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Elizabeth Gumport has an interesting, longish, essay in N+1 about one of favorite topics of blog comments sections everywhere, gentrification.
The essay reviews Brooklyn "gentrification novels" through the years fairly harshly, concluding that they're "the most recent and the most hypocritical iteration of Brooklyn nostalgia," but along the way gives an interesting tour of the genre, and has a fascinating passage that could have been written about Ditmas Park/Flatbush, about a novel by Paule Marshall that "offers a glimpse of Brooklyn in the decades preceding gentrification":
Soon after the first steam ferries between Manhattan and Brooklyn began running in 1814, rich merchants developed "Manhattan's first suburb" on the bluff now known as Brooklyn Heights. Wealth spread eastward; by the 1860s, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, previously rural retreats, began to attract wealthy families. The Pratts, the Pfizers, and the Singers numbered among the golden names of American industry who had settled in those neighborhoods by the century's end. Set during the next cycle of development—when affluent whites departed for the suburbs and West Indian immigrants moved in during the Depression—Marshall's story is told by Selina Boyce, who feels unwelcome in the brownstone her parents rent. ...In Marshall's novel, wealthy whites are not the borough's future but its past. If what was is the only measure by which we decide what should be, then the real Brooklyn might as well still be the Brooklyn of the rich.
5 Comments:
Her premise is absolutely correct that money and class is the divide in gentrification. There has been little acknowledgment that, like today's hipsters, the hippies that settled in the 70's were looked at with the same disdain, and were never considered to be the "real Brooklyn" by their neighbors. The nostalgia of Lethem, et al underscores the fact that although they lived through it, they were generally middle to upper middle class, college educated whites with the necessary financial support of parents to buy homes - none of which their neighbors had. Wearing thrift store clothes does not transform one into a pseudo-member of the working class. The divide stems from the arrogance of thinking their exterior can make up for a poseur interior.
It seems that each wave or generation of newcomers, whether they bring more money or simply more people, trigger some form of nostalgia.
However, all these stories depend on setting the nostalgic hook. And setting the hook always depends on establishing some arbitrary date in the past as the Year One, the point after which things begin to change, whether for better or worse.
For the Brooklyn Scholars, there is Daniel Fuchs, author of Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt, and Low Company.
If you want to read an excellent novel about the early days of Brooklyn's gentrification, read Paula Fox's "Desperate characters." First published in 1970, it still feels current. She is a superb writer
For the past couple of years I've been teaching a weekend creative writing course for Borough of Manhattan Community College which meets on the Brooklyn College campus. I don't really get many students from the gentrifying group, but a lot of my students - many are immigrants or their children or else African-Americans whose families have lived in Brooklyn for three or four generations.
I get some interesting "gentrification" fiction and creative non-fiction from the point of view of people of color who find that suddenly an influx of white people are moving into the neighborhoods where they live and often grew up in.
Also, I get creative work about being black, Latino or Asian in neighborhoods that were, when I was growing up in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, almost all-white: places like Marine Park, Canarsie, Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Gravesend. Some of the pieces I get from my classes are really wonderful.
I mentioned a lot of Brooklyn novels and story collections that are pretty obscure in this interview.
Here's an article on the fiction of gentrification in Brooklyn
http://www.nplusonemag.com/gentrified-fiction
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