I moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 1993, fresh from college, for two reasons: my brother told me to, and it was cheap. It was the neighborhood, he said, that most evoked the northeastern liberal college towns in which we’d grown up.
In the then-frontier land of Brooklyn, rooms were easy to come by—the Village Voice classified section was full of ads for the gay-friendly, vegetarian, communal-ish kinds of places I was used to, even though I wasn’t gay or vegetarian. Eventually, I found myself just a block from Prospect Park, in a limestone fourth-floor walk-up that I shared with two roommates. The place was the New York City version of sprawling, if in dire need of a tuneup. It was $300 per room.
The area was clearly in transition. There were none of the $2,000 double-wide strollers for which it is now (in)famous, but there was a fine cheese store in addition to the seemingly age-old pizza shop, and a neighborhood Italian joint.
Longtime residents filled my block, too, but they were not pleased with my arrival. They included the aged super of the building next door and his mangy little mutt; a sad-faced single mother with a nest of frizzy hair and a pouting boy; and a young couple perpetually smoking long cigarettes.
I don’t know which building the young couple—a skinny, freckled woman with feathered hair and her boyfriend, Mr. Tall, Dark & Handsome in his apricot-colored leather coat—lived in, but it was clear they felt they owned the block. They often marked their dwindling territory on my stoop, so I had to cleave a path through the clouds of their cigarette (and other kinds of ) smoke. At times, they refused to move.
Fed up, one evening I finally asked if they’d let me through.
“Do you own this building?” the woman asked, tiny points of her teeth exposed.
“No, I don’t own it. I rent an apartment here.”
“Then it’s not yours,” she said, her arms wrapped around herself.
Her hostility surprised me. I made less than $25,000 then. Our shower spit out less than 10 minutes of hot water most mornings, and our floors were so scratched and splintery that walking barefoot was impossible. She seemed to think I was an outsider ruining the neighborhood, but I didn’t feel like I was changing anything—I was living in the same conditions as everyone else.
Only a few years later, I began to get an inkling of how she felt. And by now, more than two decades have gone by and the feeling is palpable. Many of the cheap rentals around me have gone co-op, or turned into luxury rentals (average price of a two-bedroom here is $3,347). The newsstand/egg sandwich place across the street became an overpriced, overhyped brunch spot. The freckle-faced lady lost her apartment. College friends who moved here with me departed for the Park Slopes of tomorrow, like Kensington or Sunset Park (now pricey themselves), leaving me orphaned in fancy land.
I am no longer the gentrifier, but a gentrifiee of sorts—digesting the strange alchemy of jealousy and disdain that erupts when your neighborhood transforms around you.
Now I know how the old-timers feel. I, too, am indignant at the onslaught of next-gen gentrifiers with their army of East Hampton-stickered SUVs. Corporate lawyers, not starving artists, shift the demographics now. It seems like gentrification happens so fast now, and so fiercely, though I’m sure the freckle-faced lady felt the same.
Not everything has changed. The pizza place is still there. But the cheese shop is now a real estate office, and the 40-year-old Italian restaurant is a Dunkin’ Donuts.
Like others before me, I want to plant my flag and announce ownership of a place that can’t be claimed. But there is a reality I can’t ignore: My new neighborhood compatriots, no matter how different (or similar) they may be demographically, are almost uniformly kind. If the reputation of the neighborhood is that it’s full of competitive helicopter parents, the reality is that they’re generous. And the lifers who are left have gotten used to me, if they haven’t accepted me.
There’s no solution to the tidal waves of gentrification, but there is this: Neighbors can be wonderful wherever you live, and the sense of neighborhood can survive—it must—long after those first settlers are gone.
