Brooklyn, frontier town

If gentrification is settler colonialism then let’s go ahead and take the analogy through to its conclusion

The other day I found myself back in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, in a café on the border between Crown Heights and Prospect Heights, drinking a glass of wine and eating chips, waiting to meet a friend for dinner. People came and went … including a woman who, as if to draw a line under a stereotype, came in carrying a bottle of natural wine, with a baby bound to her chest by means of one of those wraparound contraptions popular among the Brooklyn hipster parent class.

It was all very nice … and yet it felt weird to be here, near one of the social fault lines in the Brooklyn landscape. A familiar oblique sense of alienation. The unshakeable impression that this café was a fortress in disguise, and the customers, with their MacBooks and stick-and-poke tattoos, its garrison. I was enlisted in it too, I had to admit, just by being here—and had been the whole time I lived here.

What is it about Brooklyn? Not the borough as a whole, which contains within it endless riches and wonders. I mean the part of it that has been colonized … I’m afraid that’s really the only word for it … by the professional classes and their quasibohemian cousins. It’s the part of it we are all familiar with, that crescent sweeping from Greenpoint in the north in through Bushwick and Williamsburg—briefly crossing the border into Queens in Ridgewood—and tracking down and back through Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights to the tonier streets of Park Slope and Cobble Hill: the great growing monster that day by day extends feelers, in the form of L Train Vintage stores and rowhouses repainted black, further into Flatbush and Sunset Park, pushing the frontier line further outward.

In writing about Brooklyn I’m returning to the theme of a briefly infamous article I wrote in 2022 about New York City’s cultural scene,¹ but the more useful reference point here is something else: an essay I published last week about how the frontier drama repeats itself incessantly in American life. Groups of people get it into their heads to swoop in to some loosely controlled area that seems ripe for the taking, not asking anyone for permission, just setting up shop. First it seems like a brave and creative act and later it takes on a more sinister, self-interested quality that, if you were honest, you’d have to say was probably the intention the whole time.

It's Frederick Jackson Turner stuff. It’s the logic of the frontier. It’s “settler colonialism,” if you prefer. It’s how Uber got off the ground, it’s what all those unlicensed weed stores were trying to do in New York City before the city started shutting them down. First you get a foothold and then you force them to change the rules so that you can stay where you are. That’s the story of the new bourgeois Brooklyn, I wrote, drawing from Suleiman Osman’s Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn:

Looking at the development of this phenomenon in brownstone Brooklyn from the 1960s onward, Suleiman Osman de­scribes how the initial “white-collar émigrés moved there with a sense of zeal.” These were sympathetic figures in the eyes of the New Left: Jane Jacobs–reading believers in urban life in all its racial and class diversity, in an age of suburban self-segregation. But by the 1980s, real estate in the Brooklyn neighborhoods the émigrés had colonized, many of whose names and supposed boundaries had been invented out of whole cloth by the émigrés themselves, was among the country’s most expensive, and the previous residents’ days were numbered.

No one told the gentrifiers to move into those neighborhoods. As Osman puts it, “gentrification did not originate in . . . city hall.” But once they were sufficiently established, it turned out they had things to ask of the state. Relentlessly opposed to central planning—associated with urban renewal projects and the hated Robert Moses—they battled their neighborhoods’ “aging ward bosses,” seeking to win decentralized power for themselves. By the 1970s, the white-collar émigrés had ob­tained a long list of public sweeteners and handouts, including special mortgages for “young pioneers” and tax incentives for home improvement.For the displaced residents, no such public help was forthcoming.

It's a familiar story, told in Jonathan Lethem novels and many other places besides, and it’s not like anyone really denies it. But then again, there’s a kind of reluctance to look at it straight on, without that kind of sheepish, halfhearted self-flagellation that is the way that my generation employs to deal with a wide range of moral quandaries. Yeah, I feel bad about being, like, a gentrifier, you know, but this is where I could afford to live.

The point of acknowledging that the new bourgeois Brooklyn is a recent creation of a frontier-like political-social project is not to assign blame or make media people who live in Crown Heights feel bad. It’s not like things will change if we feel bad about them. But it’s something you have to keep in mind in order to discern why so often it feels weird to be in Brooklyn.

Because it does. This was something that I felt especially intensely during the year I spent (up until June) living in a kind of bourgeois Brooklyn no-man’s land: the border between Prospect Heights and Crown Heights. Both used to be Caribbean neighborhoods, but Prospect Heights has long since been converted into a kind of slightly more downscale annex of Park Slope. In this triangle of historically-designated old rowhouses, which are not quite as nice as the rowhouses on the other side of Flatbush Avenue, live salt-and-pepper-haired 37-year-old parents of young children. They are well off, but not quite as well off as their 37-year-old counterparts on the other side of Flatbush Avenue. (The consolidated parts of the new bourgeois Brooklyn have precisely this kind of awful precision in their socio-economic sorting.)

Arlo Guthrie knew that Brooklyn was a Wild West town…

Crown Heights, on the other hand, is still partly Caribbean (and partly Orthodox), but also home to a bunch of media people and assorted professional and precarious types. It’s a neighborhood in flux, a zone of contestation, a place through which the frontier line runs zig-zag.

The dynamics along each the major avenues that run through the border zone between Prospect Heights and Crown Heights illustrate things succinctly. Vanderbilt Avenue, the main drag of Prospect Heights, has been fully remade into a paradise for the hipster parent class. An artisan ice-cream shop, a bookstore that stocks all the correct NYRB titles, a seafood store where a couple pounds of hake will set you back three figures—you can imagine the rest. They have even managed to get it pedestrianized half the time. Everywhere in Brooklyn an “Open Street” is a sure sign that the new arrivals have won a total victory over the established nonwhite homeowners, who prefer to drive unimpeded. Although it’s a pyrrhic victory in this case, because pedestrianized Vanderbilt Avenue is somehow more, not less, hazardous to cross than nonpedestrianized Vanderbilt Avenue, because of the delivery e-bikes that zoom through the gaps in the steel barricades at the speed of light. America! Not exactly the Champs-Elysées.

Washington Avenue, the next major thoroughfare to the east, forms the official border between Prospect Heights and Crown Heights. It is one of the more alienated streets in New York City, and I lived right off of it for a year. Further to the east is Franklin Avenue, where the good bars are, where the young transplant crowd hangs out, but which remains indisputably Crown Heights. Nostrand Avenue, further still to the east, is a completely Caribbean street that has so far resisted hipster incursions.

Vanderbilt, Franklin and Nostrand are easy to understand. But Washington Avenue is a demilitarized zone between the consolidated area and the zone of contestation. The social gradient is so sharp and so specifically instantiated that it’s even true that a majority of the businesses on the Prospect Heights side cater to the Prospect Heights crowd (or rather the somewhat younger and somewhat shabbier people who live scattered around its margins, as I did) while a majority of the businesses on the Crown Heights side cater to a black, Caribbean clientele.

Washington Avenue is a schizophrenic corridor of social interpellation. Only two types of people can exist on Washington Avenue: the gentrifiers, and the gentrified. To walk down Washington Avenue is to be reminded of which one you are.

Perhaps it’s salutary for people, or for people like me, to have this sort of built-in, quotidian reminder of our social position. But it illustrates the way that frontiers are engines that narrow down the wide range of human possibility down to a single dichotomy. And I have the impression that this has something to do with a certain undeniable monotony that characterizes the new Brooklyn. You know what I’m talking about, it’s the way when you walk down a certain street in Clinton Hill or in Bed-Stuy and you see all the people wearing their little outfits and their Paris Review hats and their tote bags, all the little symbolic totems that say, I’m like you, you’re like me, we’re like this together. We’re united in this project of ours, this cause, and we have to hang together if we hope to succeed, and we should, and we will, and in general we already have, look at all these French people here, they love it, but we need to keep it going, so you’d better put on your Paris Review hat too.

There’s clearly something intolerable about this.

It’s not as if I’m free from these dynamics where I live now in—yes—a gentrifying section of lower Manhattan. But Manhattan is densely packed enough that the collisions happen on different levels at once stacked on top of each other, and not in this kind of merciless flat Cartesian space.

At some level the new Brooklyn is a frontier town with all the typical hallmarks. It’s an improvised, unplanned archipelago stretching across large swaths of the urban landscape. Transportation is always an issue along frontiers: the G train, which has been under construction and out of commission for much of this summer, is the lifeline between the quasibohemian zone in the north of the crescent and the more solidly bourgeois zone in the south. It wasn’t constructed to bring 28-year-olds who live in Crown Heights to wine bars in Greenpoint, but now it’s been requisitioned to serve the new Brooklyn, and it’s not quite equal to the task.

Culture isn’t scarce in frontier towns, as people sometimes like to think, Turner among them. But it does have a certain shallowness. Its roots are shallow. And frontier towns are not secure enough to be very self-critical. They aren’t so far removed from the precariousness of the early days, when it wasn’t yet clear the project was going to succeed, and there’s still some oblique sense that there need to be limits on how far anyone can diverge from a certain center of intellectual gravity without endangering the viability of the enterprise.

Moments of possibility for something truly new and unexpected do emerge—they do, for real—in frontier towns, but they’re so fleeting. They were doomed from the start. Don’t take it from me … take it from a recent New Yorker feuilleton (I dare you):

Not too long ago (ten years), in a neighborhood only slightly far away (Bushwick), poets, rockers, and actors took the L train just far enough to find a place to gentrify, and then put down shallow roots. Andy Simmons, one of the owners of the bar Carousel (36 Wyckoff Ave., Brooklyn), which opened last year, seemed to have this bohemian migration in mind when the place was designed. … On a recent weekend, however, a pair of curious onlookers encountered a scene that was distinctly un-seventies, and almost entirely devoid of local artists. … They found themselves surrounded by buttoned-up bankers, who drowned out the observers’ dialogue with tirades about “liabilities” and “R.O.I.s.”

Tale as old as time. There’s not much bohemianism to go around these days, and what’s left when it’s gone often isn’t something you could honestly call refined. When I lived in Williamsburg, in the little, vestigially Italian-American triangle bounded by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on one side, Grand Street on another, and the industrial zone on a third, I found it a less intensely socially contested area—the surrender of the old-guard Italians to the new-guard 24-year-olds had been a generally peaceful one, the homeowners among them presumably happy about the rising home values. It was a pleasant and even quiet part of a hectic city, although the vinyl-sided hundred-year-old wooden rowhouses that characterize the area are among the ugliest in the five boroughs (a fact that no one ever talks about when they talk about Williamsburg). The drab uniform ugliness of the houses points toward another fact about it that no one ever talks about, which is that despite all the money that’s poured in and glass-and-steel highrises on the waterfront and the lurid SoHoification of the whole precinct north of the BQE, despite the bookstores and the magazines and the podcasters in Greenpoint, all of North Brooklyn still preserves something of the way Henry Miller talked about it having grown up there, of being a million miles away from Culture with a capital C.

Was it delusional for me to feel somehow spiritually far—just across the East River—from the venerable temples of New York high culture, from Lincoln Center, from the Bryant Park library, from the Met, from blah blah blah? Brooklyn’s own cultural institutions, clustered north of Prospect Park, were hardly easier to access. Was it absurd for me to feel, in this milieu of remote tech workers who moved here from San Francisco and IPA-drinking Xennial tinkerers who bought in early, a kind of stifling or even in some sense desolate cultural landscape, a kind of crypto-bourgeois suburbanism overlaid over what was once an industrial working-class periphery? Was it really that fulfilling to go to the coffee shop and see what outfits the pseudo-skaters were wearing? Riding the L train somehow filled me with despair, in part because I didn’t like how my ears popped in that long tunnel under the East River, somehow much more unpleasant than the other tunnels. Was it just that the fire had moved on, burning deeper inland into Bushwick and Ridgewood? Why doesn’t anything last in this country?

Brooklyn has tremendous reservoirs of literary firepower but they’re sliced up and dispersed across a large and badly connected area, a dispersal that somehow restricts the possibilities available—like an insufferable echo of Marx’s smallholding peasants. When you read reminiscences about the heyday of the Village Voice you sense what a great advantage it was to have all these potentialities converge in a small area of Manhattan south of Fourteenth Street. We have the Internet now, which is part of what made this dispersal possible, but the Internet is fragile, as the decline of Twitter has made all too clear, and in the end it’s somehow insufficient. The emergence of the greater downtown cultural nexus seems to suggest that what gets generated online ends up needing some physical hub where it can play itself out and the place where that would be was always going to need to be Manhattan, since Brooklyn has no center—it’s certainly not downtown Brooklyn—and neither does the crescent-shaped new Brooklyn.

In the southern sections of the crescent, of course, as signaled above, the social substrata are different. These were neighborhoods with a history of being respectable, middle-class and white but that had “fallen on hard times,” that is to say their inhabitants decamped for the suburbs after the war and entirely different groups moved in, generally poorer and black or brown. Some blocks were just abandoned, which was what motivated the professional-class improvers to come in and start fixing them up.

Of course there was at least one neighborhood that never quite was relinquished by well-to-do whites: Brooklyn Heights, America’s “first commuter suburb.” It’s worth lingering a moment on the subject of this neighborhood, which symbolizes the New England Protestant origins of Brooklyn. In their history The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn, Stuart Blumin and Glenn Altschuler describe how the neighborhood took shape from the personal wealth and ambition of Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont, one of several New England Protestants who settled in New York City and found success in business, but disliked the crowded, anything-goes, religiously indifferent character of Manhattan. Pierrepont imagined Brooklyn Heights as an elegant, spread-out residential neighborhood from which wealthy men could commute to Manhattan—a sort of Connecticut before Connecticut became Connecticut. It ended up as something denser and more bourgeois than he wanted, but the Protestant character stuck. When Brooklyn was incorporated in 1834, Blumin and Altschuler note, the triumphal procession began

marching toward the city’s powerful new center of Yankee Protestantism [the First Presbyterian Church]. Inside this post-Puritan church the ceremony [included] a song in praise of “The Pilgrim Fathers.”

Brooklyn’s Protestant elite held a kind of diminishing sway over the city as it expanded radically southward, chewing up old Dutch farmland to the sea, until it and they were engulfed when Manhattan amalgamated the outer boroughs in 1898. That Protestant elite founded the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, et cetera—all institutions that have more recently become sites of pilgrimage for people who might not be practicing Protestants but who are children of middle-class families that, given their class position, would have been fifty years ago.

Brooklyn’s old Protestant elite had a reputation for being stuffier, more judgmental, more provincial—in a kind of Scarlet Letter way; they were from New England after all—than the Astors and Stuyvesants and their like in Manhattan. But they disappeared, or so Blumin and Altschuler say.

Still, wasn’t there something somewhat Pierrepontesque about the Brooklyn revolution that spread outward from Williamsburg (in quasibohemian form) and from Boerum Hill (in professional-class form)? It was an escape from Manhattan … because Manhattan had become too expensive, sure, but it wasn’t just that … this was rus in urbe, this was a way to live the suburban good life while also being a cool person in America’s largest city … and when the Bari Weisses of the world started complaining about woke Puritanism emanating from Brooklyn, well, isn’t it at least true that it’s in the footsteps of literal Puritans that you walk when you walk around Brooklyn Heights? The new Brooklyn is stuffier, touchier than Manhattan, there’s no doubt about it … Park Slope is one click toward Westchester, maybe two …

Glimpsed from this vantage, you could say gentrification in Brooklyn is less like Manifest Destiny and more like a kind of Protestant Reconquista—with Brooklyn Heights as the mythically unconquered principality of Asturias. It took seven hundred years for the Spanish to push the last Moors out of Granada. How long until there’s natural wine bars in Sheepshead Bay? And what will have been the point of this whole project? Two or three irritating books by irritating frontier veterans about how great it was back then?

All of America is a project, all the New World is a project—a colonial project, obviously, to begin with, but we continued the way we started and kept originating projects here and projects there. Once we were finished colonizing, we colonized ourselves, I guess you could say; the original urge turned itself inward, like a fractal. In our country, at least, these projects are often invested with all sorts of self-evidently preposterous moral or cultural just-so stories, promoted and pursued by means of a psychotic and ruthless conformism.

There’s something deeply insulting to one’s intellectual and spiritual dignity to have to be part of a project and it’s a shame that to survive in this country you generally have to sign onto one or another. Manhattan is a project, too—every city in this country is a project, a project that failed or a project that succeeded or a project that was succeeding fifty years ago and is now failing or vice versa. But Manhattan, venerable old Manhattan, forgets that it’s a project sometimes, gets into the habit of thinking that it is simply one of the eternal facts of the world … maybe the most important fact of them all … a risible, View of the World from Ninth Avenue way of thinking that at the same time is a necessary condition for culture. If you think yourself unassailable you can tolerate a little bit of criticism—it won’t hurt you. But if you’re aware that you’re part of a project, then when you get criticism, you worry about the project.

Is the new Brooklyn any different from what happened in Manhattan first? SoHo had to be SoHoified before the same disease could spread to Williamsburg, Alphabet City ran so Bushwick could walk … perhaps it’s not any different. Brooklyn might even be learning the irony that Manhattan has about its downtown precincts where the fire has long since moved on, leaving behind grotesque (if still fundamentally enjoyable) life where the fire once had been. Yes, we know about that … But the going is a little slower.

I can already hear my friends reminding me that when I moved to Williamsburg, in 2022, I was grateful to do so and escape noisy Rivington Street in the Lower East Side. And it’s true, I liked living in Williamsburg, though I had my complaints. I’d live there again if things worked out that way. The new Brooklyn has its pleasures, and perhaps there was some kind of historical necessity to the project, which defined an era of New York City culture and replenished the city’s cultural influence.

There was, after all, always a germ of suburbanism in the “hipster” moment that became tied up with the equivocal renaissance of the American city from the 2000s onward. The people who were moving in, a lot of them were from the suburbs. They adopted the city, but they weren’t city people. Some still aren’t. Walking through Prospect Heights every day to the Q train when I lived off Washington, the golden retrievers infuriated me. These weren’t city dogs, these were suburban dogs, and because they didn’t have nice big yards and streets to run around in—and because of the loathsome incapability of this entire class of people to discipline their animals or their children—the dogs were neurotic and unhappy and atrociously behaved. These people had them for no other reason than because that’s the kind of dog they had growing up in the suburbs.

A friend who grew up in Park Slope notes that there is an easy way to discern the houses inhabited by people from “before” from those inhabited by those from “after” is the façade. If it’s been redone, they’re from after. One thinks of immaculate suburban lawns.

But it probably had to be this way. In a country where the middle classes had been so utterly suburbanized in the decades after the war, any reincorporation of the middle classes into the city was bound to have to also incorporate some cultural elements of suburbanism. That couldn’t happen in Manhattan, so it had to happen in Brooklyn. And I don’t want to exaggerate matters. The average Brooklyn transplant lives a less “suburban” life than 99 percent of Americans of their class background; most don’t own cars, which can’t be said for many of their opposite numbers in Chicago, to say nothing of Seattle, let alone, say, Los Angeles.

And I’m aware this is all quite rich coming from someone from a development in Southern California. I should admit that I liked the occasional moments of almost suburban calm in my first Brooklyn apartment, in Williamsburg—moments of eerie repose.

On a clear and quiet night, late, outside my apartment on Powers Street you could stand on the sidewalk and see all the way down to the G train station at Metropolitan, half a mile away. There wouldn’t be a single person on the sidewalk. You could see the green spherical light of the subway glowing there in the distance. Gatsby-style.

1. Since vindicated in its central claim.