Changing Brooklyn

Regarding the readings assigned the first week, I find it extremely interesting to use Brooklyn as a lens to observe the changing waves in New York City from the 1960s into today. Brooklyn seems to have been especially hard hit by changing industry and economy given he severe lack of opportunity available there in the 1970s, when New York City as a whole went bankrupt. It went form the “Garden of the world,” as the quote from the Honeymooners pointed out, to a black hole within a couple of decades. Many white people moved into the suburbs (and also onto Staten Island once the bridge was built) but due to larger factors like structural racism, minorities, especially African Americans, were stuck in a city that continued to decline in terms of opportunity, wealth, and education available. The spread of white people into the suburbs, and black people in Brooklyn can be observed with the Social Explorer, as well.

It was again the black minority that suffered in more recent decades with the process of gentrification. Although I have heard a great deal about the negative effects of gentrification on long-term residents of the East Village, Brooklyn is a far more recent development. Where once the idea of living in Brooklyn seemed almost the same as living in another city, Brooklyn has since become extremely connected to Manhattan. The wealthy yuppies have moved in and pushed out long-term residents with higher rents and higher costs of living. Brooklyn itself is richer than it was before, but this has had a major impact on its racial and socio-economic make up.

Visual Sociology is something I do not have any experience with. It seems to be especially useful in observing the changing trends however, as we saw in class on Monday. Observing he same street a decade or two apart reveals the changing residents of Brooklyn. Where previously there was a concentration on the needs of a specific immigrant group (Polish people) in the form of a bakery, Laundromat, hardware store, and butcher, now the needs speaks to a younger, less residential populace. The buildings have been converted to take-out restaurants, cafes, and clothing stores. The Urban Vernacular has changed, as we discussed in class. As the Introduction to “Seeing Cities change” points out “these commonplace aspects [of the “commercial vernacular”] can teach us about ourselves and how we relate to the world around us,” (14). Quoting John Brinkerhoff Jackson, the piece continues ““vernacular landscape cannot be comprehended unless we perceive it as an organization of space; unless we ask ourselves who owns the spaces, and how they were created and how they change,”” (14). Clearly, gentrification has changed the space and altered this organization of Brooklyn.

-Rachel Smalle