A cultural history of North Brooklyn as represented by my apartment neighbors

A humanistic taxonomy of gentrification

For the last three years I’ve lived on the top floor of a crumbling four-story brick walk-up apartment nestled on a quiet side street in the heart of North Williamsburg. The landlord - a retired NYPD cop with a quintessentially Italian surname now refuged out on Long Island - was born and raised in the building along with numerous siblings and extended family before his parents passed away and inherited it to him. But I’m sure at the time he had no idea what a real-estate windfall had dropped into his lap. Because it is widely understood that that was the time when Williamsburg (and the rest of North Brooklyn) was still a considered a seedy post-industrial district of New York City relegated to working-class families newly established ethnic enclaves - Polish and Ukrainians in Greenpoint, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in Bushwick and a melting pot of Italians, Latinos and Afro-Carribeans in Williamsburg proper.

That was before Williamsburg became one of the new frontlines of urban gentrification in New York City, a cultural history firsthand in the generations of tenants that live (or have lived) in my building over the last two decades in a close-quarters powder keg of demographic tensions. In many parts of North Brooklyn - especially Bushwick and Bed-Stuy - you can measure gentrification block by block as you move closer to the East River and Manhattan looming behind it. You’ll see more lux apartment towers crammed in between more traditional vinyl-sided row houses; gourmet coffee shops will appear where used to be bodegas and convenience stores; you’ll start to notice more and more big-name labels opening shops in the neighborhood. But in my building - since it is old and independently owned and yet to be bought up, evicted, demolished and eventually replaced by a shiny new apartment complex for hip college grads - you can measure the stages of gentrification floor by floor and unit by unit.

To be clear from the get-go, this is not an indictment of the process of gentrification nor of the people that might be called gentrifiers. The disruption of historic minority communities has been one of the most obvious fallouts of the New York “urban revival”¹ over the last several decades, but I recognize the economic necessity that pushes New York transplants further and further into the outer boroughs as they search for a place to call home while striving for a life and career in Manhattan. They are not would-be colonizers or cultural voyeurs. What this disruption has forced us to grapple with is the self-contradictory nature of real estate as both a public good, an inheritance and an investment opportunity in what is already the most housing insecure city in America. What this essay is trying to do, rather, is paint a humanistic picture of this trend in terms of individuals who live next door to each other.

First Generation:

The first generation is the elderly Puerto Rican couple who live in the top-floor apartment. They’ve practically lived in the building their entire lives and have raised children (and now grandchildren) in what is essentially a studio apartment with a thin partition separating the front living space from the back kitchen. They still vividly remember when Williamsburg was just a seedy industrial neighborhood full of barbed-wire fences, abandoned lots and manufacturing detritus that Manhattanites wouldn’t get caught dead in after hours (even to visit the renowned Peter Luger Steakhouse directly across the Williamsburg bridge would require a private car service). As such they look upon the newer generations with disdain as interlopers who couldn’t have survived the neighborhood as it stood when they were coming up in the world. They still peer out their windows distrustfully of anyone walking along the block that they don’t recognize and take pleasure in calling the cops to ticket cars that have been parked for too long in their favorite spot.

Second Generation:

The second generation is the aging bohemian woman now in her late 40’s who lives on the second floor. She moved to Brooklyn sometime in the late 90’s because that was the only place she could afford to pay rent on her intermittent salary from freelance photography and part-time bartending at the local dive. The apartment that she has called home ever since has slowly accumulated chaotic piles of vintage furniture and second-hand art that nails that certain mid-century Americana aesthetic that places like the Hard Rock cafe only pretend to emulate. She still rides the same rusted-out single-speed cruiser all over the neighborhood at a pace barely faster than walking. But it also becomes clear that she is essentially stuck in this bohemian dreamworld because her itinerant lifestyle never enabled her to save enough money to move out of Brooklyn… even as the rest of her cohort slowly aged out of the New York lifestyle and settled down in the New England countryside to start families.

Third Generation:

The third generation is the 30-something bachelor who has lived in the building for the last half decade or so. He went to an Ivy League back in the mid-2000’s and naturally followed the college-internship-career pipeline right into a generic white-collar New York job (is it PR? Or Marketing? Or consulting? Or some corporate Frankenstein mixture of all three). Because entry-level corporate jobs like these only pay an insulting pittance these days, it forced him to look further afield for a place to land and ended up in North Williamsburg. Despite the fact that his religious workout regimen keeps him looking unusually young, you start to get the suspicion that he might be outgrowing his bachelor pad full of eclectic masculine ornaments - a novelty typewriter on a shelf, a huge poster of Paul Newman looking dapper, and a row of mid-tier bourbon bottles on the mantle like Little League trophies. But then you realize that Brooklyn is one of the only places where he can acceptably binge drink 3 nights a week, shirk any real world responsibilities and compulsively (if a bit heartlessly) date women nearly half his age.

Fourth Generation:

The fourth generation is me and another 20-something guy living in the apartment below me with his girlfriend; generally tech or finance bros with cushy jobs at trendy startups who decided that - thanks to the valiant efforts of the second and third generations - maybe Brooklyn is actually the place to be these days. A lot of the members of my generation can reasonably be accused of gentrification. We are late to the party started by previous generations; digital nomads; laptop dorks with more money than we know what to do with and carefully considered tastes in music and the arts. And since we’re not tied to the neighborhood and its institutions in the same way that previous generations were, we freely come and go as we please, popping up wherever the best party, show or sample sale is. We still proudly claim the title of Brooklynite, but it is more of a tenuous moniker since we still schlep into Manhattan most days to grind in the corporate office towers of some Fortune-500 company.

Fifth Generation:

The fifth, and latest, generation is the British hipster doing a New York sabbatical to kickstart his DJ career. Clearly independently wealthy or from some global 1% family of questionable origin, he has no need to work or contribute anything to the local economy at all and can completely focus his time and efforts on his craft and his immaculately (but not too obviously) curated wardrobe of elevated workwear. But guys like him have picked up on the fact that, thanks to my generation, something has been brewing in Brooklyn over the last decade that rivals the techno club culture of Berlin and they want to partake in it. He won’t stay more than a year in North Brooklyn before being drawn, like a migratory bird, to an even trendier opportunity somewhere else, but while he’s here he’ll turn his apartment into a rotating house party of international artists and dilettantes like himself. In this way he’ll cement the gentrification trend that really accelerated during my generation; the fifth generation has successfully completed the transformation of North Brooklyn and its local inhabitants into a stylish backdrop for their curated lifestyle… and nothing more.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/opinion/cities-suburbs-housing-crime.html