I have a friend, a longtime resident first of Carroll Gardens and now Cobble Hill, who refers to Brooklyn as “God’s country.” This notion of the borough as a site of pristine authenticity is central to Suleiman Osman’s book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York. Osman, an assistant professor of American Studies at George Washington University, grew up in Park Slope toward the tail end of the era he surveys, but his study is informed by a comprehensive understanding of the forces that have shaped the urban environment not only in New York but in other parts of America in the years 1950 to 1980. It is a highly nuanced investigation into the oftentimes contradictory interests at play during the period.
As opposed to many studies of postmodern redevelopment, Suleiman finds that gentrification in postwar Brooklyn wasn’t the work of a cabal of bankers, real estate speculators, and government bureaucrats but more the generally unintended result of a well-meaning grassroots effort that sought to negotiate a middle ground between the alienating effects of large-scale, top-down urban renewal projects on the one hand, and the perceived banality of life in the suburbs on the other. The culprits, if one wants to call them that, were typically lawyers, academics, artists, and other well-educated members of the postindustrial service economy looking for a sense of terroir, i.e., local rootedness, against the anomie of modernist administrative society.
The first of the so-called urban frontiers to be rehabilitated was Brooklyn Heights, the area of early nineteenth-century mansions overlooking the East River that by the end of the Second World War had physically declined, with dramatically falling property values . Many of these stately townhouses had been abandoned or subdivided and converted into low-cost rental units. But by the end of the 1940s these structures were being restored and less-affluent tenants displaced by the forebears of what David Brooks has called “Bourgeois Bohemians.” (Indeed, I, a BoBo as I live and breathe, for a while rented a much more upscale version . . .