(This response is on this article, and, following, this website.)

When we read Smith’s piece on the urban frontier, I found myself in hilarity because of how much the pioneer aesthetic is in hipster culture. Arrows, vaguely indian motifs, sun-dried skulls—in the more insidious bits, straight-up-appropriated indian headdresses—it’s all there. But I thought of it as something that everyone was sort of ignorant about (Why arrows? I dunno, it looks cool.)—not so much intentional in its rhetoric as innocuous. But then—Colony 1209.

Colony 1209 is a luxury apartment building in Bushwick located on DeKalb avenue near Bushwick avenue. Residents are up in arms about it because of some pernicious tax practices the building is using to get more profit while gentrifying the area. It’s website is also washed in frontier rhetoric. The splash page reads “Welcome to Colony 1209: On Brooklyn’s New Frontier.” Their about page reads “Homesteading—Brooklyn Style.” Their amenities page talks of exploration; the location page says “We already surveyed the area for you.” The entire thing is sort of sickening, because it seems to refer to Bushwick as unrefined territory—its native naturally being cast as the sort of savage other us young adults are meant to displace. But the entire frontier myth works through this cowboy lens: see, conquer, this land was yours and now is mine, go somewhere else. It’s intentionally hostile to natives of Bushwick and I don’t understand how anyone could write this copy without feeling dirty. Is marketing always in favor of the gentry?