Dumbo's Growing Pains
Is Dumbo a victim of its own success? Yes, according to some of the people quoted in yesterday’s Times article about the neighborhood’s transition from a dingy artists’ enclave in the late ’70s to its current incarnation, a new historic district that lures what one longtime Dumbo dweller calls antiseptic yuppies to pricey condos like…
Is Dumbo a victim of its own success? Yes, according to some of the people quoted in yesterday’s Times article about the neighborhood’s transition from a dingy artists’ enclave in the late ’70s to its current incarnation, a new historic district that lures what one longtime Dumbo dweller calls antiseptic yuppies to pricey condos like 100 Jay Street. Although plenty of neighborhood businesses welcome the area’s cachet and influx of affluent residents, others aren’t as pleased by its transformation. Some residents, however, have made peace with the changes. The worst thing you can do in New York is fall in love with a neighborhood, said Cara Lee Sparry, who moved to Dumbo in ’92 and runs Superfine. Sparry said she has been pleased by new amenities and suggests that Dumbo may have won the gentrification lottery, becoming a place where cool and condo coexist.
District Trying to Forge a New Identity [NY Times]
BREAKING: Dumbo Designated as Landmark District [Brownstoner]
Photo by TomVu.
If you complain about the progress in DUMBO now, you must be the same person who complained about things lacking 15 or so years ago. Like the heat in the bldg and garbage pick.
Dumbo is basically one big traffic jam under the Brooklyn bridge, overlooking the projects and the BQE. Why this is a desirable place to live has always been a mystery to me.
C’mon 9:47, it’s not so bad here in lower Westchester. And I would not trade in the incredible sunlight that drenches my house, the privacy my 60-foot lot affords me, and the ability to park two cars on my property, for a dark attached row house and the accompanying 30-minute parking space searching adventure.
Revisionist history – People may not like DUMBO as a neighborhood now but to lament its “change” is just ridiculous. DUMBO wasnt a real neighborhood prior to 1998. Sorry but a couple of workshops and a few dozen residents does not a neighborhood make. And once people started really moving to DUMBO it was more or less the same demographic of people who live there now.
Self-absorbed people will protest when they become inconvenienced by any changes in the hood. I heard it from non-creative type old timers in Carrol Gardens, old moneyed Bklyn Heights and now artsy DUMBO. The world just doesn’t revolve around you.
The true death of Dumbo was when they built the J condo and that other pice of crap monstrocity around the corner. Nothing kills a communuity like poorrly designed, out of context, enormous bulidings. While housing shortage is a real problem in New York the solution does not lie in building a lot of tall crappy buildings. There is no reason why the buildings placed in those lots could not have been “normal” scale buildings that were designed by architects with some amount of skill and intelligence. Developer greed facilitated by Doctoroffs “vision” is the reason that our neighborhoods of Brooklyn are being destroyed and assaulted by these out of scale upper middle class housing projects. It needs to stop!
Yes, DUMBO may not be the cool, edgy, artsy place it was 5-10 years ago, but it’s still a long way from the suburbs. Have you been to the suburbs recently? I recently spent a weekend out there, and let me tell you – as much as you may miss your old DUMBO, it’s still way better than Lawrence, or white plains, or Englewood (NJ). Trust me. If you really want to feel better about what’s happening to your favorite NYC neighborhood – go spend some time in the burbs and come back. You’ll realize how much worse things could be.
That’s it. NY is OVER. If Dumbo is a cool hood then one might as well move to the suburbs, because thats what it is THE SUBURBS. Geez NY is so full of lame people.
Natural cycle of things. As in Darwin’s evolution theory.