When Brooklyn Was the World

Now that I no longer live in Brooklyn, I am always a bit shocked when I return to visit. It is a very different kind of shock than the one I am used to: finding new buildings finished and even newer ones underway after summers spent abroad and semesters of college. Now what I notice are the people.

It is often said that our perceptions of what we have left behind are inevitably altered by our own changing vantage. The overwhelming sense when I graduated from high school was that the place was going downhill, for example, and I am tempted to feel the same way now about college. But when it comes to Brooklyn, I doubt that a similar trick is to blame for my feeling that something irreplaceable is being lost.

Through the mid-90s, Smith Street remained a place of great character and life. There were relatively few bars and restaurants, but there were plenty of Cuban and Dominican social clubs, family-run shoe stores, corner bodegas, and barber shops. Today, Smith Street is known primarily for its night life, with countless bars and restaurants attracting young, hip types from all over the borough. It is easily accessible to both the F and G trains.

Even as the new Smith Street was born, however, there remained for a while a sense of its place in the fabric of adjoining neighborhoods -- Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens. (These three distinct places are now preposterously combined to form a fictional place, "BoCoCa," a term invented by Real Estate brokers and eagerly adopted by newer residents. Never mind that this "neighborhood" boasts perhaps 100,000 inhabitants and at least three major commercial streets.) But every time I visit Smith Street now, there are more Brooklyn hoodies, more ridiculously accessorized babies, more pure-bred dogs. It is a bit like looking at portrait photographs from the 1920s -- the identical slicked hair and the rounded lapels have merely given way to color-coordinated vintage sneakers and carefully displayed forearm tattoos.

The Times' Suketu Mehta presents the new Brooklyn as a place where community persists despite increasing disparity between income levels. Such an appraisal is not altogether inaccurate -- especially in the observation that the hipsters of Billyburgh are in essence a "floating group" who would return en masse to Manhattan at the drop of a hat if rents there were to suddenly fall to levels that 20-something graphic designers could afford. And yes, it would be a mistake to present Brooklyn culture as a fixed, immutable thing given its large and ever-changing immigrant mix. (A high school teacher of mine insisted that if the official population of Brooklyn is given by census data as 2.5 million, the real number, including undocumented residents, must be closer to 4 million. Even if the population is, in fact, under 3 million, this is still a fact most people find utterly astounding.)

But the point has still been missed. Yes, there are $20 million asking prices for townhouses. Yes, it is becoming increasingly acceptable to tell your Manhattanite friends that you live in Brooklyn. But these trends are not proof of revival, but of impending death. The current tide of gentrification did not begin in the 1990s, but in the early 1980s. Floating group or no, mass-produced hipster types have diluted the soup. It is getting harder and harder to meet someone in Brooklyn who was actually born there (indeed, people are often surprised to learn that I was).

The question is this: if Brooklyn is among the most widely recognized place names in the world -- indeed, the most widely recognized proper nouns behind Coca-Cola, Michael Jordan, and Nike -- why should it need to be constantly defended, explained, and repositioned?

On Friday, as I left a Brooklyn Heights Irish pub where a friend had stopped to pee, the ancient Irish doorman looked on as a couple got into a taxi and gave the driver a Manhattan destination.

"There's no ferry, you know," quipped the doorman.

"I know, that's why we're getting a taxi," the woman explained impatiently.

The doorman grinned and looked down the block toward a Subway stop where the 2, 3, 4, 5, R, and M trains can all be found. Her companion took the hint.

"She doesn't get it," the companion said wistfully, and with that they were off.

Brooklyn gets it. And so long as exchanges like these can be witnessed, Brooklyn is not yet dead.