Brooklyn

When I was at NYU, nobody I knew lived in Brooklyn. Crossing the East River was like crossing the Mississippi must have seemed to the first settlers who did it: a scary and irrevocable transgression. Across the water lay, to my knowledge, only “Domsey’s”—a multi-storeyed used clothing store in Williamsburg to which friends and I would occasionally venture, passing on the way through the Satmar Hasidic neighborhoods, whose residents we would eye with voracious anthropological curiosity. Who could live there? It would be like moving onto an Amish farm! Good pretzels, but where’s the bar? Furthermore, we reasoned back then, who wants to have to take a subway across the river after late night rehearsals? No, no…Brooklyn simply wasn’t done.

In 1995 I moved from New York to Santa Fe (more on that later), and from there, two years later, to Jerusalem (more on that later, too.). Then to DC for three years, and finally, inevitably, back to New York in September 2001—three days or so before the Two Towers came down (coincidentally, I assure you.)

By 2001, everybody was living in Brooklyn. Rents in Manhattan were ludicrous, laughable! Mostly people lived in Williamsburg—an industrial wasteland suddenly peppered with very hip restaurants, nightclubs and art galleries, many featuring indoor ponds, for some reason. I was prejudiced against W-burg from the outset, having heard about its recent explosive hipness and fearing that living there would be like moving back into an NYU dorm. My first post-NY-homecoming visit to the area (to see a friend) immediately confirmed my worst suspicions: Stepping out of the subway in Williamsburg before me was a young man in his early twenties with an Atari symbol tattooed on his upper arm.

These days I just think Williamsburg is ugly. I go there now and then to see shows or eat at a restaurant, and the shows and the food are always good, but the place still feels like a graveyard of warehouses: everything square and brick and industrial—no trees, no parks, no kids laughing and playing.

The neighborhood I moved to that September, and where I live now, is called Kensington. It has no definite character—being a collage of “All In the Family” style townhouses and postwar apartment buildings, demographically a mixture of recent immigrants from China, the former Soviet republics, and Bangladesh, alongside more entrenched, working-class Italians. No one nationality dominates—it is truly the American Melting Pot, or Mosaic, or Tossed Salad, or Jackson Pollock painting. Recently the “artisten” (a Yiddish term used by the Hasidim to disparagingly describe the young, mostly white hipsters that are invading their neighborhoods), of which I suppose I am one, have begun discovering this place. Why not? It’s affordable, 30 minutes from the Lower East Side, clean and safe. Park Slope, which is within walking distance, has extended its pseudopod up 7th Ave. as far as 20th St., which borders this neighborhood, and will no doubt continue seeping our way.

Some of my Kingsborough students said recently of Brooklyn that they would feel less comfortable here, walking hand-in-hand with a lover of a different race, than in Manhattan—the lines between neighborhoods and cultures, in most of Brooklyn, being so deeply drawn. My Grandmother Beatrice, who died two Thanksgivings ago, used to say that when she was a kid here, an Italian kid crossing into a neighboring Jewish block would get beat up, and vice versa. A West Indian student of mine last semester told me that there is some kind of cultural pride parade every year on Kings Highway, and that if you happen to try to party on the Hatiian float, and you happen not to be Haitian, they will stab you with a knife. So I guess times haven’t changed all that much.

Still, go to Prospect Park on any sunny day in the Spring or Summer and you will see Brooklyn in her full glory—the whole world in microcosm, every continent, culture, and sexual orientation in evidence—everybody playing, laughing, enjoying the sun the trees and the sky. Nobody’s stabbing anybody. Some kids might be throwing water balloons at each other, but that’s as aggressive as it gets.

But Brooklyn is changing, fast. The developers are all over the waterfront. Coney Island is getting a multi-million (billion?) dollar facelift. Bruce Ratner and Frank Gehry will soon be building this massive complex downtown: a stadium encircled by jutting, crystalline towers…people I know have already started to make the unthinkable, irrevocable pilgrimage across that little tributary of the East River, into Queens.