“‘From the Frying Pan to the Oven’: Gentrification and the Experience of Industrial Displacement in Williamsburg, Brooklyn” by Winifred Curran, is about how deindustrialization in Williamsburg caused displacement of people and businesses due to developers desiring their land. However, we know that developers usually come to a neighborhood after the first wave of gentrification begins. As Curran states, Williamsburg was one of the most industrial places in New York City (Curran 5). As a result, it was one of the neighborhoods that got hit hardest during the financial crisis and deindustrialization of the 1980s. Developers didn’t want the land there due to how vacant and empty the place became. However, it was attractive to a specific class of people called cultural entrepreneurs because of the low rent costs and easy access to Manhattan. The attraction was further cemented by the fact that many of them came from SoHo where rent prices became too high. These cultural entrepreneurs helped turn Williamsburg into a thriving neighborhood, enough where developers would want land. However, Williamsburg was always primarily known as a white neighborhood and so the cultural entrepreneurs were mainly white. This was very different for black neighborhoods.
The 1991 movie Boyz n the Hood, takes place in Crenshaw, a largely black district in Southern Los Angeles. In the movie, Tre’s father tries to explain what gentrification really means to his son.
Furious Styles: I want y’all to look at that sign. See what it says? “Cash for your home.” You know what that is?
Ricky Baker: It’s a billboard.
Tre Styles: Billboard.
Furious Styles: What are y’all, Amos and Andy? Are you Steppin’ and he’s Fetchit? I’m talking about the message. What it stands for. It’s called “gentrification.” It’s what happens when property value of a certain area is brought down. You listening?
Tre Styles: Yeah.
Furious Styles: They bring the property value down. They can buy the land cheaper. Then they move the people out, raise the value and sell it at a profit. What we need to do is keep everything in our neighborhood, everything, black. Black-owned with black money. Just like the Jews, the Italians, the Mexicans and the Koreans do.
This explains the mindset as to why mostly blacks move into predominantly black neighborhoods. The sense of preserving and keeping one’s identity is extremely important to a race, especially one that has been oppressed for centuries like blacks have. And when a group of people become oppressed, they begin to rely on each more than ever and so blacks stuck together in order to find support in each other during these awful times. An example we learned about is Harlem. Harlem became a largely black neighborhood after the Great Migration, but it wouldn’t really become a center of black identity until the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance emphasized the social, cultural and intellectual contributions that African American have made, and helped to establish the idea of black unity. This cultural aspect is mainly why only the black middle class decided to move there, and not people from other races. Boyz n the Hood was a critically acclaimed movie and one of the biggest compliments in my opinion that it got was how “thematically rich” and real the move was, and this quote makes me see why.
Questions:
1. How would Williamsburg look today if it had the same cultural identity that Harlem had?
2. Can you think of other examples where the main cultural entrepreneurs were people of color?
3. What other famous pieces of media do you know help explain the effects of gentrification?
