The Next New Brooklyn

East NY;

Though my experiences were different than yours, I can understand some of your points. I’m not trying to paint a uniformly bleak picture of life back then, as my childhood was fairly nice too.

I think Brenda from Flatbush said it best in her post. If you think about it, there was no unifying element to Brooklyn back then, or, put another way, “common ground”. In any transition, something will be lost, and something gained. What I am saying is that with the “new Brooklyn”, one of the biggest gains (at least in my mind) is that we are coming closer to this sense of common ground.

Also, I would suggest that all people see their childhood as an idyllic place. If, however, you take a look at films of NYC from those days, such as the “French Connection”, you might be shocked, as I was. As I reported in a recent post, I saw this film about one year ago in a theater. It was shot on location in NYC in 1970. Even though I lived through that time, and could swear I remember it, I was shocked by what I saw in the film. The filth and overall sense of decay is not to be believed.

Adam…you should have read my earlier post. I live in Brooklyn. I never knocked Brooklyn. Don’t know what hole you pulled that out of. I resort to my time-tested “reading comprehension problem?” question. Fool.

If you think Jersey City is better than Brooklyn then I applaud the demented world you live in. Yes, Bed Stuy over Jersey City. Have you seen Bed Stuy ever??

Thanks Daveinbedstuy, you’re a real special person. As you can see from my posts I don’t go after people and start fights I just give my opinion, but I guess that isn’t good enough for you and you have to resort to insults. I don’t hide behind an alias, my name is my name.

You are telling me that you would pick Bed Stuy over historic downtown Jersey City? Van Vorst park is absoluty beautiful and less than 10 mins to the WTC. The prices are holding steady on townhouses as well. I offer you an invitation to come check out the area. We have plenty of restaurants and amenties that Bed Stuy doesn’t and the price point and location are superior. I love Brooklyn, just I found better deals for my money on this side of the Hudson.

You sound like the sterotypical Manhattanite who knocks Brooklyn because it’s Brooklyn. Instead you knock Jersey City from Brooklyn. Take a look before you put your foot in your mouth.

“I’m a Brooklyn native too, and I have vivid memories of what Brooklyn was like before the infusion of new people: decay, ethnic tensions and a lack of any kind of pro-Brooklyn “booster values”. In those days, nobody had any sense of Brooklyn as an entity. Rather, we all clung to our neighborhood villages, usually defined by ethnicity, and had no concern for other areas near by.”

I grew up in ENY in the 1970s. There was definitely more crime and decay, and far fewer police. But I recall a very happy childhood spent on the relatively quiet streets of my neighborhood, riding my bike and playing baseball, football, basketball and street games like “skelly,” “freeze tag,” “flies up,” “Chinese handball,” “running bases” and “hot peas and butter” with the neighborhood kids. As Benson says, there were neighborhoods we KNEW not to go into because they weren’t welcoming to brothers and sisters (in those days Canarsie, Bensonhurst and Howard Beach). On the other hand, we frequently rode our bikes out to the Promenade to look over to Manhattan (which we all thought was no big whoop in particular). We took the train (longtime NYers call the subway “the train”) out to Coney Island to hang on the boardwalk. We drove out to Riis Park in Queens to swim, chill and hang out at (in those days) the nude section of the beach. I also liked traveling with my friend Wayne to his girlfriend’s mother’s well-kept brownstone in Bed-Stuy, where I had some friends. We NEVER missed the West Indian Day parade on the Parkway. My friends and I also thought of Brooklyn as superior to Manhattan, although I can’t explain exactly why. My point is that Benson’s statement, while true in some respects, is, I think, an oversimplification. I do like aspects of the “new” Brooklyn, other aspects annoy me. But Brooklyn has always been a mixed bag, one that I’ve always lived in and don’t plan on leaving.

Having been born in Manhattan, in which I lived almost consistently for–inhales deeply–sixty-one years following, I finally found myself priced-out.

I ended up as a renter in Brooklyn Heights, in, as luck would and did have it, a rent-stabilized apartment.

Besides the sense of dislocation that anyone might experience under the circumstances, I felt that BH was, though picture-perfect and wholly serene, utterly lifeless–and, believe me, I don’t crave anything like a scene.

To make peace with my new nabe, I concocted a kind of bi-borough life: I go to Manhattan not only to work, but for working out at a favored gym; for best meat and produce; for movies and of course theater; for clothes shopping; for most of my socializing.

I return to BH for (temporary) R and R, which of course includes slumber, for which the nabe is so perfectly suited (I mean this as a compliment).

When I finally realized I didn’t have to give up Manhattan to live Brooklyn–that I could have the best of both worlds–I felt ever so much happier there.