Brooding Brooklyn

Spurred on by encouragement from my last article on urban planning I’ve decided to stray from the questionnaire format and delve into something that’s been on my mind for quite a while.

The first time I heard the words “Atlantic Yards Project” I was a junior in high school, freshly  moved from NYC to Southern California. I figured the project was some maritime “beautification” project taking place in Baltimore or somewhere around there (Camden Yards jumped to mind I suppose). A few minutes on wikipedia changed my perception of the venture obviously.

To put it simply, Atlantic Yards is a glorified housing project that’s landing right in the middle of some of the most prized real estate in the United States; Brooklyn, NY. Now for the people who still live in 1986 and think of Brooklyn as a ghetto, things have changed, for better or worse. Rich white kids from NYU started moving there around the turn of the century, listening to music that you’ve never heard of and usually sucks, and wearing jeans that even Chelsea deemed “too gay”. From then on, Bed-Stuy went from a place that worshipped the Mighty Mos and Grandmaster Flash to a place that plays way too much Ratatat and Animal Collective for anyones’ good. Williamsburg went from dive city to Hipsters Inc., though I guess hipsters do love dives anyways. All in all, Brooklyn went from a place that you had to live to a place that you wanted to live. If you want to see this phenomenon before your eyes check out 125th street or to see the finished project hop down to the Village and look at apartments that used to serve the poor and have become pent house for Britney Spears and the Olsen twins.

Technically, the word is gentrification, referring to the “gentry” entering places that are usually downtrodden, meaning cheap real estate and low economic risk. More often than not the “gentrifiers” will move in as a group, seeing a certain crop of what used to be tenements as “classic” and “charming”. In New York most of the money that gentrified the areas of Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Village came from people who had lived there before. Harlem went from a white area, to a Jewish area, and is currently known as a black and Hispanic area, with white areas on the outer edges. Brooklyn was mostly white and Italian until the suburban movement post-WWII (NB: Brooklyn, before it was incorporated into New York City, was the U.S. third largest city next to Manhattan and Chicago at 3 million people.)

The next time I ran into Atlantic Yards I was in a core curriculum writing course entitled “The City in American Culture” taught by a supremely self-conscious archaeological Ph.D who was more grammarian than author. I signed up for the class after having spent a year abroad and was ready to jump back into the urban studies thing. Suffice to say I was supremely disappointed, we read Jacobs and Mike Davis, some excerpts from larger texts, a couple New Yorker articles, but our assignments ranged from the banal to the frustrating. One of our last texts was the view of the Atlantic Yards Project from either side of the argument, and after 10 minutes of discussion we returned to basic college grammar prerequisites (who the fuck cares if my works cited wasn’t in alphabetical order?!). Needless to say this frustrated me, I came to the class expecting engaged urban studies students but found a trifle too many glossy eyed freshmen and upper classmen waiting for a class they can get an A in. I begged my professor to let me do my term paper on the social impacts of new housing projects with its cynosure being the Atlantic Yards, Frank Gehry, and Bruce Ratner. DENIED! With authority I was told that my paper would focus too much on content rather than technical skill. Um, what? Apparently the college writing program had decided to emphasize capitals and periods rather than what comes between them. Anyways, I decided to give my teacher a big “fuck you” and do the research and more or less write the paper, while doing my more “technically” sound one at the same time. So here’s what I found:

•    Frank Gehry, everyone’s all-American architect, designer of those crawling titanium buildings, MIT’s “leaking” research center, among other masterpieces (or monstrosities), is kind of a jerk. To paraphrase, Gehry says he knows what’s best for Brooklynites and that they don’t appreciate art enough to see that the Atlantic Yards project is beautiful (if you want what he really said it’s in an article aptly called “Mr. Ratner’s Neighborhood”). Now I had always thought of Gehry as kind of an overrated architect in the first place, Bilbao is breathtaking but if you read the “making of” story Gehry becomes a prima donna before he’s know as a master, the new Disney Opera House in Los Angeles blinds people in surrounding apartment buildings because of the ultra-reflective titanium that has become his signature, and MIT sued the architect because their building, actually, well, leaked. He does a bang up job designing jewelry for Tiffany’s though.
•    The new Brooklyn Nets stadium will be the centerpiece of the project and I mean, yeah, Brooklyn needs a basketball team. But does anyone else see a similarity between new stadiums and the areas that surround them? Places like Fenway, Wrigley, Ebbets (R.I.P), and even Pac Bell Park in S.F., they all did excellent jobs by integrating themselves into the neighborhoods they inhabit. Given for all of those examples except Pac Bell, that happened over a hundred years ago. Stadiums nowadays are built on land that is more or less unwanted, the Meadowlands in N.J., my beloved Dodger Stadium (though it was actually built on top of what used to be a Mexican suburb and displaced thousands, but that’s a story for another day), and the Oakland sports arenas are all located within or around low-income areas. Now the question is, do they, the sports arenas, create them or does the low cost of the real estate attract them? It’s a question I’m posing to you, but it’s something that I’ll definitely be writing about in the future.
•    Bruce Ratner, the manager, stands to make, well, billions. The Atlantic Yards would house thousands of Brooklyn residents displaced by the project, and would of course be a gathering point for “artists” and “writers” that desire the Manhattan lifestyle with Brooklyn moodiness. Usually when a project manager stands to make anything with 10 digits (or 8 or 9 for that matter) the true nature of the project goes to shit.
•    The people who are most adamant about Brooklyn staying the same are the people who’ve most recently moved there. The brooding authors, the terribly untalented but trendy musicians, and the “the stars are just like us!” section of US Weekly usuals are all dedicated to the cause of keeping Brooklyn in its current form: brownstones, coffee shops, and “dive chic” bars. The residents who have lived there for generations however, tend to fall into two camps. The first being those who look towards Co-op City and Marcy as glimpses into the future of Brooklyn and are supremely pissed off about it. The second group being those who have been paid off not to see it like that. And honestly the second group isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds, a lot of Brooklyn is still poor and the influx of rich college kids has artificially raised prices in their area, the creation of an “income controlled” neighborhood isn’t a completely ridiculous idea in their minds. Two great projects that have a lot of interesting things to say about Brooklyn are ACORN and DevelopDon’tDestroyBrooklyn. Another blog named NoLandGrab is a great source too.

So that’s my simple take on this very, very complicated situation. If you’re even remotely interested in housing policies, urban studies, Brooklyn, the projects, or shit just people in general than read up. It’s one of the most interesting housing endeavors taken up by a US city in a while. This barely scratches the surface of the project. As always, please comment, I want to hear what you all have to say.

Homework: let’s see. Hmmmmm. Go punch a hipster in the face. It’ll make your day, my day, and everyone around you will appreciate it.