Talk of the Town

We’ll be back to business-as-usual on Monday but in the meantime we’ll leave you with this week’s New Yorker piece about our one-year anniversary party last fall.

One recent Saturday afternoon, some three hundred and sixty years after Dutch settler chartered the town of Breuckelen representatives of a more recent migration were milling around the back patio of one of the borough’s newer bars. They had come to toast the first birthday of Brownstoner, a blog professing an unhealthy obsession wit historic Brooklyn brownstones and th neighborhoods and lifestyles they define. The party was in Red Hook, Brooklyn’s defunct dock district, so there were no brownstones in sight, but the bar’s name (Pioneer Bar-B-Q and the up-and-coming character of th neighborhood (Ikea and Fairway due to arrive soon) fit the spirit of the occasion.

Brownstoner is a virtual back fence for Brooklyn real-estate watchers. In frequent postings, its users vet listings, trade tips on brokers and neighborhoods, and gossip about who saw what at which open house. That place is a ‘five minute walk to Prospect Park’ only if you’re a giraffe, Linusvanpelt wrote recently. Why is the Chester Court listing so relatively affordable? Clinton hillbilly said. Was someone murdered there or something?

Housing Department: Emigres [New Yorker]

The blog’s founder, who works on Wall Street and who last year bought a fixer-upper in Clinton Hill, is known to readers as Brownstoner; his wife is Mrs. Brownstoner, or Mrs. B. Like Mr. and Mrs. B., most of the guests at the party were in their thirties; many wore expensive jeans and sneakers, and a disproportionate number of them had on eyeglasses with square frames. They travelled in pairs, towing a stroller and a child or two, and lived in neighborhoods that they described in optimistic tones as improving, including not only Clinton Hill but also Windsor Terrace, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights.

The group had its own vernacular, sprinkled with terms like pocket door, parquet, gut reno, Farrow & Ball (a brand of English paint with extra pigment), and the verb to rehab (as in, I bought a single-family house from a Louisiana minister. There were illegal tenants, one of whom died in contract. And then I rehabbed it). Some expressed feelings of connection to a bygone era. One woman on her move to Clinton Hill: I was reading a lot of Edith Wharton last summer, and it seemed so appropriate.

As Beck played over the loudspeakers and children tossed horseshoes, adults drank bottles of Stella Artois, gnawed on ribs, and compared notes about their paths to the outer boroughs. It was my dream, when I first found Brooklyn, to own a brownstone, one transplant from Manhattan to Crown Heights by way of Park Slope said. I didn’t think that Brooklyn was cool enough at first, an industrial designer said. But it’s, like, the cool borough right now. We really wanted to be in Clinton Hill, said his wife, a writer, describing their house hunt. Unfortunately, we were two years too late to really find a beater.

There was much talk about the shoddy upkeep and, some said, bad taste that had been visited on the brownstones during the twentieth century. That’s one nice thing about neighborhoods like Clinton Hill, where we live, Brownstoner said. No one ever had any money. His wife jumped in. It was, you know, basically a crack house, and it was covered in weird linoleum and industrial carpeting, she said. But when you peeled it back you got this incredible parquet. And then there were the mantels.
An exchange between Brownstoner and the buyer of a house in Windsor Terrace went like this:

W.T.: It’s a three-story.
Mr. B.: With a rounded front?
W.T.: It’s like a pointed bay.
Mr. B.: Uh-huh.
W.T.: And it was totally seventies Italian, you know—plastic-wood panelling everywhere and orange carpet and dropped ceilings.
Mr. B.: Wow.
Bystander: I never understood the dropped ceiling.
Mrs. B.: I know! What is it?
W.T.: The modern look, I guess. Or maybe for saving on heating?

Discussion of money matters proved only slightly more circumspect in person than online. Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy are seven, eight, and nine-hundred thousand dollars, the Crown Heights buyer said. Clinton Hill would be 1.5. And Park Slope would be 1.8. There was also talk about how rising prices affected the neighborhoods’ demographics. The diversity of the architecture and the people who live in Clinton Hill is peerless, Nathaniel Frank, an academic, said. I saw a study which said that, counter-intuitively, gentrification doesn’t necessarily lead to displacement. People make ends meet somehow; they double up, if they want to stay. They appreciate the neighborhood as different.
Among the guests at the Pioneer, only Lee Coker-Holmes (Nativegal, on the blog) said that she was Brooklyn-born and bred. She expressed mild bemusement at some of the interlopers, and at the labels they had affixed to various neighborhoods. I would say I grew up in Fort Greene, she said. But people on Brownstoner are, like, no, that’s Bed-Stuy. So I’m, like, O.K., fine. I can’t argue about that, because when I lived there they were both ghettos.

— Kate Julian