrification Being Trumped by Artistocratization

Given all the outpouring of nostalgia last week for the good old days of more crime and fewer flea markets, this excerpt from a recent Onion article titled Nation's Gentrified Neighborhoods Threatened By Aristocratization provided some much needed comic relief:

Many of those affected by the ostentatious reshaping of their once purely upmarket neighborhoods said that they often wish for a return back to the privileged communities they helped to overdevelop just a few years ago. Among the first to feel the effects of the encroaching aristocracy have been local business owners like Fort Greene, Brooklyn resident Neil Getz.

"Around here, you used to be able to get a Fair-Trade latte and a chocolate-chip croissant for only eight bucks," said Getz, who is planning to move back in with his parents after being forced out of the lease on his organic grocery store by a harpsichord purveyor. "Now it's all tearooms and private salon gatherings catered with champagne and suckling pig. Who can afford that?"

"It's just a terrible shame," Getz continued. "There was this great little shop right across the street from my duplex apartment where I bought my baby daughter a Ramones onesie a couple of years ago, just after she was born. That whole block is an opera house now."

Just as long as the aristos don't tie their horse-drawn carriages up to the castle scaffolding, everything should be okay.
Nation's Gentrified Neighborhoods Threatened By Aristocratization [Onion]

Posted by Brownstoner at 9:59 AM | Comments (32)
Categories: Fort Greene, Gentrification