brownstone brooklyn – Brooklyn Bugle

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club, “A Meaningful Life,” by L.J. Davis

December 9, 2011

Lowell Lake, just graduated from Stanford University in the early 1960s, gets married right after college graduation. On a whim, he turns down a graduate scholarship to Berkeley, and moves with his new wife to New York City. He tries writing a novel; when that doesn’t work out, he becomes the managing editor of a plumbing trade publication. He drifts apart from his wife, but saves his money for several years.

And in about 1970 he buys a house in Brooklyn. The house, a crumbling mansion on the Fort Greene section of Washington Avenue, is home to any number of poor tenants: drug users, illegal immigrants, and more. Despite his discomfort as the rare white man walking the streets of Fort Greene, Lowell single-handedly takes on the decay of New York. He throws out the many tenants. He demolishes partitions, and hires contractors to strip and restore the house. Obsessed with his house, Lowell tries to protect it from squatters. Disasters, only some of them predictable to homeowners, ensue.

Reading the book now, 40 years after its publication, when Brooklyn is hip and New York City has rebounded, is revelatory. Davis enmeshes the reader in Lowell’s pioneering efforts at gentrification. He describes but doesn’t comment on Lowell’s casual displacement of poor black and Hispanic tenants. Davis paints a lovely portrait of a mid-century New York woman, Lowell’s mother-in-law (to be, when we meet her). It’s clear to us she’s Jewish, but Lowell misses that entirely. It’s as good a portrait of a member of an oblivious majority culture as I’ve read. In his introduction, Jonathan Lethem, who grew up down the street from Davis, says that the early Brownstoners “set the groundwork for the disaster and triumph of Brooklyn’s slow-motion gentrification, so full of social implications and ethical paradoxes.” We’re still living with the ramifications.

No matter how or where we develop—Atlantic Yards, downtown Brooklyn, Fourth Avenue—someone is going to be displaced. On the other hand, we get to live here. Please read the book first. Then discuss in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. And check out my other blog about metrics.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn by Suleiman Osman

May 24, 2011

I’ve just started reading The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn by Suleiman Osman. In the book, the Park Slope native now an Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University, explores “Brownstoners,” the group of new arrivals to Brooklyn who in the mid 20th century renovated old tenements, flophouses and townhouses. Characterizing them as “urban pioneers” or “gentrifiers” is too simplistic, Osman says, and his book delves into who this group really were and how they interacted with others in their new neighborhoods.

Have you read the book? Discuss in the comments below.

Deliberately Considered notes about the book:

The model set in Brooklyn Heights — meticulous attention to period architectural detail, the maintenance of unique small-scale neighborhood amenities, an emphasis on “local color,” etc. — soon spread to other areas of what was once called South Brooklyn. Those areas are now known by often manufactured neighborhood identities that leapfrog over twentieth-century urban development to retrieve an array of ostensibly pre-modern references, for example, Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens, both named for imagined aristocratic founding fathers while at the same time evoking Brooklyn’s rural past. In the process, the brownstoners’ (as they still call themselves) ideal of incremental growth clashed with both the managerial impulses of the welfare state as well as the parochialism of urban machine politics. It is to Osman’s credit that in recounting this history he takes pains to objectively represent the positions of all parties, even the much-maligned Svengali of modern urbanism, Robert Moses.

Bookforum writes:

The book might surprise readers living in the Age of Bloomberg: As Osman tells it, the gentrification of Brooklyn was the work not of banks, developers, and speculators, but of a grassroots movement waging war against those very forces. The movement began as a neo-romantic quest for authenticity. As of the late 1940s, members of a highly educated postindustrial middle class (lawyers, teachers, editors, architects) began to discover the borough’s once grand but increasingly dilapidated Victorian neighborhoods. Fashioning themselves pioneers in an “urban wilderness,” they saw Brooklyn’s distinctive brownstone-fronted townhouses as refuges from their monolithically modern Manhattan offices. “In a kinetic modern city,” Osman writes, “brownstones were anchors, their heavy facades giving new white-collar workers a sense of rootedness and permanence in a transient urban environment.”

Excerpt from The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn:

They first began to appear in Brooklyn Heights in the late 1940s. Artists, lawyers, bankers and other white-collar workers migrated to the aging Gold Coast district restoring old townhouses and moving into run-down tenements. By the 1960s, white-collar professionals priced out from Manhattan flooded into surrounding areas in search of cheap housing. “More and more people now are packing up, moving out of their aseptic uptown apartments,” explained New York about “brownstone fever” in 1969, “making new homes out of old, forlorn but solid and roomy brownstones, restoring them to pristine glory.”
As brownstoners spilled past the boundaries of Brooklyn Heights, they created new names for revitalizing blocks. “Cobble Hill” was named in 1958. “Boerum Hill” and “Carroll Gardens” soon followed. By the mid 1970s, few people remembered the name South Brooklyn. In brochures, newspapers, and real estate guides, the area had become “Brownstone Brooklyn” – a constellation of revitalized townhouse districts like Clinton Hill, Park Slope and Prospect Heights.
Brownstoners, however, believed they were involved in something more than a renovation fad. “Brownstoning,” as they called it, was a cultural revolt against “sameness,” conformity and bureaucracy. In a city that was increasingly technocratic, Boerum Hill was a “real neighborhood,” a vestige of an “authentic community” lost in a modernizing society. “On Wyckoff Street, an eccentric block of three-story workmen’s cottages have been rescued by young homemakers and turned into a happy, house-proud community,” described The Boerum Hill Times in 1974. “Indeed it’s quite possible to feel, while walking tree-lined streets, that one has broken through the time barrier and landed smack in the middle of the 19th century. Gentle ghosts of ladies in hoops skirts and gentlemen in frock coats can almost be seen among the leafy shadows.” (more)