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| Top and bottom, photos by by Fred Askew. Battles over what Brooklyn will become are everywhere here. |
While
we were working on the Beach Beneath
the Streets: Contesting New York’s Public Spaces, Greg Smithsimon
suggested I write about Brooklyn as a global city in and of itself. Intrigued,
I started looking at the waterfront and the changes the waves brought into the
shores of my adopted home.
Caroline and
I moved here in the summer of 2000 after being priced out of the Lower East
Side. But as soon as we got here, the
same process starting coming Brooklyn, with a rezoning plan that my friend Beka
Economopoulos called “Gentrification on Steroids.”
We
fought that battle and many more over bike lanes and community gardens, real
estate and old business in Coney Island, police accountability and recovery
after Sandy. We won some, but not all;
it was hard to make sense of the process. Over and over, we were trying to
fashion a distinct model of sustainable urbanism here as we grappled with the
dialectical nature of the changes taking place over our shores.
My
friend Mark Noonan, who quickly became a co-author for the project, suggested
we think of the changes as tides, in homage to Whitman’s Brooklyn, offering a
literary reading of the history of Brooklyn
City of
the sea! City
of hurried and
glittering tides!
City whose
gleeful tides continually
rush or recede,
whirling in
and out,
with eddies and
foam!
Walt Whitman,
“City of Ships”
(1865)
Could
Brooklyn beat back the tides and serve as a model of sustainable urbanism?
And
how should we tell its story?
Was
it possible to record a people’s history of Brooklyn?
If so, how?
If so, how?
by Benjamin Shepard and
Mark Noonan
Transcript Press, 2918
Brooklyn has all the
features of a “global borough”: It is a base of immigrant labor and ethnically
diverse communities, of social and cultural capital, of global transportation,
cultural production, and policy innovation. At once a model of sustainable urbanization
and over development, the question is now: What will become of Global
Brooklyn? Tracing the emergence of Brooklyn from village outpost to global
borough, Brooklyn Tides investigates the nature and consequences of global forces that
have crossed the East River and identifies alternative models for urban
development in global capitalism. Benjamin Shepard and Mark Noonan provide a
unique ethnographic reading of the literature, social activism, and changing
tides impacting this ever-transforming space. The book also features images of a rapidly
transforming global borough by photographer Caroline Shepard, including its
magnificent cover, as well as other artists including Brennan Cavanaugh, Robin
Michals and Jose Parla.
Prologue
Brooklyn Is
Expanding: Introductory Notes
on a Global
Borough
Written by Benjamin Shepard and Mark Noonan, with
notes from Greg Smithsimon
This book
concerns tides: tides
of people, tides
of development, tides
of industry,
tides of
power, and tides
of resistance. Brooklyn,
once a city,
then a borough,
and now
a brand, illustrates
the tensions that
arise between the
local and the
global in
a given place.
The ebb and
flow of these
dynamics can be
witnessed on
the street
as well as
in the many
seminal books and
films set in
Brooklyn and
concerned with
its unique status
as both a
distinctive place and an ever-evolving
imaginative space
evoking a wide
range of associations
and emotions. We
witness these
dynamics, for example,
in Woody Allen’s
film
Annie Hall
(1977). In
an early scene,
the protagonist, Alvy,
is seen as
a child in
a doctor’s office
in Coney Island
in the 1940s.
The doctor asks
Alvy why he
is depressed.
“It’s something
he read,” explains
Alvy’s Mom.
“Something he
read, huh?” asks
the doctor.
“The
universe is expanding,”
explains Alvy with
his head down.
“The universe
is expanding?” asks
the doctor.
“Well, the
universe is everything,
and if it’s
expanding, some day
it will break
apart and
that would be
the end of
everything!” Alvy posits.
“What is
that your business?”
notes his Mom
with exasperation, turning
back
to the
doctor. “He stopped
doing his homework!”
“What’s the
point?” explains Alvy.
“What has
the universe got
to do with
it?” his Mom
chimes in. “You’re
here in
Brooklyn! Brooklyn
is not expanding!”
As the
scene ends, the
camera zooms out
from the Coney
Island roller coaster,
the Cyclone,
with an image
of Marilyn Monroe,
as if in
a film, blurred
within
the iconic
landscape of this
amusement park for
the people. The
meaning of this
shot is
as rich and
complicated as Alvy’s
adolescent psyche. Monroe,
of course,
remains the
quintessential icon of
glamour. Her marriage
to Arthur Miller
gave the
playwright a heavy
dose of Hollywood
glitz to accompany
his Brooklyn
accent. Though
Monroe often claimed
she wanted to
retire in Brooklyn,
the
couple’s polar
personalities ensured the
marriage would be
brief. The grit
of Brooklyn
and the glamour
of Hollywood did
not pair off
easily. The scene
reminds us
of the extent
to which places,
like celebrities, constitute
a system of
semiotics and
often contending associations.
Raised in a
part of Brooklyn
that
remains both
an actual and
mythological space, Alvy,
accordingly, confesses
to having
a hard time
differentiating between reality
and fantasy and,
for the
remainder of
the film, despairs
of ever finding
himself on solid
ground.
But Alvy’s
anxiety was not
without reason: Brooklyn
was literally expanding
and, throughout
the 1950s, would
experience its most
transformative decade
as tides
of newcomers arrived,
while another human
wave, largely white
and
middle-class, left
for the suburbs.
Existentialism was in
the air in post-war
Brooklyn, a
strange feeling that nothing was
ever going to
be quite the
same
again after
the world war
which brought so
many away and
back. Outside
global forces
were at work
as well, as
many returning soldiers
and their families
moved out
to the borough.
The city
of Brooklyn had
been contending with
waves of people
and change
long before
the mid-twentieth century.
Whitman says as
much in his
poem
“City of
Ships,” written in
1865:
City of
the world! (for
all races are
here;
All the
lands of the
earth make contributions
here;)
City of
the sea! City
of hurried and
glittering tides!
City whose
gleeful tides continually
rush or recede,
whirling in and
out, with
eddies and foam!
City of
wharves and stores!
City of tall
façades of marble
and iron!
Hurried and
whirling tides are
what Brooklyn—“city of
wharves and stores”—
and Manhattan—“city of
tall façades of
marble and iron”—have
in common. At
the same
time, the city
across the river
has always felt
like something very,
very
far away.
Globalization and mercantilism,
war and environmental
change, have
also felt
like faraway notions.
Nonetheless they were
still felt. The
incoming
tides were,
consequently, not always
gleeful, for Brooklyn
was often at
the
mercy of
outside forces. The
Dodgers were to
depart in the
1950s in an
example
of what
a global marketplace
and local powerbrokers
with alternate ambitions
can do
to a local
space; this was
only after the
team had helped
integrate
baseball, offering
a feel-good narrative
replaced by a
sense of emptiness
which
would last
decades. From the
nineteenth century into
the twentieth, Brooklyn
was always
part of something
larger, something global,
with which it
was both
connected and
seemingly disconnected, displacing
residents like its
beloved
baseball team.
It was
hard to expunge
the feeling that
the borough was
seldom at the
center of
things. “When I was a
child I thought
we lived at
the end of the world,”
explains Alfred
Kazin in his
1951 book, A Walker
in the City.
“It was the
eternity
of the
subway ride into
the city that
first gave me
this idea.” Brooklyn
was
almost all
periphery. Like present-day
Los Angeles, it
seemed to go
on forever,
especially on
the long subway
ride he describes,
from the East
River, beneath
the Brooklyn
Bridge, past Borough
Hall and Prospect
Park, out to
Canarsie.
“We were
of the city
but somehow not
in it,” he
confesses. “We were
at the end
of the
line. We were
the children of
immigrants who had
cramped at the
city’s
back door,
in New York’s
rawest, remotest, cheapest
ghetto, enclosed on
one
side by
the Canarsie flats
and on the
other side by
the hallowed middle-class
districts that
showed the way to New
York.”
Kazin’s concerns
about his life
in the city
are familiar to
many. “The anxiety
of our
era has to
do fundamentally with
space,” argues Michel
Foucault in his
essay, “Of Other Spaces,
Heterotopias.” Spaces are
not mere containers,
even as
they can
sometimes entrap people,
when there are
no doors for
exit or entry.
For
Foucault, they
are places involved
with sets of
relations that give them meaning.
“In other
words,” he writes,
“we do not
live in a kind of
void, inside of
which we
could place individuals
and things ...
we live inside
a set of
relations
that delineates
sites which are
irreducible to one
another.... Our epoch
is one
in which
space takes for
us the form
of relations among
sites.”
The
“form of relations,”
of which Foucault
speaks, take shape
through our interactions
within the
time we spend
walking the streets,
riding the subway,
sitting
on stoops,
or hanging out in public
space, where we
make new friends
and
discover other
spaces. It even
takes shape within
Brooklyn’s relationship with
its Manhattan
neighbor. Manhattan is
most often considered
a place for
work,
while Brooklyn
is seen as
a place of
residence—though even this
is changing.
The city
is shaped by
our interactions within
these spaces, and
the social
relations amongst
the tides of
people filling them.
Waves of people,
economic
systems, and
stories shape the
borough. Increasingly, Brooklyn
is a place
where
difference finds
space between bike
rides, bridges, brownfields,
block parties,
foreclosure-defense street
actions, communities of
resistance, and community
gardens created
by and for
the people here.
Here we dance
with marching
bands, celebrate
the legacies of
Michael Jackson and
Prince at Fort
Greene
Park, visit
Coney Island, or
simply hang out
on Brooklyn’s lively
streets and in
its many
watering holes and
restaurants. Here, heterotopias
take shape, day
and
night, through
interactions with a mix of
people across class
and ethnic lines.
These are
spaces of otherness,
with countless ebbs
and tides between
who’s
coming and
who’s going.
Flowing through
this book are
the stories of
community gardeners, agitators,
artists, students,
and local residents
trying to find
a place to
live, of those
like
Kazin, who
felt on the
outside, while contending
with the clash
of bodies
and forces
of the city
“beyond.” They are
the narratives of
those lost on
the
subway. It
is the Brooklyn
which has long
had to cope
with alienation, low-
wage jobs,
inadequate housing, police
violence, the possibility
of deportation,
incarceration, and
stop-and-frisk policing. As
depicted in fictionalized
stories
such as
A Tree Grows
in Brooklyn. Death of
a Salesman, and Do the
Right Thing,
as well
as in real
life, Brooklyn is
filled with those
longing for greater
respect
and upward
mobility. It is a very
distinct local place.
Yet, as Alvy
understood
well, it
has always been
connected to something
much, much larger
that is
in constant
flux. This is
a place where
global forces always
seem to have
the
upper hand.
But it is
also a place
where people organize
and build their
own
commons. Here,
communities rise and
fall, and rise
again. Instead of
the same
old thing,
citizens have learned
to ride the
tides, forging their
own distinctive
livable globalized
space.
Hovering over
these conversations is the concern
that it may
all be too
late. The
condominiums popping
up everywhere, skyrocketing
rents, ugly buildings
overlooking Brooklyn
Bridge Park, rampant
police abuses, hospital
and
independent bookstore
closings lend credence
to this conclusion.
This specter
of failure
has always been a part
of life here.
General George Washington
famously lost
the Battle of Brooklyn, retreating
into the fog
rather than face
British troops
who outnumbered his.
The events of
August 27, 1776
have often
been recognized
as a moment
of losing a
battle but ultimately
winning a war.
Instead of following conventional
rules of engagement,
Washington led his
troops West
through the fog,
past the marsh
that would become
the Gowanus
Canal, to
the East River,
where they fled
to safety.Sometimes you
have to
retreat
and
pick your battles.
That is the
story of this
book, of battling
titans,
the British
troops, even capitalism
itself. You are
not always going
to win, but
you are
going to retreat,
rope-a-dope, elude opponents,
in the fight
to preserve
something truly
special. We see it today
in the streets
of Brooklyn from
Bed-
Stuy to
Prospect Park and
Coney Island. This
is a book
about lots and
lots of
small battles
that amount to
large wins.
This trend
can be found
in the advancing
and receding waves
of people and
history. To
the western-most edge
of Long Island
have come successive
tides of
people—Native American,
Dutch, English, African-American, Irish,
German,
Italian, Swedish,
Hispanic, Caribbean, and
Asian. For thousands
of years,
Brooklyn was
home to the
Leni Lenape, who
followed prey in
the forests and,
in
the summer,
settled near shellfish-rich waters.
Their vanquishers, the
Dutch,
used axes
and tidal mills
to clear and
drain the land
to establish farms
that
would supply
agricultural products first
for themselves, then
for the British,
then for
the Americans following
the Revolutionary War.
In the nineteenth
century, Brooklyn
was flooded with
people following tides
of work—handling
products and
raw materials, building
ships, tunnels, and
bridges, and manning
the warehouses
and factories that
would subsidize the
Empire City across
the
river. Settling
in working-class, immigrant
communities, Brooklyn residents
would continue
to experience successive
tides of dramatic
change. Between
the rise
and fall of
the Brooklyn Navy
Yard, the Great
Migration of African
Americans from
the South from
1910-70, the slum-clearing
policies of Robert
Moses, the
red-lining of real
estate companies in
the 1950s, the
gentrification
of the
last two decades,
the compulsive re-zoning
of mayors Bloomberg
and de
Blasio, the
rising waters of
Super-Storm Sandy in
the fall of
2012, and waves
of
young people
clogging the streets
with their hands
in the air,
declaring, “Hands
Up, Don’t
Shoot,” and “Black
Lives Matter” in
the fall of
2014, Brooklyn has
endured countless
tides. The pattern
is long in
the making. So
is the literature
on this
global borough and
its persistent questions.
A Globalized Space
Scholarship on
global cities has
identified the distinctive
roles that places
like New
York, Paris, Tokyo,
London, Los Angeles,
and Chicago play
in the
global economic
system. However, most
studies of the
new role of
these “global
cities” focus
on downtown, the
financial district, the
multinational financial
institutions, and
the white-collar employees
who work there.
Far
less emphasis has
been placed on the contributions
of the large
numbers of working-class
immigrants and their
transnational culture, the
armies of service
industry
workers who
sustain the financial
industry and its
executives, the reduced
social contract
working people are
offered in the
neoliberal global city,
and the
precariousness of
this new economic
order for most
workers. Their experience
propels Global
Brooklyn. Writing on
global cities has
rarely undertaken a
sustained examination
of the periphery
of the global
city, even though
it makes
up the
vast majority of
the city in
terms of population,
lived experience, and
space.
global Brooklyn
wakes the city
up in the
morning, provides the
labor power that
gets it
through its day,
and puts it
to bed at night. Its
diverse communities are
also rich
sources of global
cultural production, even
while residents face
some
of the
most severe consequences
of the neoliberal
policies generated by
the
global city.
On a day-to-day
basis, its residents
cope with a
neoliberal political
ideology that
protects private property
interests, drives down wages,
advocates
the privatization
of social resources,
and protests regulatory
frameworks that
hinder free
market values. “[U]neven
development inherent in
neoliberal
entrepreneurial economic
development strategies favor
... concentrated capital
at the
expense of the
poor and middle
classes,” notes Brooklyn
sociologist
Alex Vitale.
Those on the
margins of this
global borough feel
the squeeze, as
inequality increases.
Over and over
again, the development
of cities seems
to
mold a
polarization, dividing classes,
creating pockets of
urban poor, who
are
increasingly restricted.”
In a departure
from previous studies,
Brooklyn Tides
considers globalism’s effects
on these local
populations, placing particular
emphasis on the
agency people have
to act and
challenge the structural
constraints the global
city imposes.
Brooklyn Tides addresses the
question of what
it means to live in
a global
city for
the millions of
residents who experience
the benefits and
costs on a
daily
basis. Is
there the possibility
of another type
of urban experience
in the glare
of
globalization? How
do local people
find space for
autonomy while contending
with the
tides of neoliberal
urbanism crashing in
around them? These
questions
churn through
this study of the ebbs
and flows of
Brooklyn’s tides.
To answer
these questions, we
consider the literature
and history of
Brooklyn as
well as the
efforts of activists
who have sought
to have an
impact
on this
space.
The
early chapters consider
Brookyn’s past, while
the latter half
of the
book addresses current
struggles. Living up
to Walt Whitman’s
adage
that Brooklyn
can be a
“City of Friends,”
we trace the
stories of past
resistance
to groups
of contemporary activists
combating police brutality,
fighting for
bike lanes
and community gardens,
opposing big-box stores,
and forging a
sustainable city.
While many suggest
that there is
no space for
agency in the
era
of globalization,these efforts
suggest that Brooklyn
can be a
place where actors
successfully take
on inequality and
police brutality, while
emphasizing a more
livable model
of sustainable urbanism.
Building on the
principles of participant
observation, these
later chapters borrow
from the perspective
of local activists
(including one
of the co-authors
of this book,
Benjamin Shepard) to
suggest
there is
still room for
regular people to
have a larger
impact on globalized
cities.
Along
the way, we
trace the workings
of anti-gentrification activist
Imani
Henry, of
cyclists Keegan Stephan
and Monica Hunken,
anti-consumer activist
Reverend Billy
(a.k.a. Bill Talen)
and his Church
of Stop Shopping,
artists Robin
Michals and
José Parlá, as
well as groups
such as Right
of Way, Public
Space
Party, Occupy,
Equality Flatbush, and
Transportation Alternatives to
trace an
alternative story
of global Brooklyn.
This book does
not consider the
struggles
of every
activist or campaign
in this borough;
rather it focuses
on a small
group
of artists
and activists taking
on the challenges
of the globalization
churning
through the
streets of their
neighborhoods. Through their
efforts, each suggests
that there
are things everyone
can do to
create a livable
city. This is
a vision of
a
just, sustainable
city, supported by mutual aid
and friendship, not
high poverty
rates and
escalating cycles of
police brutality to
discipline the masses.
Still, why
study Brooklyn? Just
as every global
city has a
business district,
every global
city has a Brooklyn. Whether
they are called
outer boroughs,
banlieues, peripheries,
suburbs, or shanty
towns, these are
the vast districts,
much larger
than the center-city
home of power
and wealth, which
provide
the labor
for the global
city. Just as
each city’s downtown
is different because
of the
individual roles each
city plays in
the global financial
economy, so, of
course, every
“Brooklyn” is unique,
shaped by its
distinctive history, the
residents’ responses
to globalization’s demands,
the particular composition
of its
immigrant communities, and
the cultural production
that takes place
in each
borough. While no
book can do
justice to every
facet of globalization
across this
borough,
Brooklyn Tides
examines the stories
of everyday residents
of Brooklyn
to understand some
of the most
significant features of
New York’s
most famous
working-class, immigrant, and
service-industry suburb.
Brooklyn has
coped with the
ravages of displacement
and deindustrialization
for decades.
In its most
desperate decade, over
half a million
people moved out
of the
borough. The borough
lost tens of
thousands of jobs.
Between the
infusions of
financial capital, economic
development, cultural redefinition,
and
accompanying homogenization, its
neighborhoods were being
remade in front
of our eyes.
Within the last
decade, rapid gentrification has
made parts of
the
borough sites
of luxury living,
work, and recreation.
Today, its renovated
waterways are being filled
with high-rise condos.
Much of this
development is supported
by
the legacies
of red-lining, foreclosures,
police brutality, sky-rocketing
rents, and
hyper-policing of
public space. In
order to ensure
this better business
climate
for urban
growth and development,
New York’s brand
of urban neoliberalism
has
cultivated intricate
public policies and
policing approaches aimed
at maximizing
social control
of public spaces,
including “closed-circuited video
surveillance
systems, anti-homeless
laws, and gated
communities.”
Today, its
citizens revel in the borough’s
vast cultural resources
but lament
patterns of
displacement and uneven
development which follow
such patterns
of urban
flux.While many newer
residents bring affluence,
for much of
the borough
New York’s fiscal
crisis of the
1970’s never ended.
The borough
continues to
endure persistent unemployment
and loss of
work for the
lower and
middle classes.
The story of
global Brooklyn also
demonstrates the power
of
global capital
and the processes
of cultural erasure,
as homogenization robs
local
spaces of
their color.
Nonetheless,
while the forces
of top-down globalization
steamroll communities,
Brooklyn is hanging
on, and even
fighting back. Down
the same
Coney Island boardwalk
where local actors
fought a wrecking
ball aimed
at making
way for franchise
and new condo
developments, Brighton Beach
offers
a pulsing
Brooklyn immigrant and
cultural mix, adding
to the neighborhood’s
rich history.
Each day, countless
communities here counter
social controls with
movements aimed
at spurring a
vital and progressive
urbanism.
As a global borough,
Brooklyn contends with
both cultural erasure
and expansion.
Like many urban
geographies, Brooklyn’s public
spaces, its
waterways, its
spaces for work
and play, have
become sites of
contestation
that seek to navigate
lurching changes. After
all, for much
of the nineteenth
century, Brooklyn
was an agricultural
community, transformed by
the region’s
industrial development
in the post-bellum
period. As late
as 1879, it
provided
much of
the region’s vegetable
production. Four decades
later, little was
left of
this once
flourishing agricultural economy
or the rural
communities it helped
sustain. This
history raises the
question: is urban
development an inevitable
component of
industrialization?
Could
the agricultural base
of Brooklyn’s
past have
survived the residential
real estate development
with some foresight?
This is
a question well
worth asking. Brooklyn’s
transformation from rural
economy into
a dense urban
center took shape
in response to
both technological
innovation and
a seemingly blind
faith in free
markets which made
farmland
prohibitively expensive.
Still, questions about
costs and benefits,
what was lost
and gained
from what Marc
Linder and Lawrence
Zacharias term ‘’irrational
deagriculturization” grip
global Brooklyn. Any
number of values
were stifled
when the
borough paved over
a once vibrant
agricultural terrain. Facing
a
rapidly changing
landscape, can this
“agricultural dissolution” be
reversed
here? Some
suggest the answer
is affirmative. Urban
farms are making
a
comeback in
Brooklyn. The largest
of these, Brooklyn
Grange, produces over 40,000
lbs. of organically-grown vegetables,
grown on rooftops
in the Brooklyn
Navy Yard.
According to Paul
Lightfoot, the chief
executive of Bright
Farms,
“Brooklyn ...
has now become
a local food
scene second to
none. We’re bringing
a business
model where food
is grown and
sold right in
the community.”
For such
initiatives to become
a sustained reality,
policy makers must
support a host of
progressive ideas, particularly
the right to
open space. Of
course, such
thinking challenges cities
to question a
dominant paradigm which
views economic
development and community
needs as opposites.
They
need not be.
Others follow a
different road along
a seemingly unsustainable
path
toward hyper-development. Over
the dozen years
of the Bloomberg
era here,
space was
rezoned—a third of the city—to
make way for
more sky-scrapers,
gentrification, blandification, and
inevitable displacement. And
the process
continues today.
Here, all
that is solid
melts into air.Marx
was willing to
note that capitalism
does amazing
things, yet he was appalled
by the human
cost.
Still,
negative development is not all
inevitable. Throughout
Brooklyn Tides,
we consider the
social, cultural, and
ecological costs of
such patterns, while
suggesting there could
be a different
route for a global city.
Could this be
a space where
regular people fight
off what look
like inevitable tides?
Just as the
Native Americans, for
a brief spell
in the 1650s,
resisted the Dutch,
and brownstone owners
in
Brooklyn Heights
in the 1950s
protected their neighborhood
from demolition
by Robert
Moses, the borough’s
past suggests there
might be other
paths for
such a
global space.
Is
it possible for
this global borough
to follow a path
toward a
more sustainable urbanism?
This account of
Brooklyn’s past and
present insists
that the future
of the borough
remains in the
hands of the
people who
live here.
* * *
“Take me
to this place
known as Brooklyn!”
Allan Swann orders
his host,
Benjy, in
Richard Benjamin’s 1982
film
My Favorite
Year
about
1950’s television.
“Where is
it?” he asks.
Played by Peter
O’Toole, this Errol
Flynn-like film star
is escorted
to a place
which feels like
the end of
the world from
its Manhattan
neighbor. There
he meets Benjy’s
Jewish mother, her
Filipino husband, former
boxer Rookie
Carroca, and the
rest of his
outlandish tribe, as
well as most
of
his neighbors
in the apartment
building. The building,
teeming with quirky
eccentrics, welcomes
Swann as a
hero.
For
Michel Foucault, a
heterotopia is
a space
for difference; a
space for otherness;
a welcoming space
for long-time
residents and
newcomers, insiders and
outsiders, such as
the tribe Swann
encounters.
Can
the same be
said of Brooklyn
today?
Sometimes marketed
as a Manhattan
suburb, is it
a space of
difference or
has it
become something more
digestible? Long a
borough of immigrants
and mixed races, a
reverse migration has
set in. Many
residents are simply
displaced
while even long-time home-owners
have chosen to
leave. As Spike
Lee laments
about his
historically black neighborhood
of Fort Greene,
increased real estate
values have
caused many locals
to sell out:
“Black people by
droves [are] moving
to Atlanta,
they’re moving to
North Carolina ...
They’re selling their
houses and I
don’t blame
them. I can’t
say to them,
‘you can’t sell
your house’ ...
What we need
is affordable
housing for everybody
... Brooklyn Heights
is the most
expensive
neighborhood. Then
you got Park
Slope, Fort Greene,
Cobble Hill, Clinton
Hill
and then,
you know, it
works like this...
the rents get
cheaper the further
away
you go
from Brooklyn. And
the reality is,
after the sand
on Coney Island,
it’s the
motherfucking Atlantic
Ocean. So, where
you gonna go?”
Despite
increased rents, the
space does, however,
remain a draw
for writers and
those working in
creative industries. Today, many
see their Manhattan
neighbor as the
outer
borough. The
tides of people,
work, resistance, and
flux continue.
***
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be part of the discussion, join us tonight Monday:
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