The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn by Suleiman Osman
After World War II, a new wave of white-collar workers and artists migrated into the neighborhood. “Brave pioneers bringing brooms and buckets of paint,”, exulted Capote, “urban ambition, young couples, by and large..”(Osman 86).
For some writers, Brooklyn’s slums were not repressive but liberating…Mailer imagined himself a frontiersman boldly settling along a new urban frontier. “One is a rebel or one conforms,” explained the young author (Osman 106).
The wave of artist migrants fueled a proliferation of the writing population in the Brownstones. Brownstone Brooklyn was also a “liberating” place to work in prior to the heavy gentrification that would later take place because of the visceral rawness of the area. This liberating appeal to writers is as true today for contemporary writers as it was for Mailer.
New Globalism, New Urbanism by Neil Smith
“In the context of North America and Europe, it is possible to identify three waves of gentrification. The first wave, beginning in the 1950’s, can be thought of as sporadic gentrification, much as Glass observed it. A second wave followed in the 1970’s and 1980’s as gentrification became increasingly entwined with wider processes of urban and economic restructuring. Hackworth labels this the “anchoring phase” of gentrification. A third wave emerges in the 1990’s; we might think of this as gentrification generalized”(Smith 440).
“Rather I want to insist that gentrification is a powerful, if often camouflaged, intent within urban regeneration strategies and to mount a critical challenge to the ideological anodyne that sweeps the question of gentrification from sight even as the scale of the process becomes more threatening and the absorption of gentrification into a wider neo-liberal urbanism becomes more palpable” (Smith 446).
Gentrification was the motor that created the literary center Park Slope is today. Its waves saw the arrival of the artist demographic that is now characteristic of the Park Slope neighborhood.
Works Cited
- Smith, Neil. “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy.” Antipode, 34: 427–450 (2002). Print.
- Osman, Suleiman. The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York. Oxford: Oxford UP, (2011). Print.
