There Goes the Neighborhood 06.04.2008

I have been working about one hundred million hours a week, and I got home late tonight- almost 10 pm- to find that the entire train station had been transformed into a spiderweb of caution tape, with tons of people in orange vests draped around in it like dead flies. There were also some very very bright lights shining up from the tunnel, and some disheveled-looking white people drinking pellegrino by the turnstile. I was immediately alarmed, of course- what are all these white people doing in my neighborhood? Did an American Apparel open up somewhere? I worried that I had been at work for so long that my entire neighborhood had been gentrified in my absence

These things happen fast in Brooklyn. In the year that I’ve lived here, Bushwick has become the new Williamsburg, and Williamsburg is the new Park Slope (plus skinny jeans). Fort Greene is what Brooklyn Heights used to be, and I think that DUMBO has actually been annexed by Manhattan at this point. There’s a plan to turn Coney Island into the Hamptons of the Raritan Bay, and I think that someone told me that Burrough Park is “up and coming” too. Brooklyn is the new Manhattan, and Queens is the new Brooklyn. Manhattan is Mars, and the Bronx is static. And so on.  And every time it happens, all the people who built the neighborhood and created the community and care about each other and the way that they live and the way that this little corner of the earth belongs to them – well, all those people get “priced out.”  Which is to say, they get pushed out- scattered further south, further west, try to hold down another neighborhood and keep an eye out for the planned neglect and the land grabs and all of the other plans and tactics and strategies that seem to fall into such a weird and icky formula that is too much the same every time to be an accident.

It turns out that there’s no American Apparel here- not yet, anyway.  They are filming a movie in my neighborhood. Word on the street is that Denzel Washington is here. The white people are actors, and the whole thing will be over in a few days. Apparently, they just needed a slum- and that’s all that they see here, ignoring the goofy, cheerful butcher with his shopping carts full of goat carcass, and the little cat he feeds each day.  They look right through the tailor and shoe repair shop and the pharmacy that’s been here 30 years- they don’t see the families that plan the giant street bazaar once a month all summer, or the crossing guard who has been walking little feet across the street since 1979.  They can’t see any of the things that make my neighborhood so great- they only see the backdrop for the scene in the movie that needs a slum.

My neighborhood is the best kept secret in Brooklyn.  Thanks, Denzel, for keeping it real…

Tags: brooklyn, Gentrification, Kensington