By Myles Ludwig
A couple of weeks ago, T, the special magazine-like issue of The New York Times published an article about a growing trend they called the “globalization of Brooklyn” or “Brooklynization.” Theoretically, there could be a Brooklynized neighborhood in Beijing.
The word, “Brooklynization,” reminds me of the corruption of the word “factoid,” invented by Norman Mailer (a Brooklyn boy himself) to represent a plausibility repeated so often it’s mistaken for fact.
The article gave me the shivers.
It seems “Brooklynization” has become the new nomenclature for an area of large spaces with cheap rents and sporadic services (irregular garbage pick-up, for example) where artists can afford to live, i.e. SoHo, which was replaced by Tribeca and, before that, by gentrification. Darwinian real estate development in reverse. It happened in Greenwich Village, then the East Village.
Even Hoboken was hot for a while.
Here, in West Palm, we had a SoSo (South of Southern) for a while, but it didn’t stick; now it’s Northwood Village.
I’m disconcerted by how quickly the pioneers of malldom (the Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Restoration Hardware, Anthropologie, etc.) push out the places that give the place its unique characteristics (dare I say charm), the quirky designer boutiques, specialty restaurants, funky underground clubs and the artists. I’m told the Nouveau Brooklynites are setting up in Queens to get away from themselves. There must be some kind of Moore’s Law for this.
Around the country, urban real estate developers are building ready-made faux Brooklyns. These Potemkin neighborhoods are complete with new apartments that have “lofts.” I lived in a loft for a while in New York back when a loft was a vacated factory or light industry space that could be rented illegally (unless the city granted you an A.I.R. certificate ― the creative equivalent of a handicap parking placard ― which identified you as an Artist in Residence). Now it seems to mean high ceilings.
This is not my Brooklyn. Fuhgettaboudit.
I’m a Brooklyn boy and proud of it. Born and bred in Bensonhurst in the Brooklynstan of the Charlotte Russe, Nathan’s Famous, Kasha Knishes, Brighton Beach, Coney Island and the BMT train into the city.
My grandparents moved to Bensonhurst from the Lower East Side where they had been immigrants in the early years of the 20th century. It was a big step up. Moving to Brooklyn meant they had cut themselves a chunk of American pie. Assimilation.
Brooklyn was an urban Eden then. I grew up in a neighborhood of Jews and Italians and assorted aliens who ate fish sticks on Fridays. I didn’t know fish came on sticks. Still have never seen one. We considered the Bronx an inferior planet, but still, a cut above New Jersey, where my uncle Max and Aunt Sonya had a chicken farm in Freehold.
That’s where Bruce Springsteen ― perhaps a connoisseur of fish sticks ― would later be born, and get his first guitar after seeing Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show. Now, he has a daughter who is a Wellington equestrian. Quite the rising.
And let’s not forget that Brooklyn has a valued artistic tradition of its own. Both Thomas Wolfe and William Styron fled the provincialism of their Southern boyhoods to seek their fortunes and broaden their horizons in its brownstones and boulevards.
We are proud of our Brooklyn.
The stoop was our patio. The men were at war, so moms and aunts and cousins and their girlfriends met on the stoop on charming spring afternoons to console each other and boast about us, their toddlers. We were swaddled in carriages lined up on the sidewalk like limousines. Women who lost sons in the war didn’t come out much, but they hung a special kind of flag in their windows. They were Gold Star Mothers, pitied and respected.
Neighborhood kids used the stoop as third base in games of stickball or home in ringalevio. I got my first sports injury on a runaway tricycle speeding down the driveway where my grandfather parked his fender-bulging black Buick, crashing into a lamppost and leaving me with a small souvenir scar on my forehead I still have.
When summer sweltered we went to Brighton Beach and Coney Island. My grandfather played handball at the Brighton Beach Club long before the Russian vory moved in. He did handstands and acrobatic backflips with his brothers on the sand. My parents told me courting stories of riding the Cyclone, the old wooden roller coaster, and the thrill of the Parachute Jump and the Steeplechase on their early dates. At night, some people slept on mattresses hauled onto fire escapes. My dreams were accompanied by the syncopated rumble of the trains between boroughs.
My parents had a cross-cultural marriage. Mom, Brooklyn-born, went to Brooklyn College. As a child she took tap dancing lessons and dreamed of being a Radio City Rockette. Dad was from Washington Heights (a fancy name for Harlem), sported an ascot, smoked a pipe and imagined himself as a Jewish Ronald Coleman or Leslie Howard. He wanted to be a diplomat.
The bungalows in the Catskills were our Hamptons and, years later, I worked at one of the smaller hotels as a busboy. Terrible job. I was fired on the busiest weekend of the season, July Fourth. Too arrogant.
The Brooklyn Paramount was about Francis Albert before Freed. We had the Brooklyn Dodgers, and when my grandfather took me to Ebbets Field, I could go down to the dugout and shake hands with a leading member of our homegrown royalty, the Duke of Flatbush. We took the train to the city to the movie palaces and stage shows at the Roxy or Radio City Musical Hall.
My Brooklyn had no hipsters in snap brim hats. In fact, I knew the word “hipster” as derogatory, a belittling put-down. One could be a “hep cat” like a jazz musician and later, as in Mailer’s The White Negro, “hip,” which was shorthand for knowing the subtext.
If Saul Steinberg had drawn a map of the United States, then, it would have begun and ended in Brooklyn and those of us born there are still proud of being from another country.
We are tough and resilient and we don’t need no smilin’ baristas.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.