The Last Water Frontier
Walking through Red Hook, one can’t help noticing the diversity of land development even on a single block. Next door from a successful upscale establishment will be a failing business or an abandoned building of industrial use. Disused lots are everywhere – many have been turned into city gardens by the community, but most remain in shambles – piled with old building materials. The neighborhood of Red Hook, due to its geographic isolation from public transportation, its primarily industrial zoning, and the sentiments of “old-timers,” has experienced a slower rate of development/gentrification compared to adjacent neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens. It’s proximity to Manhattan, however and its long waterfront make it prime land for large-scale residential development in the coming years.
- Dock workers/industry
There is still a strong industrial presence in Red Hook, long established by decades of waterfront industrialization (that’s a hard tradition to break, as the “old-timers” are proud of this history)
- Attempts to make neighborhood more successful (Building of the Projects in the 1930s
Fiorello Laguardia’s decision to build the Red Hook projects was early attempt to make the neighborhood more residential and increase the profitability of the land, but didn’t end up effecting much change.
Geographic Isolation (Public transportation)
- No access to subway system and the solitary bus line (B61) have resulted in a slower-paced community, as well as a slower pace of development or exploitation of waterfront space. (Red Hook is a peninsula, which prevents accidental foot traffic and is not a bridge between neighborhoods)
- Subway stops in the two most prominent areas of Carroll Gardens as well as bus service on main avenues like Smith Street and Court Street allow for a more bustling atmosphere, which indicates to developers/businesses the existence of a valuable investment/space
- How would the advent of new transportation systems (e.g.: Red Hook ferry) change the neighborhood?
- Carroll Gardens is a much more residential neighborhood with better access to transportation, and is much more gentrified. Businesses there strive to serve the local inhabitants through restaurants and other types of niche marketing (Ex: Momofuku).
- Due to strong use values held by generations of “Red Hookers,” many of its inhabitants were born and bred there; slow-paced lifestyle is more likely to guarantee a relatively stagnant population (describe old-timers and discuss feelings of comradery and unity through public parks and local government)
- Carroll Gardens doesn’t have the opportunity to establish this constant community; the makeup is changing due to the constant influx of new residents, often families or yuppies (young entrepreneurs)
Influence of Businesses
- Due to geographic isolation, Red Hook’s commercial activity is limited to locals and to retailers who get their goods from Red Hook suppliers (Stumptown Coffee – failure to open a retail space in Red Hook).
- Superstores like Ikea and Fairway contribute to the retail supplier dynamic practied throughout Red Hook. The reason these stores choose Red Hook is because of its original industrial purpose. These stores have an easy time implementing their business model because of the wide availability of cheap warehouse space.
- Who owns the land?
- Are there big developers waiting to build residential waterfront properties?
- When did they buy the land?
- What are they waiting for?
- What other neighborhoods could Red Hook look like in the future?
Simon Plutser-Sarno, Jonah Greebel, Sofia Curran
Hi Simon, Jonah and Sofia,
So far so good. This outline speaks of an eminently writable paper: you get high marks for sketching out something supportable, given the evidence you have, and organizable on the page. This is important.
However, given that you have something clear to say and a readable road map for how to say it, I would urge you to indulge your collective ambition as well as your pragmatism. What you’re missing in your introduction is something I recently (yesterday) decided to refer to as the Great, Motivating “However” (GMH). There is currently no GMH in your introduction – no sense that what you’re arguing is, or should be, particularly surprising or controversial to the reader.
So where and how should we insert a GMH into this fine introduction? There are a couple of sub-arguments running through your outline that surprise me. One is the role of spatial isolation that you find in Red Hook. Isolation, in the literature on urban development, gentrification, poverty, social problems, etc., is virtually never a good thing, particularly when it coincides with a severe lack of public transit access and lots of old nasty industrial type places.
In fact, a really strong argument has been made in a bunch of places (the chapter “Constructing the Ghetto” in Massey and Denton’s American Apartheid comes to mind) that the spatial isolation of public housing projects built during the postwar era of “urban renewal” played a big role in creating entrenched poverty among low-income African Americans throughout American cities. In other words, given its location on a map of Brooklyn (particularly a transit map or a land-use map), Red Hook should be a terrible ghetto.
But it’s not. Or, I should say, However, it is not. (That may or may not have been a GMH – I’ll let you decide.) It is a gentrifying neighborhood, complete with gourmet restaurants that pretend to be stevedores’ diners and bars that pretend to be fisherman’s wharfs. However, (another potential GMH?) it is not a gentrifying neighborhood in the way that Carroll Gardens is. The isolation has in fact permitted a more gradual form of gentrification entirely unlike any of the proximate neighborhoods that come to mind. Looking at how Red Hook is developing is interesting in light of what Marxist Neil Smith said about the role of external financial capital and self-aggrandizing “pioneers” in transforming gentrifying neighborhoods. Old-timers and local capital play important roles here, more important than in neighborhoods whose economic and cultural landscapes seem to have changed virtually overnight. (For an entire book on the role of old-timers in gentrifying neighborhoods, see Saracino-Brown’s The Neighborhood That Never Changes.)
So, I guess what I’m suggesting is that your very plausible argument becomes surprising (and more authoritative) when placed into dialogue with things that people have written about what isolation does to neighborhoods, or (if you prefer) how gentrification typically occurs. Placing your ideas into dialogue with things that smart people have written is what academic writing is all about. You need to find your straw men, or your motive, or your GMH for this paper and play up the aspects of your argument that are interesting or controversial given one or two important authors’ claims about gentrification or about isolation, or about waterfront communities, etc. etc. etc.
Let me know if any of this makes sense. Actually, only let me know if it doesn’t. 🙂
Great start – this is going to be a good paper, I can tell already, and if you can be ambitious in your argument and find a way to engage with broader theories about how neighborhoods work, it will be a great paper I have no doubt.
Mike