The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York download epub

Good topic, dense writing, long winding chapters.

extremely detailed history about the neighborhood. historical and social description of the evolution of this unique area of Brooklyn. Especially interesting if you live there!

Really loved this book, it was a deep and intricate backstory to Brooklyn. For anyone living in the area or one day hopes to own a brownstone its really exciting to hear about the history of the area.

Extremely polished academic study of changing demographics, and the concomitant revitalization of Victorian-era (and earlier) residential housing, in and near downtown Brooklyn, post-WW II, also making superficial reference to similar change in other urban centers. A case study of the back-to-the-city movement examining the ethos and economics as well as the politics. Densely written, heavily researched and annotated, published in small print, and not for a general readership.

Most of the book focuses on Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood on a promontory across the East River from Wall Street, which probably peaked around the time of the erection of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. The wonderful housing stock, and amenity of an imagined pastoral village in the heart of the great metropolis, attracted urban pioneers after the war, including many notable writers and intellectuals, Arthur Miller, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, et al. They fought fiercely through the fifties and into the sixties to be not crushed by urban renewal and established the precedent of an historic district.

The writer is descriptive rather than prescriptive. In his deft style, Osman sees everybody on all parts of the spectrum evincing a trope of one sort or another, and possibly as wrong as he or she is right. There are also innumerable palimpsests, for readers who prefer them to tropes, and for others ample gemeinschaft. One can also enjoy a synecdoche, or maybe a panopticon. No? Then you might be a flâneur. Osman found quite a few so join the crowd.

Impressively, the author does not invent victims or advocate on behalf of those self-described. The notorious gangs of South Brooklyn/Red Hook, on the outskirts of downtown Brooklyn, for example, did resemble West Side Story (1957), in that they fought bitterly amongst themselves but didn't snatch the pocketbooks of little old ladies. Or, as Osman might say, did they? No, no, they didn't. They rolled drunks, maybe, occasionally.

That's different than what happened later, with African-Americans and Puerto Ricans packed into nearby vertical ghettos, a component of the great modernist urban plan that survives. Minority advocates whom Osman might view as misguided today demand more of the same such as around Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards project creating a New York venue for the Nets basketball corporation. Ironically, the opposition from those neighboring property owners is abstract; little is being demolished and most of the naysayers may well prosper. The Brooklyn Heights hiposie that wrote the playbook for big project opposition in the fifties and sixties had a better case.

Osman finesses racial conflict associated with gentrification/displacement with mixed results. Quoted with ambiguous approval is a brownstoner who says they "strained their liberalism all out of shape trying to adjust to blacks and their culture of poverty" (p. 237). What "black culture of poverty"? Possibly more white proletarians were displaced by gentrification in Brownstone Brooklyn than blacks and Hispanics. The contradiction was and is class/socio-economic status. This can be seen today as back-to-the-city continues, though on different terms, all over old Brooklyn, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Prospect Heights, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Vinegar Hill and Crown Heights, and also in Williamsburg and Red Hook (as well as in Harlem). The 2010 Community Survey says that not only non-Hispanic whites priced out of areas like Park Slope are assuming more distant Victorian housing stock, but middle-class blacks too, and they surely share the same values including a quest for place and authenticity. Indeed, middle-class blacks are perhaps less likely to romanticize the ghetto or what some whites see as diversity.

Paradoxically, the Jacobsian West Village, as well as Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope, comprise some of the most expensive and coveted urban real estate in the country if not the world. The day is fast approaching when nineteenth century housing stock will be exhausted for would-be pioneers. Only at the utmost fringes is the sweat-equity of the 50s through the 70s at all possible. This book therefore essays to chronicle a moment in time.

Good book.

Interesting book for those of us who have lived in Brooklyn, New York. However, the writing hovers between academic and for the general public, could have done with a little more editing!

Obviously an expanded PhD dissertation. Contains no original research, personal observations or interesting conclusions. A fascinating subject made unspeakably dull by pedestrian writing. Another blooper from The New York Times Book Review. Don't those folks read the books they review?

(holy pussycats....I just wrote my review of THIS book; accidentally, under another book--the one called "Bricks and Brownstone: THe New York Row House...." so...to whoever reads this stuff.....please forgive; and consider that the review which I wrote under "Bricks and Brownstone: THe New York Row House" ......should have been listed under THE INVENTION OF BROWNSTONE BROOKLYN; because this is the book that I was writing about.