LightSkinYeshua
All Star
Anybody around nostrand and junction? Its crazy how much of those new buildings they are building in residential areas. shyt is wild suspect because its just on random quiet blocks.
My NYC Black Folk......Gentrification
- Thread starter Lewis Black
- Start date
I remember when PH was pre gentrification. it's so different now.I've been living in Prospect Heights since I was a 4-year-old.
at the transformation.
at coffeshops on Franklyn Avenue
ogc163
Superstar
ogc163
Superstar
reap what you sow.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
there's a lot of large empty lots down there so it makes sense, I went to a dentist appointment down there this winter and was shocked
transportation is good and there's the college
my DC and Bay brehs will probably disagree
The Evolution of New York City’s Black Neighborhoods - Metropolitics
While Detroit and Chicago have each lost more black residents than New York City, New York is third on the list. New York remains home to the nation’s largest black population (the census recorded almost 2.2 million black residents in 2015 compared to fewer than 900,000 in Chicago) and more of metro New York’s black population lives in the central city than in any other of the 20 largest metro areas (Ratogi et al. 2011; Frey 2011). But this population has been falling. This trend has many consequences, visible in the population changes taking place in iconic black neighborhoods like Harlem, as well as in shifts in local political leadership, indicated recently by Adriano Espaillat’s election as the first Dominican American (and formerly undocumented person) to Congress to succeed Charles Rangel.
In Metropolitics, Rodriguez (2016) recently spotlighted the negative impact of “black urban dislocation” on black urban electoral power. How do we understand this dynamic? To my knowledge, no model of neighborhood change links together all the factors operating at different levels in a way that allows us to predict what is likely to happen in any given place. A close look at the trajectories of Central Harlem and New York City’s other black neighborhoods can give us some useful hints. Observers associate the sharp rise in housing prices and rents in Harlem with the growth of white and black middle-class professionals, displacement of poor and working-class black renters, and public efforts to remake the 125th Street commercial district. But it would be misleading to say that gentrification—real-estate entrepreneurs using public programs to upgrade land use and change racial and class tenure patterns—is the sole or even primary force driving change. Harlem’s black population has been aging and moving elsewhere for many decades, while new immigrant populations are also moving in alongside young white (and black) professionals. As Harlem has become less black, it has also become more diverse.
Harlem in context
Harlem served as a primary home for the city’s black population between the 1920s and 1960s and is the heart of the city’s black cultural heritage. It has also been afflicted by disinvestment, depopulation, crime, and drugs. Harlem’s housing stock was developed at a fairly high-quality after the Civil War. Initially built for Manhattan’s growing middle class, it later attracted immigrant Jewish and Italian working families, and then became increasingly African-American in the early 20th century as blacks were displaced from lower Manhattan and property busts prevented Harlem landowners from attracting higher-income tenants. Central Harlem’s population shifted from 33% black in 1920 to 70% in 1930 (according to the censuses of each decade). The area elected Adam Clayton Powell to the City Council in 1941 and Benjamin Davis, a black Communist, succeeded him in 1944 when Powell moved up to Congress. It was home to an important Democratic club led by J. Raymond Jones, the “Harlem Fox,” that not only launched Charles Rangel’s successful challenge to Powell, but many other elected officials as well, including Mayor David Dinkins (Walter 1988).
After the Depression, however, the city’s black population grew more quickly in other neighborhoods than it did in Harlem. The opening of the A train in the 1930s and the magnet of wartime shipbuilding jobs in Brooklyn drew Harlem residents to Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn (Botein 2013, p. 718). After peaking in 1950, Harlem’s black population steadily declined, affected by suburbanization, urban renewal, public-housing construction, and disinvestment in the private housing stock, reaching a low point in about 1980. The city’s black middle class chose to live in less-dense neighborhoods with higher-quality housing, including Central Brooklyn, Southeast Queens, and more northerly parts of the Bronx. Those remaining behind in Harlem were increasingly poor and many lived in public-housing projects, subsidized housing, and low-quality private rental housing. By the end of the 1970s, the city had taken title to almost 70% of the private rental units for nonpayment of real-estate taxes.
The revival of the city’s economy and population after 1980 did not initially have a large impact on Harlem. Mayor Koch’s 10‑year housing plan built more subsidized housing in the South Bronx and North Brooklyn than in Harlem. Ultimately, however, public and private investment returned most of Harlem’s in rem housing to service. Between the Great Society and 1980, developers built 3,615 units of subsidized housing in Central Harlem, half of them in Esplanade Gardens, a Mitchell-Lama co‑op complex of 26‑story buildings on the Harlem River finished in the late 1960s. After 1980, city housing programs financed 11,323 more units built by nonprofit and private developers. When combined with the 8,600 units of pre-existing public housing, this gave the neighborhood a substantial social-housing stock. A large share (44.7%) of Central Harlem’s households also live in rent-stabilized private housing, leaving only 14.7% in unregulated private housing. [2] Many other public investments were made in its commercial spaces, with an empowerment zone, the Schomburg Library, a revitalized Apollo Theater, and the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building. [3]
By the 2000s, with crime rates having dropped to a fraction of the level typical 15 years earlier and the subways much improved, private residential investment in Harlem began to pick up, with the New York Times real-estate section frequently highlighting young African-American professional couples restoring brownstone row houses to their former glory. In 2006, private developers built the first new market-rate condo development, the 77‑apartment Lenox, on Lenox Avenue and 129th Street, with some units priced at more than $1 million. Other private developers followed and the pressure on the private rental market grew to such an extent as to threaten longtime tenants in the unprotected part of the market.
The trajectory of New York City’s black households and their neighborhoods
Harlem is one small, if important, part of a larger picture. Across the city, immigration, the aging and out-migration of the native-born minority populations, the labor-market shift to the services (and growing polarization of earnings and wealth), the paring-back of the welfare state, and technological change have been reshaping black neighborhoods. This broader context disadvantages heads of single-parent households with low levels of education and little or no attachment to the labor force, of which Harlem has a disproportionate share. Even in social housing, they find it hard to compete for housing not just with white professionals, but with Dominican and West African and Mexican immigrants, black middle-class professionals, and even German exchange students seeking an affordable new urban experience./quote]
Less well-known, but equally important, the shares of people living in native-born African-American and Puerto Rican households have also declined substantially. Over the last quarter of a century, people in African-American households dropped even faster than the native white population, while people in native-born Latino households declined more slowly. Like native-born white households, the city’s African-American and Puerto Rican populations are aging, their fertility is declining, and their members are more likely to leave the city than to move in. The leading city to which members of native-born black households move outside the metro area is Richmond, Virginia, while the largest extra-metropolitan city destination for Puerto Ricans is Allentown, Pennsylvania. By contrast, all the immigrant-origin minority household populations have grown substantially, including those headed by black immigrants.
While Detroit and Chicago have each lost more black residents than New York City, New York is third on the list. New York remains home to the nation’s largest black population (the census recorded almost 2.2 million black residents in 2015 compared to fewer than 900,000 in Chicago) and more of metro New York’s black population lives in the central city than in any other of the 20 largest metro areas (Ratogi et al. 2011; Frey 2011). But this population has been falling. This trend has many consequences, visible in the population changes taking place in iconic black neighborhoods like Harlem, as well as in shifts in local political leadership, indicated recently by Adriano Espaillat’s election as the first Dominican American (and formerly undocumented person) to Congress to succeed Charles Rangel.
In Metropolitics, Rodriguez (2016) recently spotlighted the negative impact of “black urban dislocation” on black urban electoral power. How do we understand this dynamic? To my knowledge, no model of neighborhood change links together all the factors operating at different levels in a way that allows us to predict what is likely to happen in any given place. A close look at the trajectories of Central Harlem and New York City’s other black neighborhoods can give us some useful hints. Observers associate the sharp rise in housing prices and rents in Harlem with the growth of white and black middle-class professionals, displacement of poor and working-class black renters, and public efforts to remake the 125th Street commercial district. But it would be misleading to say that gentrification—real-estate entrepreneurs using public programs to upgrade land use and change racial and class tenure patterns—is the sole or even primary force driving change. Harlem’s black population has been aging and moving elsewhere for many decades, while new immigrant populations are also moving in alongside young white (and black) professionals. As Harlem has become less black, it has also become more diverse.
Harlem in context
Harlem served as a primary home for the city’s black population between the 1920s and 1960s and is the heart of the city’s black cultural heritage. It has also been afflicted by disinvestment, depopulation, crime, and drugs. Harlem’s housing stock was developed at a fairly high-quality after the Civil War. Initially built for Manhattan’s growing middle class, it later attracted immigrant Jewish and Italian working families, and then became increasingly African-American in the early 20th century as blacks were displaced from lower Manhattan and property busts prevented Harlem landowners from attracting higher-income tenants. Central Harlem’s population shifted from 33% black in 1920 to 70% in 1930 (according to the censuses of each decade). The area elected Adam Clayton Powell to the City Council in 1941 and Benjamin Davis, a black Communist, succeeded him in 1944 when Powell moved up to Congress. It was home to an important Democratic club led by J. Raymond Jones, the “Harlem Fox,” that not only launched Charles Rangel’s successful challenge to Powell, but many other elected officials as well, including Mayor David Dinkins (Walter 1988).
After the Depression, however, the city’s black population grew more quickly in other neighborhoods than it did in Harlem. The opening of the A train in the 1930s and the magnet of wartime shipbuilding jobs in Brooklyn drew Harlem residents to Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn (Botein 2013, p. 718). After peaking in 1950, Harlem’s black population steadily declined, affected by suburbanization, urban renewal, public-housing construction, and disinvestment in the private housing stock, reaching a low point in about 1980. The city’s black middle class chose to live in less-dense neighborhoods with higher-quality housing, including Central Brooklyn, Southeast Queens, and more northerly parts of the Bronx. Those remaining behind in Harlem were increasingly poor and many lived in public-housing projects, subsidized housing, and low-quality private rental housing. By the end of the 1970s, the city had taken title to almost 70% of the private rental units for nonpayment of real-estate taxes.
The revival of the city’s economy and population after 1980 did not initially have a large impact on Harlem. Mayor Koch’s 10‑year housing plan built more subsidized housing in the South Bronx and North Brooklyn than in Harlem. Ultimately, however, public and private investment returned most of Harlem’s in rem housing to service. Between the Great Society and 1980, developers built 3,615 units of subsidized housing in Central Harlem, half of them in Esplanade Gardens, a Mitchell-Lama co‑op complex of 26‑story buildings on the Harlem River finished in the late 1960s. After 1980, city housing programs financed 11,323 more units built by nonprofit and private developers. When combined with the 8,600 units of pre-existing public housing, this gave the neighborhood a substantial social-housing stock. A large share (44.7%) of Central Harlem’s households also live in rent-stabilized private housing, leaving only 14.7% in unregulated private housing. [2] Many other public investments were made in its commercial spaces, with an empowerment zone, the Schomburg Library, a revitalized Apollo Theater, and the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building. [3]
By the 2000s, with crime rates having dropped to a fraction of the level typical 15 years earlier and the subways much improved, private residential investment in Harlem began to pick up, with the New York Times real-estate section frequently highlighting young African-American professional couples restoring brownstone row houses to their former glory. In 2006, private developers built the first new market-rate condo development, the 77‑apartment Lenox, on Lenox Avenue and 129th Street, with some units priced at more than $1 million. Other private developers followed and the pressure on the private rental market grew to such an extent as to threaten longtime tenants in the unprotected part of the market.
The trajectory of New York City’s black households and their neighborhoods
Harlem is one small, if important, part of a larger picture. Across the city, immigration, the aging and out-migration of the native-born minority populations, the labor-market shift to the services (and growing polarization of earnings and wealth), the paring-back of the welfare state, and technological change have been reshaping black neighborhoods. This broader context disadvantages heads of single-parent households with low levels of education and little or no attachment to the labor force, of which Harlem has a disproportionate share. Even in social housing, they find it hard to compete for housing not just with white professionals, but with Dominican and West African and Mexican immigrants, black middle-class professionals, and even German exchange students seeking an affordable new urban experience./quote]
Less well-known, but equally important, the shares of people living in native-born African-American and Puerto Rican households have also declined substantially. Over the last quarter of a century, people in African-American households dropped even faster than the native white population, while people in native-born Latino households declined more slowly. Like native-born white households, the city’s African-American and Puerto Rican populations are aging, their fertility is declining, and their members are more likely to leave the city than to move in. The leading city to which members of native-born black households move outside the metro area is Richmond, Virginia, while the largest extra-metropolitan city destination for Puerto Ricans is Allentown, Pennsylvania. By contrast, all the immigrant-origin minority household populations have grown substantially, including those headed by black immigrants.
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Walked into the breakroom for lunch and this lady was talking about how her sister and brother in-law had an apartment the size of a kitchen.
Me: "Was this in Manhattan or something???"
Her: "Yeah, they live in Harlem"
Me: "
oh..."
Her: "They're the Supers of the building."
Me: "
oh wow" *on the inside 
*
Me: "Was this in Manhattan or something???"
Her: "Yeah, they live in Harlem"
Me: "
oh..."Her: "They're the Supers of the building."
Me: "
oh wow" *on the inside *Alex Wolf
Writer and creative strategist based in Brooklyn, New York. Named as the ‘Top 100 Most Creative People’ by Fast Company.
Dec 11, 2017
Goodbye Brooklyn
There’s a unicorn horn store on Flatbush Avenue. I repeat. There’s a unicorn horn store on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, New York in the United States of America. Set off the alarms. Send in the guards. My culture is drowning, and is no condition to make it out. I noticed this place of — ahem, business a few months back and peeked in. To my horror, there they were. Rows and rows of glittering, rainbow unicorn horns meant to attach to on top of little children’s heads.
Out front, a sign written by a hand that seemed all too excited to jot down the frightening words — “The World’s First Unicorn Horn Store”. Oh, how lovely, and right in the middle of the neighborhood I grew up in. I feel so special. Down the block from this children’s wonderland is 560 State street, the building Jay-Z raps about selling drugs in.
Just in case you were wondering, unicorns are trending in the marketplace of little girls right now. They see them as fun, imaginative characters that they get to run with, take over and even pretend to be like. Gee, why does that ring a bell?
As much as I wanted to go in, I restricted myself. It’s only been six months since I’ve left anger management and I know better. I would not be able to find patience as the perfectly swirled horns beamed down at me. To the new kids, these horns made a promise; a carefully prepared space for their childhood to bloom. To me they made the promise that my childhood was gone, forever. Don’t even dare to look back.
Nope. I could not stand straight while in conversation with whoever had the audacity to work there. I would not be able to look them in the eyes. Not this time. I was afraid my heart might break right in front of them. I was afraid that once again, I would have to dance the newcomer dance. The dance where I have to look at the newcomer with eyes that I hope make them see my pain, eyes that show them how lost I am about that they’re here in the hope that they would understand, but they never do. And in a store like that, on Flatbush Avenue, it would just be too much. But I do that dance, as I have had to learn it living here now. It takes energy. To lift my mouth into that smile feels like I’m cranking a tight screw. I am not happy to see you. I am not happy that my neighborhood is gone.
Oh boo, hoo. Get over it. Things change. Life goes on. You’re right. These new people, they have the right. They have the right to be here. They have the right to buy up the buildings that used to belong to people who lived here. They have the right to make uncomfortably fancy coffee shops and grocery stores that sell Parmesan cheese for $22. They have the right to build bookstores in neighborhoods that used to be black. They have a right to place books about how it’s messed up that these neighborhoods used to be black right in the front of these bookstores. They have a right to complain about the horrors of gentrification while simultaneously gentrifying. They have the right. But I have some rights too.
I have a right to be sad. I have a right to experience confusion and frustration when the culture shock I’m experiencing is so intense because it is coming from my own. I have the right to think it’s wrong that the place that was so special to me as a child has become commoditized — a brand — for outsiders to come and indulge in like we’re unicorns. Because wherever they came from was so pathetic and boring that they needed this place instead. I have a right to roll my eyes when I see all these establishments that include the name ”Brooklyn” in them as if they represent Brooklyn. Brooklyn Pilates. Brooklyn CrossFit. The name of the unicorn horn store is “Brooklyn Owl”. Brooklyn fukking owl? How does it feel to name something after a place that you aren’t from? I just want to know.
My friends from the Bronx freak out when they see a Starbucks pop up: “It’s happening to us too!”. Shut the hell up. Do you know what I would do to go back to the days when a Starbucks was the thing that worried me? Give me a call when you have a tour bus running through your borough and a 30,000-square -foot Apple store and Whole Foods right next door to each other. And can we talk about how the “G” in the G line appropriately represents the exact neighborhoods that have been gentrified? Did you all plan that?
I get it. Change happens. I’m not mad at the people that are changing my culture. I’m mad that I have no choice but to watch it. It’s like watching a house burn down with all my things in it and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to save. I don’t know if I should risk going in at all. Is that a baby I hear crying? Is that an old lady in the window? Oh, I don’t know, but it’s all crumbling so fast. I can’t think.
When it first started to happen there was a different energy. The newcomers felt like outsiders. I would see them and almost smile in awe. Wow. You are really brave to live here I’d think. They’d tiptoe around the borough, very aware that they were outnumbered and watched. Today just the opposite has happened. I am now the outsider and they don’t tiptoe anymore. We crunch under their boots like snow. Suddenly, I’m the brave one.
I regret, as I’m sure most of the native Brooklyn people do, all the times I bragged about this amazing place. When I moved to California as a teenager, “Brooklyn” was one of the three first words I said to every person I met (half of being from here is saying it every time you leave). Brooklyn was in the screen names. Brooklyn was on my t-shirts. While I lived there my nickname was even “Brooklyn”.
This was the same year the Biggie movie came out. We drove all the way to San Francisco to see the first screening. My friend with wide eyes spoke to me in the passenger seat on the way. “I didn’t even care about Biggie or Brooklyn before I met you, Brooklyn. But you just made me care!” Yeah, I know. We all made you care and we fukked it all up for ourselves.
I can’t walk past Grand Army Plaza without seeing a grand army of tourists taking photos in front of a fountain that I’ve been walking past my whole life. How are you just noticing this? Whenever I sit on the benches on the side I feel like I’m James Baldwin. The negro, judging you all.
See, there are people who buy culture and then there are people who make it. The people who buy it see its pieces as creative decorations available for sale. Things you can simply buy and accessorize your life with. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that these people are late to the show or that they make it into a show. There’s parts of Brooklyn that reek of a hipster Disneyland. Where people get the same giddiness around women wearing bamboo earrings or men with du-rags as a child would around a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. I can feel you all turning us into characters in your head. Yes. We are just like the movies. a$$hole.
But the people who actually make culture, who made the Brooklyn culture, see what their mothers see when their child is grown. We see it still in it’s infant form no matter how developed it is. We see how it took its first steps, how it depended on us to grow and how we depended on it to give us a reason to keep going.
We saw it broke and lonely. We saw it dismissed and misunderstood. We saw it being talked about like a fukking concentration camp in Season Six, episode Sixteen of Sex and the City. “Brooklyn. I can’t say it, let alone live in it. You’ll all come visit, right?” Miranda’s words drenched in doubt.
When Brooklyn was still the scary place you didn’t move, and for reasons valid,like our child, we still loved it. We still saw the beauty it has and we saw it all way. before. you.
Writer and creative strategist based in Brooklyn, New York. Named as the ‘Top 100 Most Creative People’ by Fast Company.
Dec 11, 2017
Goodbye Brooklyn
There’s a unicorn horn store on Flatbush Avenue. I repeat. There’s a unicorn horn store on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, New York in the United States of America. Set off the alarms. Send in the guards. My culture is drowning, and is no condition to make it out. I noticed this place of — ahem, business a few months back and peeked in. To my horror, there they were. Rows and rows of glittering, rainbow unicorn horns meant to attach to on top of little children’s heads.
Out front, a sign written by a hand that seemed all too excited to jot down the frightening words — “The World’s First Unicorn Horn Store”. Oh, how lovely, and right in the middle of the neighborhood I grew up in. I feel so special. Down the block from this children’s wonderland is 560 State street, the building Jay-Z raps about selling drugs in.
Just in case you were wondering, unicorns are trending in the marketplace of little girls right now. They see them as fun, imaginative characters that they get to run with, take over and even pretend to be like. Gee, why does that ring a bell?
As much as I wanted to go in, I restricted myself. It’s only been six months since I’ve left anger management and I know better. I would not be able to find patience as the perfectly swirled horns beamed down at me. To the new kids, these horns made a promise; a carefully prepared space for their childhood to bloom. To me they made the promise that my childhood was gone, forever. Don’t even dare to look back.
Nope. I could not stand straight while in conversation with whoever had the audacity to work there. I would not be able to look them in the eyes. Not this time. I was afraid my heart might break right in front of them. I was afraid that once again, I would have to dance the newcomer dance. The dance where I have to look at the newcomer with eyes that I hope make them see my pain, eyes that show them how lost I am about that they’re here in the hope that they would understand, but they never do. And in a store like that, on Flatbush Avenue, it would just be too much. But I do that dance, as I have had to learn it living here now. It takes energy. To lift my mouth into that smile feels like I’m cranking a tight screw. I am not happy to see you. I am not happy that my neighborhood is gone.
Oh boo, hoo. Get over it. Things change. Life goes on. You’re right. These new people, they have the right. They have the right to be here. They have the right to buy up the buildings that used to belong to people who lived here. They have the right to make uncomfortably fancy coffee shops and grocery stores that sell Parmesan cheese for $22. They have the right to build bookstores in neighborhoods that used to be black. They have a right to place books about how it’s messed up that these neighborhoods used to be black right in the front of these bookstores. They have a right to complain about the horrors of gentrification while simultaneously gentrifying. They have the right. But I have some rights too.
I have a right to be sad. I have a right to experience confusion and frustration when the culture shock I’m experiencing is so intense because it is coming from my own. I have the right to think it’s wrong that the place that was so special to me as a child has become commoditized — a brand — for outsiders to come and indulge in like we’re unicorns. Because wherever they came from was so pathetic and boring that they needed this place instead. I have a right to roll my eyes when I see all these establishments that include the name ”Brooklyn” in them as if they represent Brooklyn. Brooklyn Pilates. Brooklyn CrossFit. The name of the unicorn horn store is “Brooklyn Owl”. Brooklyn fukking owl? How does it feel to name something after a place that you aren’t from? I just want to know.
My friends from the Bronx freak out when they see a Starbucks pop up: “It’s happening to us too!”. Shut the hell up. Do you know what I would do to go back to the days when a Starbucks was the thing that worried me? Give me a call when you have a tour bus running through your borough and a 30,000-square -foot Apple store and Whole Foods right next door to each other. And can we talk about how the “G” in the G line appropriately represents the exact neighborhoods that have been gentrified? Did you all plan that?
I get it. Change happens. I’m not mad at the people that are changing my culture. I’m mad that I have no choice but to watch it. It’s like watching a house burn down with all my things in it and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to save. I don’t know if I should risk going in at all. Is that a baby I hear crying? Is that an old lady in the window? Oh, I don’t know, but it’s all crumbling so fast. I can’t think.
When it first started to happen there was a different energy. The newcomers felt like outsiders. I would see them and almost smile in awe. Wow. You are really brave to live here I’d think. They’d tiptoe around the borough, very aware that they were outnumbered and watched. Today just the opposite has happened. I am now the outsider and they don’t tiptoe anymore. We crunch under their boots like snow. Suddenly, I’m the brave one.
I regret, as I’m sure most of the native Brooklyn people do, all the times I bragged about this amazing place. When I moved to California as a teenager, “Brooklyn” was one of the three first words I said to every person I met (half of being from here is saying it every time you leave). Brooklyn was in the screen names. Brooklyn was on my t-shirts. While I lived there my nickname was even “Brooklyn”.
This was the same year the Biggie movie came out. We drove all the way to San Francisco to see the first screening. My friend with wide eyes spoke to me in the passenger seat on the way. “I didn’t even care about Biggie or Brooklyn before I met you, Brooklyn. But you just made me care!” Yeah, I know. We all made you care and we fukked it all up for ourselves.
I can’t walk past Grand Army Plaza without seeing a grand army of tourists taking photos in front of a fountain that I’ve been walking past my whole life. How are you just noticing this? Whenever I sit on the benches on the side I feel like I’m James Baldwin. The negro, judging you all.
See, there are people who buy culture and then there are people who make it. The people who buy it see its pieces as creative decorations available for sale. Things you can simply buy and accessorize your life with. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that these people are late to the show or that they make it into a show. There’s parts of Brooklyn that reek of a hipster Disneyland. Where people get the same giddiness around women wearing bamboo earrings or men with du-rags as a child would around a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. I can feel you all turning us into characters in your head. Yes. We are just like the movies. a$$hole.
But the people who actually make culture, who made the Brooklyn culture, see what their mothers see when their child is grown. We see it still in it’s infant form no matter how developed it is. We see how it took its first steps, how it depended on us to grow and how we depended on it to give us a reason to keep going.
We saw it broke and lonely. We saw it dismissed and misunderstood. We saw it being talked about like a fukking concentration camp in Season Six, episode Sixteen of Sex and the City. “Brooklyn. I can’t say it, let alone live in it. You’ll all come visit, right?” Miranda’s words drenched in doubt.
When Brooklyn was still the scary place you didn’t move, and for reasons valid,like our child, we still loved it. We still saw the beauty it has and we saw it all way. before. you.
What happens to Jerome Avenue after its rezoning?
Everything from Dominican mechanics, African shops, Halal chicken stores will be decimated on that street
Everything from Dominican mechanics, African shops, Halal chicken stores will be decimated on that street
Francis White
i been away to long, my feeling died.
Alex Wolf
Writer and creative strategist based in Brooklyn, New York. Named as the ‘Top 100 Most Creative People’ by Fast Company.
Dec 11, 2017
Goodbye Brooklyn
There’s a unicorn horn store on Flatbush Avenue. I repeat. There’s a unicorn horn store on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, New York in the United States of America. Set off the alarms. Send in the guards. My culture is drowning, and is no condition to make it out. I noticed this place of — ahem, business a few months back and peeked in. To my horror, there they were. Rows and rows of glittering, rainbow unicorn horns meant to attach to on top of little children’s heads.
Out front, a sign written by a hand that seemed all too excited to jot down the frightening words — “The World’s First Unicorn Horn Store”. Oh, how lovely, and right in the middle of the neighborhood I grew up in. I feel so special. Down the block from this children’s wonderland is 560 State street, the building Jay-Z raps about selling drugs in.
Just in case you were wondering, unicorns are trending in the marketplace of little girls right now. They see them as fun, imaginative characters that they get to run with, take over and even pretend to be like. Gee, why does that ring a bell?
As much as I wanted to go in, I restricted myself. It’s only been six months since I’ve left anger management and I know better. I would not be able to find patience as the perfectly swirled horns beamed down at me. To the new kids, these horns made a promise; a carefully prepared space for their childhood to bloom. To me they made the promise that my childhood was gone, forever. Don’t even dare to look back.
Nope. I could not stand straight while in conversation with whoever had the audacity to work there. I would not be able to look them in the eyes. Not this time. I was afraid my heart might break right in front of them. I was afraid that once again, I would have to dance the newcomer dance. The dance where I have to look at the newcomer with eyes that I hope make them see my pain, eyes that show them how lost I am about that they’re here in the hope that they would understand, but they never do. And in a store like that, on Flatbush Avenue, it would just be too much. But I do that dance, as I have had to learn it living here now. It takes energy. To lift my mouth into that smile feels like I’m cranking a tight screw. I am not happy to see you. I am not happy that my neighborhood is gone.
Oh boo, hoo. Get over it. Things change. Life goes on. You’re right. These new people, they have the right. They have the right to be here. They have the right to buy up the buildings that used to belong to people who lived here. They have the right to make uncomfortably fancy coffee shops and grocery stores that sell Parmesan cheese for $22. They have the right to build bookstores in neighborhoods that used to be black. They have a right to place books about how it’s messed up that these neighborhoods used to be black right in the front of these bookstores. They have a right to complain about the horrors of gentrification while simultaneously gentrifying. They have the right. But I have some rights too.
I have a right to be sad. I have a right to experience confusion and frustration when the culture shock I’m experiencing is so intense because it is coming from my own. I have the right to think it’s wrong that the place that was so special to me as a child has become commoditized — a brand — for outsiders to come and indulge in like we’re unicorns. Because wherever they came from was so pathetic and boring that they needed this place instead. I have a right to roll my eyes when I see all these establishments that include the name ”Brooklyn” in them as if they represent Brooklyn. Brooklyn Pilates. Brooklyn CrossFit. The name of the unicorn horn store is “Brooklyn Owl”. Brooklyn fukking owl? How does it feel to name something after a place that you aren’t from? I just want to know.
My friends from the Bronx freak out when they see a Starbucks pop up: “It’s happening to us too!”. Shut the hell up. Do you know what I would do to go back to the days when a Starbucks was the thing that worried me? Give me a call when you have a tour bus running through your borough and a 30,000-square -foot Apple store and Whole Foods right next door to each other. And can we talk about how the “G” in the G line appropriately represents the exact neighborhoods that have been gentrified? Did you all plan that?
I get it. Change happens. I’m not mad at the people that are changing my culture. I’m mad that I have no choice but to watch it. It’s like watching a house burn down with all my things in it and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to save. I don’t know if I should risk going in at all. Is that a baby I hear crying? Is that an old lady in the window? Oh, I don’t know, but it’s all crumbling so fast. I can’t think.
When it first started to happen there was a different energy. The newcomers felt like outsiders. I would see them and almost smile in awe. Wow. You are really brave to live here I’d think. They’d tiptoe around the borough, very aware that they were outnumbered and watched. Today just the opposite has happened. I am now the outsider and they don’t tiptoe anymore. We crunch under their boots like snow. Suddenly, I’m the brave one.
I regret, as I’m sure most of the native Brooklyn people do, all the times I bragged about this amazing place. When I moved to California as a teenager, “Brooklyn” was one of the three first words I said to every person I met (half of being from here is saying it every time you leave). Brooklyn was in the screen names. Brooklyn was on my t-shirts. While I lived there my nickname was even “Brooklyn”.
This was the same year the Biggie movie came out. We drove all the way to San Francisco to see the first screening. My friend with wide eyes spoke to me in the passenger seat on the way. “I didn’t even care about Biggie or Brooklyn before I met you, Brooklyn. But you just made me care!” Yeah, I know. We all made you care and we fukked it all up for ourselves.
I can’t walk past Grand Army Plaza without seeing a grand army of tourists taking photos in front of a fountain that I’ve been walking past my whole life. How are you just noticing this? Whenever I sit on the benches on the side I feel like I’m James Baldwin. The negro, judging you all.
See, there are people who buy culture and then there are people who make it. The people who buy it see its pieces as creative decorations available for sale. Things you can simply buy and accessorize your life with. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that these people are late to the show or that they make it into a show. There’s parts of Brooklyn that reek of a hipster Disneyland. Where people get the same giddiness around women wearing bamboo earrings or men with du-rags as a child would around a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. I can feel you all turning us into characters in your head. Yes. We are just like the movies. a$$hole.
But the people who actually make culture, who made the Brooklyn culture, see what their mothers see when their child is grown. We see it still in it’s infant form no matter how developed it is. We see how it took its first steps, how it depended on us to grow and how we depended on it to give us a reason to keep going.
We saw it broke and lonely. We saw it dismissed and misunderstood. We saw it being talked about like a fukking concentration camp in Season Six, episode Sixteen of Sex and the City. “Brooklyn. I can’t say it, let alone live in it. You’ll all come visit, right?” Miranda’s words drenched in doubt.
When Brooklyn was still the scary place you didn’t move, and for reasons valid,like our child, we still loved it. We still saw the beauty it has and we saw it all way. before. you.
Another stuck in the past guy crying because he got old and the world passed him bye. Some of the points made sense but that sit back mentality is disgusting thinking nothing is ever going to change.
We need to change before the next man so we can be in the drivers seat for once.
UberEatsDriver
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If you look at some of the property management companies online many have insane insentatives such as giving $1,000 gift cards and free first three months of rent just to attract rich folks.
Realistically I think because of rent stabilized apartments developers only see value in building luxury. Hopefully it all comes tumbling down!
UberEatsDriver
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- Brooklyn keeps on taking it.