Nostalgia for a Brooklyn of Yore
The Times has a story about a bunch of Facebook groups that memorialize Brooklyn back in the day, including “The Neighborhood: Who Says You Can’t Go Home?” (for Williamsburg natives); “I Loved Being a Kid in Flatbush”; I Lived in Carroll Gardens When We Still Called it Red Hook; and Greenpoint Natives. Many of the…
The Times has a story about a bunch of Facebook groups that memorialize Brooklyn back in the day, including “The Neighborhood: Who Says You Can’t Go Home?” (for Williamsburg natives); “I Loved Being a Kid in Flatbush”; I Lived in Carroll Gardens When We Still Called it Red Hook; and Greenpoint Natives. Many of the pages have thousands of members. Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University, tells The Times that they point back to a time when there was “real social cohesion” in city neighborhoods and that while “new trends in urbanism try to recapture those old communal feelings, you can never recreate what emerged organically.” They’re also clearinghouses for stuff like complaints about gentrification and changes in real estate values: “Patrick Drexler, 51, who left Williamsburg for New Jersey after he and his wife divorced in 2001, said he longed to live again near Lorimer Street, where his grandfather made his home after emigrating from Germany in 1892. Mr. Drexler recently asked his ex-wife, who still lives there, what kind of place he could get for about $1,200 a month. ‘She told me: What are you, crazy? You couldn’t get a parking place for that now,’ he said.”
On Facebook, Neighborhoods as They Once Were [NY Times]
Photo from I Loved Being a Kid in Flatbush
Mitchell Moss is clearly an idiot.
What these sites and groups reflect is NOSTALGIA, not an historically accurate portrayal of the past.
The idea that NYC in the 1970’s had “real social cohesion” is just demonstrably ridiculous.
Do people have fond memories of their youth – sure; were there some great and fun things about the past – of course;
But for a professor of Urban policy and planning to be so ignorant about the realities of this cities recent history is frightening.
The truth is that Nostalgia is universal – in the 80’s and 90’s there were tons of books and articles reminiscing about the great days of living in Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1940’s and 1950’s (so wonderful that a whole generation left) AND in 30 years there will be articles about the wonderfulness of living/growing up in the first decade of the 2000s in NYC….and so on and so on.