Ever get that nagging feeling that Boerum Hill is an elaborate marketing campaign, because where in tarnation is the hill? Or that the NIMBY activists at your local rezoning hearing must have gone through some sort of training camp to get like that? Well, the first point is pretty much true, and there may not be a camp, but residents of Brownstone Brooklyn have been honing their auditorium jeers and protest signs for over a half-century now, as historian Suleiman Osman writes in his book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn.
A 1976 home tour poster by the Boerum Hill Association shows a prototypical brownstoner sculpting a miniature brownstone. (The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn)
The book came out in 2011, but it's history published by an academic press, so you'd be forgiven for missing the initial fanfare. The topic is niche, but it's a must-read for anyone interested in New York history, local politics, urban planning, NIMBY activism, and how gentrification has influenced them all. Today's local controversies—babyccinos, the Manhattanization of the outer boroughs, finance bros in Long Island City, yarn graffiti in Bushwick, colonial-chic real estate advertising—they all have roots in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s covered by Osman. It was then that artists, gays, and footloose white collar professionals, almost all white, migrated en masse to Brooklyn Heights and the expanse of row houses beyond (then known as South Brooklyn) even as other less whimsical white people fled for the suburbs.
Seeking a return to an imagined Victorian village-life idyll, the brownstoners honed their plastering skills and scoured historical archives looking for names to differentiate their little burghs, never mind that brownstones were, at the time that they were mass-produced in the late 1800s, pilloried as "oppressive" and monotonous, the suburban tract houses of their day. (The Hill is imaginary but the Boerum family, slaveholders with Brooklyn property around the time of the American Revolution, is real enough.)
What came after is easily caricatured as the ravings of the tweed-wearing Heights resident, inveighing against one perceived incursion after another: market-rate housing; supermarkets; public housing; factories; middle-class housing; gay cruising. And all that happened. But there were also communist types making common cause with black power radicals to demand community control of schools and other institutions. There were cross-ethnic street battles and insurgent political clubs and splinter groups galore.
The whole phenomenon, generally overshadowed in historical discussions by the larger trends of riots, white flight, and urban economic collapse, was a whirlwind mess that we're still living in the echo of, and Osman is a steady guide through it all. The book is worth reading for the 1967 Park Slope yuppie photographed in Victorian period garb alone, but all the rest helps make sense of the image.
I spoke to Osman to get some insight into his process and his thoughts on growing up in Park Slope.
Could you explain the focus of your research generally? I teach the American Studies program [at George Washington University]. I'm a historian and also a scholar of urban studies. I like everything about cities: the built environment, planning, race and ethnicity. So it's an interdisciplinary approach to the history of cities.
And what got you interested in this field? I think everyone's first project is slightly autobiographical, and I'm from a city. When I was in graduate school, I wasn't necessarily going to focus on cities, but I kept on being drawn to scholarship of history, and geography, and I took a course about cities and space. I ended up doing a project about it.
A 1980 map of "Brownstone Neighborhoods," including many neighborhood names coined by transplants in the 1960s and 1970s. (The Brooklyn Phoenix Brownstone Guide via The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn)
As you're doing all the general exams and reading all this great scholarship on cities, I realized that a lot of it for good reasons focused on the landscapes like Newark and New York City in the 1970s, and explaining the roots of a lot of the struggles that former industrial cities continue to have. I was reading this literature over a decade ago, and I thought there's a story that's happening in a place like Brownstone Brooklyn that's a bit different. I don't know if it's the next chapter or a different chapter, or supplementary, but there was something different about the emergence of a post-industrial city.
I thought that, even though there's a lot of sociological and social scientific literature on it, the historians haven't quite yet begun to tackle it. And I thought, wow, there's something here that would be interesting to tell. Of course 10 years later, this is really a issue that more and more people are writing about and interested in. I think the historical angle, the older roots haven't really been explored that much.
How do you define Brownstone Brooklyn as a concept? All place names are invented in some ways. There's no such thing as a "real place name." Brownstone Brooklyn is a name that really has roots in the '70s as a lot of these brownstone neighborhoods were experiencing a lot of brownstone renovation that I describe in the book. Preservationists and people renovating these neighborhoods gave it this name to give some coherence to these brownstone neighborhoods that were undergoing an early version of gentrification.
So there are brownstones in these neighborhoods, but it's a name that's relatively recent.
And what era were you living in Park Slope? From about 1981 to adulthood, 2006.
How did you observe the neighborhood change in that time? The book ends when I arrive, so there's no overlap in the book, interestingly, between my own experience in Park Slope and its subject matter. But I do think there's a continuation in some of the trends. In some ways, it's fascinating how many of the same issues and debates were being echoed and talked about, in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, or Brooklyn Heights in the '50s. At the same time, in the '90s and 2000s, we are at a different stage. There's much more involvement of the state, much more involvement of the real estate industry. The book describes an era where a lot of these neighborhoods were red-lined. It was a much more decentralized phenomenon. In some ways, it's the same, but it's also very different.
Suleiman Osman
is a term that's amorphous, and the phenomenon that the word describes has had some consistencies, but it's also changed over time. That's why the history is helpful to add to the debate.
What is your own personal emotional reaction when you go back to the old neighborhood? There's a classic divide, in history but also in memory studies, between big H history and big M memory and little m memory. They're both valid in ways. Historians see themselves as scientifically seeing the past, whereas memory is more subjective, but has other truths to it.
It's weird for me with New York. This place that I've now studied through this lens as a historian, but I also have memory, and it makes me skeptical of both. I even question my own memory sometimes, and ask, "Well, is what I'm doing nostalgic?"
Or, my sense of loss that Seventh Avenue Park Slope doesn't look like it did when I was a kid. That's validated, but also the historian in me questions my own knowledge of the city. It's a weird feeling. Brooklyn is in some ways very much the same. It's booming. But then even new arrivals also have the sense of something off. It's almost like a phantom limb. There's the aching sense that something's changed, that something's not there.
In some ways, it's very exciting to see what's happening. Not the luxury apartments, but things on the waterfront. There's some sense among everybody in Brooklyn, "Is the borough going in the direction we want it to?"
You've seen a lot more of this, but it's interesting to be here as things are changing so rapidly. Particularly now, in the past 10 or 20 years when places that are Bed-Stuy or Harlem—these are places that have generational, big symbolic resonance, locally but also nationally and globally, as centers of African-American landscapes. When those start to shift it adds even further debates, not just about residential displacement, but about the meaning and future of these cultural landmarks. Not that there weren't similar debates about older Puerto Rican and Italian-American and African-American neighborhoods in the '50s and '60s and '70s.
Take Harlem, which in the '70s people thought there were such stark lines of segregation that Harlem would never gentrify. Or U Street here in Washington. It's a similar history to Harlem, or Bronzeville, in Chicago. U Street is undergoing a similarly rapid change. It's both gentrifying and also undergoing a similar racial transition in the past 10 years, or 15 years. There are similar debates about history and whether history can become commodified, can be come branded in these iconic African-American neighborhoods.
In the book you talk a bit about Fort Greene and Prospect Lefferts Gardens, but you focus mostly on the area between Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. How did you choose those neighborhoods? Do you think there's some particular resonance for people, even if they don't live in New York? Gentrification during that time period in the '60s and '70s—the word was coined in 1964 by a London sociologist. [The word] didn't really come to the United States until the late '70s or early '80s. There was kind of a small phenomenon that Ruth Glass was describing in London, of young middle class [people] moving into these neighborhoods and rehabbing buildings. It was described by a variety of names, like white-painting in Toronto, or brownstoning in New York. Or sand-blasting.
It was largely occurring in 19th century housing that was near central business districts, like King William in San Antonio, or the South End of Boston, or Rittenhouse Square and Society Hill in Philadelphia.
A lot of these areas were undergoing racial transition. A majority of areas, though, in the '60s and '70s that were undergoing this phenomenon were poor and working-class white districts that were undergoing white flight. There's still a lot of displacement on the individual house level of poor renters of color in rooming houses, but the areas I'm describing—Fort Greene had made a transition to a majority African-American population—but Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens didn't.
That's why I chose the area; for demographic reasons. I was looking at where this phenomenon occurred. And I chose these neighborhoods because I think they were representative of what was happening nationally.
Do you think that Brownstone Brooklyn has an outsize place in the national consciousness because New York is a media center? Yeah, I think it gets a ton of attention partly because the people moving to these neighborhoods are over-represented in the arts and media, and they tend to write about their neighborhoods a lot. Brooklyn in some ways has become a global brand. It has an outsize influence on planning and discourse about cities, not just in the United States but around the world. Places want to describe themselves as the next Brooklyn.
If gentrification is one of the big overlooked stories of recent urban history, is the role of the African-American middle class an even more overlooked story? You get into it to some degree, but I feel like in the pop history discussion of cities, there are poor black people and more affluent white people who move to the suburbs, but the African-American middle class isn't really discussed. They're an important part of the story, particularly in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the '50s and '60s, and also West Indian immigrants who were renovating houses and starting neighborhood associations, and in many ways keeping New York City afloat in the '70s. They were starting cleanup campaigns, so many things were happening. There were 10,000 block associations in New York in the 1970s. I think you point to something right. There's a group of graduate students and young scholars who are now starting to write about gentrification in the field of history. There's tons of social scientists and geographers, but in terms of historians, it's a growing sub-field.
And I think you're also right, more people are starting to look at the '70s where you start to have majority black cities, and a real range of black mayors, the complexity and diversity of African-American politics, class politics, political views, political coalitions and the roles of black homeowners versus renters. Nathan Connolly who just wrote a good book about this.
The political and class diversity of Brooklyn, and also of African-American urban history is fertile ground for historians to explore.
(Oxford University Press)
Even in the '70s, Hattie Carthan started the Magnolia Tree Earth Center [in Bedford-Stuyvesant]. A book just came out about Bed-Stuy by Michael Woodsworth. I think you're right. What you're talking about is an important part of the story.
And it's a story of unintended consequences as well. I don't think any of these homeowners starting these organizations could have predicted—people in Lefferts Gardens were organizing because the city's in a fiscal crisis and there's basically planned shrinkage. There's no money coming to us. We're almost volunteers replacing municipal services. We're trying to basically make these places survive, and I don't think they could have possibly imagined in the '70s that in the '90s or the 2000s their brownstones would be worth millions.
Now the question for the '90s or the 2000s is whether these organizations are much more aware of the value of the neighborhoods, or whether they become part of the machine.
Yeah, in the case of Prospect Lefferts Gardens Neighborhood Association, they're very active and very nuanced in their approach to various development proposals. They try to get affordable housing included in developments, but they're not full NIMBY. In the '70s they were basically begging people to come to the neighborhood, which is a very different rhetorical approach.
A 1938 redlining map. Neighborhoods that are lowest-graded/allegedly highest risk for lenders are colored red. (National Archive via PlaNYourCity)
For people who haven't read the book and may not, even after this great interview, can you explain the role that redlining played in the mid-century development of the neighborhoods we're talking about? What's interesting about the time period that this book talks about, the '60s and '70s, is that a lot of these neighborhoods that today we think of as sites of high-priced real estate speculation were actually red-lined, and it was very difficult for people to get mortgages, hard to get insurance. So a lot of this rehabbing that we're talking about was sweat equity. And in the '70s there was this interracial coalition of homeowners and activists who formed these anti-redlining campaigns. They protested banks and got the first federal legislation against red-lining passed, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.
A lot of the neighborhoods were given D ratings for federally guaranteed mortgages.
And the rating was based on a combination of factors that included race and income. Right. It was ostensibly to prevent another Depression and high rate of bankruptcies and saving loans, a kind of early version of the foreclosure crisis. After the Depression they created this ranking system, banks, and companies, and the federal government. They would rate neighborhoods based on a letter. It was supposed to be based on things like the quality of housing stock and mixture of industry and residences. But beyond all those variables, one consistent feature that resulted in the D rating was the racial makeup of the neighborhood, the percentage of African Americans, Mexican Americans and other minorities, which resulted in African-American parts of the city and Latino-American parts of the city being denied the benefits of the New Deal and subsidized mortgages and middle-class home ownership in the '40s and '50s.
There was an anti-red-lining movement in the '70s that began to challenge it, but in the '60s this was still the case. It was very hard to get financing to buy a brownstone. You had to use things like purchase money mortgages, or use a mortgage broker to cobble together small mortgages, or just use savings.
I was very interested to read about how '60s radicalism played out on the local level in these neighborhoods, where people were able to form interracial coalitions and where race became a dividing line. These early young people moving to neighborhoods like Park Slope, as opposed to the image of the pernicious yuppie of the '80s, these were a lot of people with links to the New Left or the counter-culture or reform politics. It resulted in interesting conflicts and also cooperation with other groups in the city. And also debates within these communities about the way new arrivals were transforming these neighborhoods they were moving into. Reconciling the process of gentrification with progressive politics continues to be an interesting aspect of the whole process.
The Clay Pot on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, founded as a crunchy ceramics studio in 1971, now sells designer jewelry and high-end ceramics. (The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn)
A lot of what you hear in terms of rhetoric is very familiar these days, in terms of discussion about gentrification and development. For instance, discussions in Brooklyn Heights about basketball courts in Brooklyn Bridge Park echo a lot of what was said about the plan to bring a Burger King to Montague Street in 1974. At the same time, a lot of young white liberals wouldn't be caught dead calling their neighborhood the frontier, or saying that they were colonizing. What do you think has changed about the language that's used to discuss the process of gentrification? The first part of this point was the fraught class politics in Jacobsian urbanism in Brooklyn and a progressive critique of Robert Moses and development and lifeless playgrounds, and a celebration of authenticity and farmers markets. But that could at times result in sometimes the critique of public housing or basketball courts, or a lot of these public landscapes that are used by the nonwhite poor or the nonwhite working class. It's a tension.
Were they against Burger King or [the people they thought would patronize it]? I think it was both.
I think gentrification has become a much more loaded term. In the '60s we didn't have this vocabulary. Today I don't think there's anyone who moves to Brooklyn who's not aware and concerned about being a gentrifier. In the '60s the term hadn't become as strong a term in public discourse as it is today.
Do you think we're stuck with the trend of people digging up names from history, real or imagined, and renaming neighborhoods? I think so. The question is, is there a legitimate and illegitimate way for name creation? Let's say a neighborhood experiences an influx of immigrants and they create new institutions and they eventually name the neighborhood as their enclave, versus a speculator who changes the name of the neighborhood because he wants to attract wealthier people.
All names are invented, so it's just looking critically at the history and seeing the ways that others have been contested.
In some instances, neighborhood names that were once seen as not positive can become sites of mobilization or even pride. So for example, Bed-Stuy, there was that joke that they made in the '40s. If something good happened the neighborhood was reported as Crown heights, and if something bad happened it was Bed-Stuy. By Spike Lee Do the Right Thing and certainly today, it's being used to signify a proud place of African-American identity in central Brooklyn.
The best thing is that people are aware of the politics of neighborhood naming.
The Robert Moses centralized style of urban planning has gone by the wayside, and we now have community boards and the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure. Is the legacy of brownstoning NIMBY activism, or is it possible for a big master plan or infrastructure project to come out of this patchwork of neighborhood institutions? I think you're right. One wonders. The positive way of thinking of it would be since the '70s there's much more than there was before—almost every city has some sort of neighborhood participation or at least some sort of environmental review process. The era of them clearing 20 square blocks or 10 square blocks of housing to build enormous projects is not really the case anymore. One wonders along the Williamsburg waterfront, the type of return on the big developments. I wonder sometimes if there's a phenomenon of Jane [Jacobs]-washing. Big developments focus more on the aesthetic parts of that sort of brownstoning movement, so you have some reference to architectural diversity or authenticity or grittiniess or greenness, but it masks a type of economic conformity. It gives a sort of Jacobsian veneer to a Moses-scale project.
And then on the other hand, there's a lament of the inability of cities to really build infrastructure projects like bridges or things that are for the broader good of cities, and whether some of that is rooted in a NIMBYism of the '70s, which as the book describes is coming from a wide variety of pockets of the city, with different political motives.
I'll leave you with one last possibly too ambitious question, which is that the general lament of anti-gentrification activists tends to be that the improvements that neighborhoods do get will not be enjoyed by the people who have been there the longest because they'll be displaced. Have you seen in your research examples of that people achieving some degree of housing stability and economic diversity through organizing. I'd say that hopefully the book offers a hopeful history because within the story of conflicts are remarkable stories of cooperation in which newer and older residents get together to rebuild PS 321, or start block associations together. On the local level there are examples. There's not a case where you can embalm the city and not experience any sort of neighborhood change, but there are examples where both new and old with a lot of conscious effort can find ways to change the neighborhood in ways that benefit everybody there.
Hopefully by reading the book you can also see inspiration for groups today to find possibilities for the Brooklyn of the future.
