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…
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
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!
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.
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.
it’s not the difference of opinion, it’s using irrelevant (and outdated) statistics as a strawman, declaring your deliberate ignorance of obvious parallels, citing the fact that you don’t want to move to SF as some kind of support for your argument, and assuming you know anything about my background that makes you seem dense.
as for crabby, relax: i’m pretty crabby and i can tell you are, too. care to join me for some tea? (shipped from SF, because they have no good tea out here.)
I lived and went to college in St. Paul and know The Cities well. Very apt analogy in my opinion.
and thanks, gkw, that’s indeed part of my point in terms of cultural and shifting class/racial demongraphics. other elements of urban geography – the “revitalization” of [oakland/brooklyn] downtowns and waves of gentrification spreading out from pre-existing middle-class nodes like boerum hill and lake merritt, or previously more mixed residential/industrial areas, like williamsburg and the flatlands of west oakland, as money moves across the bridge when the finite space of the [island/peninsula] is maximized. and so on.
Neither dense nor crabby, I simply don’t think Oakland is to San Francisco in the way that Brooklyn is to Manhattan.
If having a difference of opinion from yours makes me dense or crabby, I will put you in the category of using Sarah Palin logic as well.
11217 – a little dense and crabby are you today? but i’ll try again. what’s relevant is the comparative ratio between the cities, city A vs city B in the first pair compared to A and B in the second pair. not A to A and B to B. or A + B compared to A + B.
the portion of the article cited discusses cultural and other demographic shifts. not population and certainly not static population numbers. by your (il)logic, a better comparison is the entire city of los angeles to san diego. pretty dumb, indeed.
beyond that, even if you had a good point, you’d need to give me the population references for the other proposed city pairs and show me why they are more relevant.
why are they a more relevant city pair? commerce. social geography. urban landscape. education. class. culture. immigration and emigration. ethnic, racial and class diversity. in the absence of time enough to write my own thesis, for more information, see some previous discussion of the analogues between and among the cities: http://bstoner.wpengine.com/brownstoner/archives/2008/03/the_san_franbro.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/fashion/30sanfrooklyn.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://www.newgeography.com/content/00258-a-new-model-new-york-san-francisco-anyone
That article was fascinating, kind of an orgiastic review of all the cliches about New York that get so passionately debated here.
Is it just me or do other people wish they’d moved to New York earlier than they did??