Jeremiah's
Vanishing New York

The Gowanus building that houses the excellent Two Toms Restaurant is up for sale.



A tipster on Twitter alerted me to the Trulia listing. It offers the building for $3 million and exclaims, "LOCATION EQUALS OPPORTUNITY! Searching for the perfect investment property found in one of the hottest neighborhoods in Brooklyn?"

Also, as ominously noted, "Currently the space is occupied by Two Toms Restaurant, but this space may also be delivered vacant, if necessary."

Two Toms has been in business since 1948 when it was opened by Tom Giordano and another Tom. It's been family-run since and is one of the last authentic red-sauce joints in a city where red-sauce joints are vanishing.

Enjoy the wood paneling and definitely get the pork chop. Before some asshole comes along and fucks it up.

In Williamsburg, the Whisk kitchenware shop is being driven out by a massive rent hike. They've only been around for a decade, but even these newer small businesses get the boot by the big hyper-gentrification machine.



Free Williamsburg has the story. In the owner of Whisk's own words:

"It is a story of greed, commercial banking and the distortion of 'fair' market rents.

When we opened Whisk on November 26, 2008, our rent was $8,625/month; it ended at $18,452/month. The thing is, we could sustain that high rent. We are a great, busy store and online retailers have not cut into our sales enough to hurt us. But to renew our lease for just 5 years, our landlords asked for no less than $26,500/month, or a 44% increase. To accept that rent would mean increasing prices and depressing wages. And that’s not the contribution I want to make.

So how did it come to be that it’s $26,500 or leave? I believe the story goes like this:

Developers identify Williamsburg as the cool place to be. Developers seek loans to amass more land ownership. Banks underwriting these mortgages demand to know payments can be met via higher rent rolls. 'We like chain stores for tenants,' they say. Williamsburg businesses shift from independent, unique services to large American and multinational businesses seeking to grow their brand. Can’t actually pay the high rent demand? 'No matter,' say these businesses. 'It’s an advertising investment!' Private equity supported brands want in; food chains want in; heck, all the banks want in! Big landlords are happy and finally so too are the small landlords who can now say “me too!” on high rent demands."

There are solutions--but we have to take control.

Reader Mark Satlof writes in:

"Court St. Office Supplies here in Downtown Brooklyn is going. They say they will be closing in about two weeks and have been there 40 years. Old-school, old-fashioned stationery and everything else store. It's really a wonder, not a small store. Really a loss of the fabric."



On the shop's Facebook page, they write:

"Our shelves are emptying as we say goodbye, and the store has been full of well-wishers. We'll be closing in a few weeks, but we're staying in the office supply business. So like us on Facebook, join our email list or stop by just to say hello."

They will continue to run the shop online. Owner Jacob Gutman told Brooklyn Paper, “Our challenge has been the shift in how people purchase things these days. Our decision to close the store has nothing to do with rent.”

So blame this one on Internet shoppers.

VANISHED

It's the little places that make a neighborhood function like a neighborhood. Bodegas and other small, affordable markets are vanishing fast across the city. Here's another.

Mike writes in: "I thought you might be interested in the closing of the M&H Deli (bodega) on Dekalb Ave and Saint Felix Street in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Closing after 35 years due to rising rent, per the sign. It was your pretty typical bodega serving the community and the Brooklyn Hospital across the street."



Once again, it's not due to lack of business. It's not the Internet. The sign makes the reason clear.

VANISHING

Brooklyn music bar Hank's Saloon will close by the end of 2018.



On Facebook, the owner writes: "the building was taken over by a new developer who had plans to build big. We knew it was only a matter of time before we got the news that we would have to close Hank’s and move along."

And "it deeply saddens me that one of the last NYC bars of this kind will no longer exist. These places are extremely special to New York and add genuine heart and soul to the community."

They're looking for a new space.

VANISHING

Frankel's clothing shop has been in Brooklyn for a very long time. Tucked into the shadows of the Gowanus Expressway in Sunset Park, the shop's painted bricks announce: "An American Treasure Since 1890," "The One," "The Only," and "We're Still Here."

But Frankel's won't be here much longer. Third-generation owner Marty Frankel has decided it's time to pack up and move the shop to Jersey.



With its selection of steel-toed boots and Carhartt work clothes, Frankel's caters mostly to laborers. They've covered his doorway with union stickers.

"You know how the Jewish people have the mezuzah on the door and they kiss it? The union guys do it with a sticker," Marty says. "They walk out and kiss it." He demonstrates, kissing his fingers and then touching them to the door frame.



Before work clothes, Frankel's specialized in western wear. Cowboy boots and cowboy hats. Marty would put horse manure in the dressing rooms to give the place that country aroma. Before that it was Timberland boots and "ethnic clothes," snakeskin pants and Italian knit sweaters, bandannas in gang colors. He shows a photo of customers Method Man and Raekwon from the Wu-Tang Clan. Before that, going back to when Frankel's began, they outfitted the seamen coming in off the big ships at port. But they sold more than just clothing.

"In the 1950s," Marty says, "condoms were illegal in a lot of places. So we'd get cases of Trojans and take 'em down to the ships," to sell them in bulk to foreign sailors who'd smuggle them back to their home countries. "I'm responsible for a lot of people not being born. I like to say I sold condoms to seamen." He smiles at the joke.



A warm and welcoming guy, Marty likes to joke around. He's got a roll of packing tape on the counter with the word SEX written on it. "That's my sex tape," he says. "Don't mind me. I got Tourette's."

Somehow he gets to talking about the designer Ralph Lauren, who changed his name from Lifshitz, or was it Lipshitz? "They used to say: If your Lipshitz, what does your asshole do? Don't mind me. I got Tourette's."



When Brooklyn's piers shut down and the seamen sailed away, the neighborhood changed. In the 1970s it got rough. Marty would go to work strapped with two guns and a bullet-proof vest. It was a daily thrill. "I miss it," he says, looking out the window to the street. "It was exciting to come in and see who got shot over the weekend. I saw a guy get shot on that corner, a body dumped over there, and another guy get his ear shot off right there. It was a tough place back then. If you weren't black and blue, it meant your father was in jail."

But Marty survived. He was part of the scene. He grew up in the neighborhood and came to work in the shop with his father. The place is full of antiques, including a bowler hat that belonged to Marty's grandfather, a shoe-fitting fluoroscope (for x-raying feet while emitting radiation), and a long wooden bench that goes back a century.

"My whole life was spent on that bench," Marty says. "I slept on it as a child. That was my crib. I don't know anything else. All I know is this store."



Marty owns the building and doesn't plan on selling it. But it's time to close.

"I'm 76 years old," he explains. "I'm tired. I fell asleep going home on the Pulaski Skyway. I'm lucky to be alive, but I get tired driving home to Jersey every night." And the parking around the store is terrible. "It's not easy down here. There's nowhere to park. They call this Sunset Park? They should just call it Sunset."

Besides, the majority of his customers have moved away from Brooklyn.

More and more, old-time locals come in and tell him their landlord has sold their building and they're getting evicted, moving to Pennsylvania or some other state. The neighborhood is changing again. A nearby Costco has taken a bite out of Frankel's -- "It hurts. Costco gets all the deals" -- and the newcomers to the neighborhood haven't helped.

"Hipsters. They're all white guys with Chinese girlfriends and rescue dogs," says Marty. "They try on twenty pairs of shoes, but they won't buy here because the store doesn't look nice. They like to take pictures of my barcodes, though, and then buy the shoes online."



Still, Frankel's is well loved by its regulars and the neighborhood people. A guy walks in and calls out, "Hey Marty, I gotta take a piss," and heads to the restroom. A woman comes in and chats about life, the school they both went to years ago. Customers come and go, buying boots and hats.

They all know Marty and enjoy his easy talk--and his sense of humor. Like his trick of leaving an old boot on the sidewalk as bait. Passersby pick it up and bring it in, saying, "You left a boot outside." He thanks them and then, after they go (hopefully after buying something), he tosses the boot back on the sidewalk.

"It's going to be hard to leave," Marty says, sitting down on that antique bench. "Mentally, it's hard. I'm like the watering hole here. People come by and ask What happened to this guy? and Have you heard from that guy? I've got three generations of people shopping at this store. Now that they know I'm closing, they write me emails. They say, How can you do this to us? Do it to them? I have trouble sleeping at night, thinking about the move. But it's time. A hundred and twenty-seven years? I figure that's long enough."

By the end of November, Frankel's will be gone.

The first building in the luxury mega-development replacing Williamsburg's Domino Sugar factory is now seeking tenants. 325 Kent just put out the welcome mat, a big banner on view to Manhattanites along the East River.



Go close-up and you'll find their "Walk-ins Welcome" signs feature different flavors of doughnuts.

They look artisanal, of course, because it's Williamsburg. (Does the neighborhood still hawk hundred-dollar doughnuts dipped in 24-karat gold?)

They're also square, like the building, and no doubt are meant to appeal to the foodies who have claimed Brooklyn in the 2000s.



Anyway, I walked in, but didn't feel especially welcome and walked right back out.

As Curbed reported: "market-rate apartments in the building will start at $2,495 for studios, $3,250 for one-bedrooms, and $5,195 for two bedrooms." And "The first retail tenant will be a 4,000-square-foot outpost of Clinton Hill craft beer bar Mekelburg’s, known for serving 'epicurean baked potatoes,' apparently."



On Saturday, August 19, you can see The Domino Effect, a documentary on the rezoning and subsequent hyper-gentrification of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. It's playing at 2:00 at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, 161-04 Jamaica Ave in Queens. A "talk back" with the filmmakers will follow the screening.


The Domino Effect (Trailer) from The Domino Effect on Vimeo.

VANISHING

"I stay here," says Krystyna Godawa. "I'm not moving."

For the past ten years, Krystyna has run the Park Delicatessen at the edge of McGolrick Park on Nassau Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The deli has been here since the 1930s. But the landlord recently doubled the rent and Krystyna can't afford it. She's looking for another spot nearby and plans to stay put until she finds it.



Customers come in and out of the shop, ordering meals to go from the refrigerated case of home-cooked pierogi, potato salad, chicken cutlets, cole slaw, and beets. They stop to ask Krystyna, in Polish and in English, "Any news? When's the last day?" They promise, "I'll keep my fingers crossed."

And then they touch Krystyna--they all touch the woman they call Babcia Krysia, "Grandma Krystyna"--on the shoulder, the arm, the back of the neck. Their touches are tender and familial. They are family.



Krystyna holds their histories--the births of their children, the deaths of their parents--as she holds the history of the deli, still making German dishes that hearken back to the days when the place was Mullenbrock's delicatessen. Back in Poland, Krystyna worked as a librarian, another kind of preservationist, another holder of memory.

"I'm only ten years here and this is sentiment to me," Krystyna says, looking around the shop. "If you like your job, you put the heart." Losing the deli is like a death. "It is like you take out your heart from your body."

She feels powerless to stop the loss, "like kids who cannot do nothing, like tied my hands."



Her lease expired in April and she'd been on a month-to-month since. But once her landlord found a new tenant (rumored to be an ice-cream shop), she gave Krystyna until August 1 to vacate. It's too soon. Krystyna has no place to go--and she's having trouble finding an affordable rent in a neighborhood that is gentrifying.

"I will try to do everything to stay with my people," she says, referring to her customers, the people who give her "heart and happiness." Her blue-green eyes fill with tears. As she feels the grief of her own loss, she also feels her customers' grief.

"If I have to close, okay. But I see how much people want this place, how much people like me, and it's very tough to me. That is the worst. How can I live if I don't have my customers?"



Heart and sentiment are important to Krystyna. It's the stuff that keeps people connected, that keeps neighborhood communities together. But she sees these positive forces diminishing in the world. The new generation, she says, is cold. The newcomers to her apartment building don't say hello, don't hold the door. They all seem disconnected and disinterested.

"Life is too tough," she says. "If we're not nice to each other, what kind of life is it? The sentiment is second now."

What's first?

"Money. Everything is about the money."


photo by Yulia Zinshtein

If you visit the Park Deli before it's gone, you'll find a neon sign in the window that reads: VANISHING. A few of the letters flicker.

It is the work of artists Troy Kreiner and Brian Broker of Shameless Enterprise, in collaboration with "Vanishing New York" and built by neon artist Patrick Nash. This is the second installation, after Cake Shop earlier this year.

People walking by see the sign and come in to talk to Krystyna. "It's a shame," they say. "Soon all the small businesses will be nothing."


photo by Yulia Zinshtein

From the Times, the view of gentrification from Cherry's Unisex in Bed-Stuy:

“Gentrification is always on the periphery, always in the negative space of so many conversations that take place here. The wave of money and development is transforming Bed-Stuy along Fulton Street, and there are no guarantees that Cherry’s won’t be washed away with so many others. Little distinguishes it from any other shop on the strip except for how long it has been on Fulton, and the woman for which it’s named.

'When you call the police, they come,' Cherry said. 'Before, there was no policing at all. But now? Not only do they come, they’re arresting everybody.'"


Photo: George Etheredge for The New York Times

In the 2000s, black New York neighborhoods are becoming markedly less black (and brown) and more white -- as well as less poor and more rich.

In the 1960s, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights called the suburbs a “white noose” around America’s cities. Today, it's “Vanilla Cities and Their Chocolate Suburbs,” as author Jeff Chang calls it in his essay of the same name. He writes of these new “geographies of inequality,” where the colorized suburb now receives the brutal treatment the inner city has--neglect, predatory lending, and paramilitarized policing that too often ends in the murder of black people. “The fate of Brooklyn,” Chang writes, “tells us about the fate of Ferguson.” The violence of urban hyper-gentrification ripples outward.

Author Alan Ehrenhalt calls this demographic shift the “great inversion,” as the affluent (often white) flood into urban centers and the poor (often people of color) are pushed to the suburbs.

Also in the Times, Reniqua Allen writes of black millennials giving up northern cities for the South. Is the Great Migration reversing course as white flight has done? How much of it is a choice?

As the color (and class) of neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy, Harlem, and Crown Heights changes, it’s important to understand that displacement can be direct, like eviction, or indirect, what Peter Marcuse calls “the pressure of displacement.” In his 1985 paper “Gentrification, Abandonment, and Displacement,” he writes, “When a family sees the neighborhood around it changing dramatically, when their friends are leaving the neighborhood, when the stores they patronize are liquidating and new stores for other clientele are taking their places,” etc., then it’s only a matter of time before they move out, “rather than wait for the inevitable; nonetheless they are displaced.”

So when people speak of lower- income people of color “wanting” and “choosing” to move out of their neighborhoods, or out of the city, we have to think more deeply about that. What might look like a choice may actually be surrender to the pressure of a rapidly changing and increasingly alienating environment.

From the Times article on Bed-Stuy:

“Black people have never been obstacles to white people moving into their neighborhoods,” Mr. Parker said. He says his rent has more than doubled since he moved in, but with more white and Asian people now living in the neighborhood, there’s a newer, stronger police presence. There’s more to do in the neighborhood. “But there’s a problem if white people come in thinking Bed-Stuy is theirs,” he said. “This is a black community.”

Mr. Parker said the white and Asian people moving to Bed-Stuy weren’t the only recent arrivals. There were also what he called “new black” — African-American doctors, lawyers, business owners and young professionals are also moving into the area and living in the new luxury apartments.

“No one ever notices or talks about them,” he said.

Tomorrow evening, January 31, the NYPL's Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar, Hugh Ryan, will be presenting on "The Queer Histories of Brooklyn’s Working Waterfront." I asked Hugh a few questions on the topic of his research.

*UPDATE: Watch the streaming video of the talk here.



Q: What are some ways that queer populations and the working class came together in New York of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century?

A: For much of the period I’m researching (from the mid-1800s to World War II), there wasn’t really a “queer population” to speak of. Our modern idea of sexuality as a unique identity, separate from gender, was only just coming into existence (the word “homosexuality” wasn’t even coined until 1868). Of course, there were people who did and felt queer things. But they didn’t “come together” with the working class in the ways that we would imagine. Rather, they were part of the working class (as well as other classes), and in some spaces and at some times, they felt or expressed their queer desires more clearly (or at least, more visibly to a modern eye).

During this period, some of these people (particularly in urban areas) were beginning to have enough economic and social freedom to form small groups of like-minded folks – little proto-queer-communities, if you will. On the waterfront, for instance, there were jobs that queer people could have, less policed streets, lots of same-sex only (particularly male-only) spaces, a dense anonymizing urban fabric, and a global culture that understood that different places have different sexual mores. A few jobs in particular were open to different kinds of queer people: sailor, sex worker, female factory worker (in WWII especially), artist, and freak/entertainer.

So there’s a lot of queer history to be explored in these working-class communities, but it’s not as simple as finding the gay bar in Red Hook they all went to. And because these folks were poor and queer, they rarely had the opportunity to write their own histories, so I often find myself reading "against" an official source, trying to ferret out information about queer life from an arrest record, or a medical report, or an angry jeremiad written for a newspaper by a straight person.

Q: What have you discovered in those sources?

A: New York City had laws against dressing in the clothing of the opposite sex, and you can find lots of working-class folks in Brooklyn being prosecuted under these laws as far back as the mid-1800s -- like Josephine Jarneuse, a "street walker" that ran away from a "good home," who went by the name Johnson and was arrested for "masquerading in boys attire" at an early age. According to a pearl-clutching obituary in the Paterson, New Jersey, Evening News, Jarneuse hung out at Coney Island, where "from bad she went to worse," and eventually died in childbirth. But we have no records from Jarneuse's point of view -- were they trans, or a middle-class girl who ran away from home to earn money and have a free life? Or did they run away because of tensions over their sexuality and gender identity? Something queer is happening in her story, but it's impossible, at this remove, to say exactly what.

Sometimes newspaper articles have more information, but it can be misleading, like in the case of Tina Becrens, who was arrested in Brooklyn in 1898 for wearing women's clothing. To the newspaper, Becrens claimed they wore women's clothes solely to find work, but the more I read, the more that felt like an excuse wrapped in the truth--as an obviously queer person, Becrens probably was unable to get work when dressed like a man, but that wasn't the sole reason they dressed in women's clothing. These stories are always isolated from any kind of queer community, but by looking at them in the aggregate, you can begin to build a picture of the queer population in Brooklyn at this time.

Later, especially around the 1920s/1930s, you start to see some conscious queer community building. For instance, the poet Harold Norse was well aware that Walt Whitman and Hart Crane both lived in Brooklyn Heights, and it's part of what drew him to go to Brooklyn College when it was still near that neighborhood. There, he would meet a number of other gay men, students and teachers, which would propel him into a queer arts circle that included W.H. Auden, Jane and Paul Bowles, and Allen Ginsberg. Living as a queer artist, however, often meant not making very much money, which both made Norse a member of the working class, and meant that he lived and socialized in places where other working class people went--although his queerness and his literary output also gave him access to more highbrow spaces. That access, really, is a connection to power, and because of his connection to power, Norse's life was deemed interesting enough that he was able to publish a memoir, which means we have much greater access to his thoughts about his own sexuality. But the further back you go, the rarer that kind of information is.



Q: What made working class spaces more welcoming to queer people than middle or upper class spaces? (If you think they were.)

A: This is a great and complicated question. I hesitate a little around “welcoming,” but I will say that during this period, you had a few conditions that made queer experiences more visible (and possible) among working class New Yorkers. First off, according to historians of sexuality generally, the working class was more open to all kinds of non-marital sex, not just same-sex or gender nonconforming desires. Many of these communities were predominantly immigrant, and the ratios of men to women were all out of whack, making marriage less of an option. Men and women inhabited separate social spheres, and had little access to private spaces where they could meet together – but at places like the municipal baths or aboard ships, men (and to a lesser degree, women) had chances to gather together in semi-private places. Also, new ideas about sexuality-as-an-identity were more common among upper-class people, and those ideas gave an added level of risk to same-sex desires, because now not only were you participating in an activity that might be frowned upon, that activity defined who you were as a person.

Additionally, having obvious same-sex or gender non-conforming desires (or making no effort to hide them) frequently led to trouble securing work or housing, as well as family issues, and the attention of the police – all of which made queer people more likely to be working class than upper or middle class. Almost all of the people I’ve researched – from butch women who worked in factories, to trans men who worked as sailors, to famous gay male artists like Hart Crane – talked about the ways in which their queerness made it hard to get work, or how only certain jobs were open to people “like them,” or how they had to hide who they were for economic reasons.


Q: What were the differences and similarities between lesbian and gay male participation in the working class world?

We don’t really know the answer to that question, because our pool of information is limited to those people who were out (and were recorded, in some way, as being out). Being out isn’t about desire or sexuality, per se, but whether you had the social space to acknowledge and/or enact your queer desires, and then whether that acknowledgment or enactment got recorded. Women, in general, had less access to economic and social freedom, and their lives were less recorded. So the history of all queer people assigned female at birth (whether lesbians or trans men or however else they may identify) are less common, harder to find, and tend to occur in the latter half of the time period I’m researching.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that queer working-class women were less common than queer working-class men. When working-class women suddenly had access to well-paying jobs, mostly with other women, in less-policed and less-gendered spaces, we see a huge uptick in records of queer women – for example, in the factories of the Brooklyn Navy Yard during WWII.

In a similar way, race and racism really complicate these queer histories. People of color have also been historically kept out of many kinds of employment and many neighborhoods, and this (in part) determined the kinds of queer lives they were able to live (and which we as historians are able to find traces of). So when the Navy Yard suddenly became a source of jobs for queer working-class white women, women of color were kept out of those jobs, which then divided the burgeoning queer community that this work made possible (in fact, of the first 200+ women hired at the Navy Yard in WWII, only twelve were women of color.)


Q: How did transgender and gender non-conforming New Yorkers make their way in blue-collar spaces?

A: This is a tricky question to answer, because there are a lot of folks for whom it’s impossible to say whether they were “transgender” or “gay.” At the time, most people who thought about queerness as a specific sexual identity saw it as an inversion of normal gender. Basically, they collapsed our modern categories into one catchall group. Those who were most likely to be “out” were those who couldn’t hide their queerness – particularly “butch” women, “femme” men, and trans people of all stripes. But how they would have identified if they lived today is an open question.

That said, there are records of people who were obviously what we would today consider transgender. Often, these are arrest or medical records, because these people usually had so little social power that they never got to keep their own histories – and because the simple act of wearing clothes appropriate to their gender could get them arrested. Like all working class people, however, they tried to have jobs that could afford them a modicum of social privacy and stability, from domestic worker to sailor to sex worker.




Q: Why/how did the working class and the queer go their separate ways in the 20th century -- or did they?

A: My research really stops around the fifties, so take all of this with a grain of salt, but my guess is that they didn’t – at least in terms of actual behavior. In fact, research shows that queer people are still more likely to live in poverty than our heterosexual peers. However, as the presidential election showed, our modern concept of the working class is of a white, homogenous, rural (or rural-adjacent), religious, poor, and socially conservative monolith. That idea of the working class is often pitted against an idea of the queer community, which is thought to be urban, non-religious, progressive/liberal, wealthy, and diverse (although we’re usually still thought of as all being white). But while these concepts have parted ways, I don’t know how reflective they are of a real separation between “queer people” and “working class people.”

One tendency I do think is worth looking at, however, is the connection between poverty and religiosity in America. Mainstream American religions are still mostly struggling with queerness, and obviously, the impact of religious homophobia is going to be stronger in communities that are more religious.

Also, it’s worth remembering that the connection between queerness and the working class that I’m exploring in Brooklyn (and which George Chauncey explored so marvelously in Gay New York) is a very specific one. It occurred in an urban world that was a global nexus for cultural intermingling, at a time when men and women lived very separate lives (and when there were generally way more men around than women). Other working class groups, defined by other sets of conditions, probably had very different ideas or experiences or prevalences of queerness.

This past fall, the journalist, author, and Village Voice editor Neil deMause published The Brooklyn Wars, the story of 21st-century hyper-gentrification in the borough of kings. I asked him a few questions about what the wars are all about.



What are the Brooklyn Wars? Who are the competing armies and what are they fighting for?

The last 20 to 30 years of this borough — the rise of the “New Brooklyn” and all that — has been portrayed as either a good or a bad thing, depending on your perspective, but either way usually as a sort of unavoidable evolution. When you look more closely, though, it’s actually been the result of a series of pitched battles over what the borough would look like, who it would serve, and who would get to live here.

The sides in these battles have been complex and shifting: You have developers, and politicians seeking “redevelopment” in various forms, and residents of all types who either promote or resist change, sometimes both at the same time. (One of the odd things about living in a city like New York in times like these is that it’s totally possible to be simultaneously a gentrifier and gentrified, both a threat to old-timers and threatened by the next wave of newcomers.) And the weapons wielded are varied as well: Brooklyn wouldn’t look the same today if the city wasn’t rezoning everything in sight, but it also would be far different if the housing market weren't governed as it is by a weird amalgam of bare-knuckles market speculation, tax-incentive plans like 421-a, and the tattered remnants of mid-20th-century rent regulations and public housing programs — or, for that matter, if the New York Times real estate section were a normal journalistic enterprise instead of operating as a kind of fifth column for the development industry.

The Brooklyn wars, then, look like residents and shopkeepers and city planners and moneyed investors all tussling over whether areas like the Fulton Mall or the Sunset Park waterfront will keep serving the people they have in recent decades, or whether they'll be remade to fit, and draw, a more upscale clientele; and they look like the shifting allegiances among residents, amusement park operators, developers, and city officials in Coney Island that helped craft that neighborhood's grand bargain that's still playing out. And they look like every single person who has needed to make a decision: Where will I live, and what will the impact be of that decision? Like all wars, they’re hard to sum up easily, which is why I needed to write a whole book to wrap my brain around it.


Artists Evictions in Gowanus

Why do you think, of the four outer boroughs, Brooklyn became so popular for hyper-gentrification in the 2000s?

The thing about gentrifiers is that everyone wants to be first to be second — being an "urban pioneer" is only satisfying if you're sure that the trail ahead has been laid, and that more wagons will be following you over the horizon. Unlike the other outer boroughs, Brooklyn always retained a certain amount of upper-middle-class housing, particularly in brownstone Brooklyn, which provided a foothold for middle-class types who started fleeing Manhattan after it gentrified rapidly in the '70s and '80s. As a former city in its own right, it also had the densest transit network, which made for easier commutes to lower Manhattan. And it had nice parks and pretty housing and all the rest of the stuff that goes with having been a destination for well-off homeowners in the 19th century.

As I describe in the book, when I was looking to return to New York after college but expressed to a friend that I no longer felt at home in Manhattan, she immediately suggested Park Slope, though she warned me it might be getting “a bit too yuppified.” That was in 1988.

Brooklyn also ended up being the perfect place to play out what I call in the book the ecological succession patterns of gentrification: First the artists seeking out cheap housing where they can make a racket (or stretch out canvases), then the people who want to live near artists, then the people who heard that the neighborhood was "hot," until eventually you work your way down to the hedge fund managers. There's no particular reason it couldn't have happened in the Bronx, except that it didn't, and once that momentum was established in Brooklyn there was no stopping it — especially not once the developers, rezoners, and Times real estate reporters got involved.

We can’t talk about gentrification, perhaps especially in Brooklyn, without talking about race, as you do throughout your book. But some will say, “White people were there first.” How do you respond to that?

Well, the Canarsee Indians were here first. But, sure, Brooklyn was largely white when most of it was first built, so some people might justify the retaking of the borough as, hey, we're just back from a long vacation, right?

It shouldn't be about who got first dibs on the place, though, or even about squatting rights now. The history of Brooklyn neighborhoods is inextricably intertwined with race: You had the bank redlining in the 1930s and realtor-led block-busting in subsequent decades that helped make Bed-Stuy the center of one of the nation's biggest African-American communities and Bushwick the poster child for abandonment by landlords and city services. Then today, you have the marketing tactics that portray residents of color simultaneously as local flavor and as native tribes to be subdued and displaced by more qualified trailblazers — witness the "Colony 1209” that advertised itself to “like-minded settlers” on “Brooklyn’s new frontier,” or the Sunset Park real estate panel that boasted of “dynamic new residents” who “now demand a borough where they can work, shop, eat, and sleep.” (Guess old residents weren’t big on the eating and sleeping?)

The common theme here is that, regardless of whether the more affluent residents were fleeing or returning, it was people of color, and people without money more generally, who got the short end of the stick. Neighborhoods are changing all the time, whether it's Bensonhurst shifting from Italian to Asian or whatever, but that's not necessarily gentrification, which requires one group being displaced by another unwillingly. Gentrification isn't about change; it's about power.


Double Dutch in Bed-Stuy

People like to say that Brooklyn has hyper-gentrified due entirely to “market forces.” What do you think they’re saying when they say that—and what are they not saying?

It's self-evident that the population of Brooklyn is changing as certain areas become more desirable, and as new people arrive to bid up the price of housing. Of course, the other way of describing the same process is that when neighborhoods improve, the right to enjoy them goes to whoever has the deepest pockets. That, to me, is what we should be concerned about — that we're building a city where, essentially, only the wealthy can have nice things.

And anyway, the “market" is constructed in the first place by a melange of policy decisions. What would the city look like if the state hadn't spent decades providing tax breaks to private developers under the 421-a program, and had instead spent the money saved on some sort of public housing? What about if vacancy decontrol had never been passed in the 1990s, and landlords hadn't been provided a huge incentive to boot out tenants in order to reap windfall profits? What if we still had a 70% top income tax rate in the U.S, like we did before Reagan, and the super-wealthy were a rarity instead of the world we have now, where New York City has as many millionaires now as the entire nation did 30 years ago?

People act like "the market" is a natural thing like gravity, but it's a construct determined by whoever's making the rules it operates under. That doesn't make it inherently good or bad — but it does mean that the rules can reasonably be changed without it being some sort of abomination against nature.

You write about the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and how wealth has been flooding into Brooklyn. What do you think is lost—or gained--when big money moves in to a neighborhood?

What's lost is affordable housing and stores and churches and everything else that serves the existing population. That's a huge thing not just for residents, but for shopkeepers as well — a recent Hunter College study found that more than half of Latino-owned stores in Williamsburg closed up shop in the first decade of the 21st century.

What's gained is some renovated apartments, since under our current housing system there's very little incentive to provide upkeep and upgrades unless somebody is willing to pay more in rent for it. Plus a hell of a lot of Asian fusion cuisine, which isn't entirely a bad thing — everybody should have a right to pad thai — but also ends up being a poor substitute for what’s lost, even in the eyes of some of the newcomers. (I still complain about missing the terrific, cheap Mexican diner in Park Slope that ended up closing as a result of the neighborhood change that I was an unwitting part of.) One of the ironies of gentrification is it often ends up killing off the very thing that made the place attractive to gentrifiers in the first place.

I could probably go on about European colonists in America and passenger pigeons, but make your own extended metaphor here.


Italian Easter bread in Carroll Gardens

What do you see as the future of Brooklyn?

Right now the future certainly looks a lot like the recent past — the wave front of gentrification that's sweeping rapidly eastward across Bushwick and Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights and Flatbush shows little sign of slowing. And a Trump administration is only likely to accelerate the process, both through tax policies that promise to massively increase income inequality, and by decimating any programs that might fund public housing or empower immigrants or provide any other bulwarks against the raw power of cash.

That said, there's certainly more talk now about ways to resist the wholesale remaking of New York than there's been before in my lifetime, and an awful lot of activists who are doing everything in their power to put forward other visions of a sustainable city, like UPROSE in Sunset Park or the Queens groups like Woodside on the Move that are fighting back against that borough becoming the new Brooklyn. Systemic change is always hard and tiring and bloody, but every once in a while it actually succeeds, and usually in the least expected of ways — don’t forget that New York’s rent control laws were passed in response to temporary wartime housing shortages after World War II. The most that we can do is learn the lessons of the recent past, speak out, and push the powers that be, then see what happens.

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• Save the date: Neil deMause and Tom Angotti, editor of Zoned Out!, will be giving a presentation on Brooklyn redevelopment at the Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch at Grand Army Plaza at 7pm on Monday, February 27.

VANISHING

Publishers Weekly reports today that Brooklyn's beloved and excellent bookstore BookCourt will be closing at the end of this month.

They've been open since 1981. In a public statement, the owners announced their retirement--and sent their regrets.



Author Emma Straub is working on a solution. She writes on her site:

"A neighborhood without an independent bookstore is a body without a heart. And so we’re building a new heart.

We’ve spent the last few months looking at spaces, getting our math together, and thinking about light fixtures. We have secured initial funding and crossed our fingers. And so, dear Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Columbia Waterfront, and beyond…you won’t be lonely for long. Books are magic, and we want to make sure that this neighborhood is positively coated in bookish fairydust for decades to come."

Fingers crossed. In the meantime, New York--you make me heartsick more and more every single day.

Gleason's Boxing Gym, in DUMBO before it was fashionably DUMBO, moved locations yesterday.

It hasn't gone far, just around the corner. But the gritty old joint is packed up and gone, and the new place is shiny and, well, new. As Alex Vadukul wrote in the Times last week, "the relocation leaves behind an era’s worth of sweat and grime that has accumulated in this temple to the sweet science."


Jared Goldstein

Jared "The NYC Tour Guide" Goldstein shared a few photos of Gleason's last day in the old spot, just as it was being dismantled.


Jared Goldstein

I can't say I've ever been a boxer, but I went now and then to Gleason's twenty years ago, just to be in its atmosphere. I remember walking there through a Brooklyn waterfront wasteland, smoking a cigarette while standing in some yellow weeds full of trash.

I was heavy into Joyce Carol Oates' "On Boxing," which I recommend, if you want to read something beautiful about the brutal sport. At the time, it was all poetry to me.

I'd go to places to watch bouts in dumpy joints where you sat in metal folding chairs, so close you could see the sweat spray off the boxers' bodies on impact.

At Gleason's, I'd just hang around to watch the fighters practice. I tied a few loose laces on their gloves. That's all. It was a moment, a long time ago, when I wanted to be close to something I couldn't quite name.


Jared Goldstein

That dumpy old DUMBO is gone. And so is that old Gleason's. The last time I went, in 2008, it all felt changed.


2008

Born in the Bronx in 1937, moved to Brooklyn in 1984, Gleason's still survives. And that's more than you can say for many real New York places.


2008

They posted shots of the new gym on their Twitter feed. Same color scheme, just shinier. It probably smells like fresh paint and off-gassing vinyl.

Let the sweat and grime begin.


Gleason's Twitter

Last week, Curbed shared photos from the marketing materials for the new luxury development of the former Domino Sugar refinery. The place is now being called "The Refinery." Because, yes, that's what the building was, but also--obviously--because that's what the developers (and City Hall) want the luxury development to do.

It will help to refine the neighborhood.



What do refineries do? They cleanse. They purify. Sugar refineries, in particular, take darker materials and turn them white. That is also being done--has been done--to Williamsburg and to much of Brooklyn and the city.

New York is becoming exponentially whiter every day, thanks to hyper-gentrification. The process acts as one big refinery, a factory for smoothing and bleaching.



Mayor de Blasio appears to be all for this. Or else he's been brainwashed by the neoliberal free-marketeer myth that luxury development is inevitable. (It is not.) He recently told Crain's NYC Summit conference that the "only way" to create an inclusive city "is through development."

He could not be more wrong. Development excludes. Development whitens. Development segregates.

The designers who created The Refinery's renderings know this. Look at the people in the images. What do you see?

Park Slope has a new Starbucks. A gigantic Starbucks. It recently opened on the corner of 7th Avenue and 9th Street in a part of the neighborhood with very few, if any, national chain stores.



This large corner spot was previously home to Brooklyn Flipster's, a burger place. Their lease was not renewed.

Too bad the city won't stand up to corporations. Too bad they won't zone to stop the spread of chain stores. Too bad they won't pass the Small Business Jobs Survival Act or give us back commercial rent regulation, like we had decades ago.

Too bad Mayor de Blasio, in his own home neighborhood, won't do anything to stop the homogenization of the city and the total destruction of the small business streetscape.

Too bad no one in power will stand up and #SaveNYC.

VANISHED

Reader Christine writes in to let us know that Rocco's Calamari of Fort Hamilton Parkway in Brooklyn has closed abruptly after 35 years in business.


photo via Eating in Translation

"This was my husband's childhood hangout every Saturday afternoon," writes Christine. "The Fried Calamari was to die for, fried zucchini was one of my favorites. Great home-cooked style meals at a great price. Freshly made everyday... Just a tremendous loss for everyone."

The closure was sudden and unannounced, leaving customers reeling. After celebrating their 35th anniversary on July 9, on their Facebook page they wrote, "Rocco's will be closed for vacation from July 31st to August 8th. We will reopen Tuesday, August 9th!" But they did not reopen.

A second Facebook notice reads: "After 35 years of serving the community, we are 'hanging up our hats!' We would like to thank our wonderful staff and loyal customers for their patronage. It has been an honor and pleasure in serving you ALL! ‪#‎retirement."‬

I never got to try Rocco's, so here's Brooklyn Butch with his take on the place, complete with the theme from The Godfather:

It is 1996 and I’m in love with Coney Island. I’m in love with its decrepit, ancient buildings, crumbling but also vibrating with color and life. Ice cream, cotton candy, corn dogs, fried clams. I’m in love with the smell of grease and seashore. The feeling of being at the edge of the world. On the margin. Way out there. Beyond. And I can’t get enough of the freaks.



I go to Sideshows by the Seashore to see their 10-in-1 show. Zenobia, played by Jennifer Miller, is the bearded lady. She wears plain clothes, pants and a shirt, no makeup, nothing theatrical. The focus is her beard, thick and woolly, a bit wild. With her long wavy hair, she looks, if not like Jesus, then one of the apostles. A hippie.

She goes through her spiel: "I am a woman with a beard,” she announces. “If I called myself The Bearded Lady, I would be claiming that I, Zenobia, was the one, the only, woman with a beard in the entire world. The Bearded Lady. Could that possibly be true? Of course not. The world is full of women who have beards. Or at least they have the potential. They have the potential to have a beard, if only they would reach out and fulfill their fabulous potential, as I myself have so obviously done. Historically speaking, speaking historically, that is, hair has been a symbol of power. It goes back to Samson and his great mane of power. That's why men don't want women having too much in too many places. You get it? Forget it. That's what I said, forget it. So people want to know how I deal with walking down the street. Cause here I am, a gal with a beard, gallivanting around New York City. You think I'm getting hassled out there? I get more than my fair share. So what do I do?”

She picks up a machete from the stack behind her.

“After a long hard day at work, I'm hot, I'm tired, all I want is a nice cold…”

“Beer!” the crowd yells.

“Machete!" Zenobia corrects them and begins juggling three glinting, sharp blades. She’s good. The crowd roars in applause.



It is 2016, exactly 20 years since it was 1996, and I return to the Sideshows by the Seashore. I’ve been back a number of times over the years, but today it’s a revival, Superfreak Weekend, and Jennifer Miller is reprising her original Zenobia act.

She’s glammed it up since 1996, wearing a purple satin gown over her jeans and motorcycle boots, her eyelids painted with purple powder. Her beard has a few gray hairs in it now. She begins her spiel, word for word, the same as it was in 1996: “If I called myself The Bearded Lady, I would be claiming that I, Zenobia, was the one, the only, woman with a beard in the entire world!”

A boy in the audience shouts out, “You have a gay name!”

He’s maybe 8 years old. His mother tells him to “stop it.” Zenobia relishes the moment—as Jennifer Miller she’s a professor of performance studies, a lecturer on gender, and director of the left-wing political theater troupe Circus Amok. “Now we can really talk,” she says, moving to the front of the stage and kneeling down. She addresses the boy directly.

“What about the name Zenobia strikes you as gay?”

“It’s a gay name!” the boy shouts. His mother tells him again to "stop it." They go around like this, the boy repeating himself, clearly in the throes of a gender mind-fuck. The needle on his cognitive record keeps skipping. After 20 years, the bearded lady act still has the power to unsettle.

Zenobia continues to talk to the boy and the audience. We laugh at a joke. The energy moves. She asks the boy again what’s gay about her name. Quietly now, he says, “Well, it’s kinda gay. And it’s kinda pretty.”

“A-ha! Now that’s what we call queer,” Zenobia says, getting to her feet. “The place where gay meets pretty!” And the show goes on. She completes her spiel and juggles her machetes. She’s still good. The audience roars. She gets ready to do it again.



I walk out to the boardwalk, past the many bright-colored banners for Thor Equities: “Space Available,” “Stores for Lease,” “Retail Space Available,” one after another, tied to chain-link fences around bulldozed lots, strapped to shuttered building facades and empty storefronts. Much has changed in 20 years.

Giuliani illegally tore down the old Thunderbolt rollercoaster. The Stillwell Avenue subway station got a major makeover. Thor's Joe Sitt bought up acres and acres, and then kicked out the carnies. Astroland shuttered. Bloomberg rezoned the whole place, drastically reducing the space for amusement. The decrepit, ancient buildings I loved were torn down. And the chains came in: Applebee's Dunkin Donuts Wahlburgers Johnny Rockets Bank of America Subway.

I tell myself Coney is still Coney. You can still get a corn dog and a plate of fried clams. The Cyclone still gives people whiplash. Local families still come to have fun. The crowd is diverse, multi-cultural, working class. You can’t argue with that. But there is something vital missing. Coney has lost its edge, the character it boasted for over a century. Everything feels brighter, shinier, cleaner. More controlled. Less alive.



On the graffiti-covered gates of the Eldorado Arcade, signs read: “GRAFFITI FOR FILM SHOOT - PLEASE DO NOT PAINT OVER - NBC UNIVERSAL.” The graffiti doesn’t look anything like real graffiti, made by someone who perhaps has never seen real graffiti.

I walk down to Williams Candy, a sweet little spot that’s been here for about 80 years, and buy a small paper bag full of malted milk balls. I’m the only customer. They’re all going to IT’SUGAR, the massive chain. Next door, the tables at one of the last honky-tonk clam shacks are empty, while families cram into Applebee’s and Wahlburgers.



People don’t want surprises anymore, so there are no surprises left at Coney Island. Except for that scene back at the Sideshow. That is what Coney Island has always been about, shaking people out of their everyday lives, shocking and thrilling them with experiences of the unusual.

In his Coney Island history book Amusing the Million, John Kasson writes that Coney encouraged “the grotesque.” The freaks symbolized “the exaggerated and excessive character of Coney Island as a whole,” unusual bodies that “displayed themselves openly as exceptions to the rules of the conventional world.” The whole place was an escape from conventionality. But at today's Coney Island, the sideshow is the one space left where gay meets pretty.

Gentrification is slow. Hyper-gentrification is fast. We're really not dealing with old-fashioned gentrification anymore, as much as people keep talking about it.

For a look at what happened--and keeps happening--to large swaths of Brooklyn in less than 10 years, check out Brooklyn Flux, a series of before-and-after photos by Kristy Chatelain.


all photos by Kristy Chatelain

Taken along the waterfront of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, from 2007 to present, the photos mostly show the kind of change that is sweeping the city--from industrial and scruffy to sleek and trendy.

Or vacant.



Signs of the former population, like a Puerto Rican flag in graffiti, are replaced by the symbols of the new population, i.e., old-timey typefaces, gold-leaf signage, wine bars.

And on it goes.