Brooklyn’s tree-lined streets are famous for their integrated, diverse neighborhoods. “This is the Sesame Street version of Brooklyn,” according to journalist Aaron Hillis.
Photographs by Laura Jean Hocking
I’m walking down the street in Brooklyn on a sunny spring day, and my pants are falling down. It’s my first day in New York’s largest borough. When we arrived at our hotel in mid-afternoon and changed out of our travel clothes, I discovered that I hadn’t packed a belt. “I could really use a belt about now,” I said to my wife.
Just then, we turned a corner to find a street vendor hawking sunglasses, sundries, and, on a rotating display, belts. “There you go,” said my wife.
Three minutes later, I had belted up on Schermerhorn Street and we hurried on our way. There was so much to see and do.
To Brooklyn Bridge
In 1930, poet Hart Crane compared the Brooklyn Bridge to a seagull’s wings, the sails of a ghostly boat, and a giant striding across the East River. Tellingly, Crane began “To Brooklyn Bridge” by talking about how unremarkable it seems to the people who look at it every day.
Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge’s mile-long pedestrian span on the first sunny day of spring and you’ll see the full rainbow of human diversity on display.
The Brooklyn Bridge is not only one of the world’s great engineering achievements, it is also strikingly beautiful. It’s a testament to the strength of the design that it looks like a natural feature, just part of the landscape.
On an average day, 10,000 pedestrians and 3,500 bicyclists make the trip across the Brooklyn Bridge.
Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge’s mile-long pedestrian span on the first sunny day of spring and you’ll see the full rainbow of human diversity on display. Stand quiet for a moment and you’ll hear English, Spanish, French, Russian, Hindi, Mandarin, Swahili, and a dozen unidentifiable tongues swirl in the crisp spring air. People from all over the world are drawn here, partly for the economic opportunity, partly for the cultural amenities, and partly just for the romance of living in one of the world’s great cities.
Kelly Maina is an accountant for Price Waterhouse Cooper and a lifelong New Yorker who now lives in Brooklyn. She’s watched the borough undergo profound change over the last two decades. “When I first lived here in the early aughts, I would run back and forth across the Brooklyn Bridge,” she says. “You would see people walk over, but they wouldn’t leave the bridge. They would turn around and go back to Manhattan. Now, when I go to the bridge on Saturdays, I spend my time directing people. They want to be in Brooklyn. They want to go to Grimaldi’s. They want to go to Brooklyn Bridge Park. It’s become such a destination.”
The Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch stands at the northern entrance to Prospect Park.
A Borough’s Growing Pains
If the five boroughs of New York City went their separate civic ways, Brooklyn would become the third largest city in America. More than 2,600,000 people reside in Kings County’s 71 square miles. By comparison, 938,000 people live in Shelby County’s 763 square miles.
During the postwar economic boom of the 1950s, formerly concentrated urban populations started to decamp from the crowded cities to the suburbs. In New York, as in many other places in the United States — not the least of which was Memphis — city centers emptied out. Rents fell along with demand, and much real estate fell into neglect. But one side effect of those falling rents was that formerly expensive residential neighborhoods and industrial areas attracted a new group of people who were young, bohemian, and artistic. They’re now known, in the urban studies language popularized by Robert Florida, as “the creative class.”
The archetypal New York creative was Andy Warhol, who ran an art space in Manhattan called The Factory, where a crew of artists produced hundreds of millions of dollars worth of paintings, films, sculpture, and music over the course of two decades. In the mid-1960s, The Factory’s rent was $100 a year.
By the mid-1970s, large swaths of New York looked like a crime-ridden war zone, but it was home to one of the greatest explosions of creativity in American history. Punk rock and disco evolved next to each other in Manhattan, while hip-hop culture sprang from Queens. Artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who started out spraying graffiti on subway cars, became worldwide cultural ambassadors for New York. In the 1980s, young urban professionals who worked in the city wanted to live closer to the nightclubs, restaurants, and art galleries they frequented after work, and the city started to re-fill. Speculators bought up formerly destitute properties and improved them. Real estate values started to rise.
As late as the 1990s, there was only one big hotel in Brooklyn, a Marriott at the foot of the bridge. Brooklyn was not a place you visited; it was a place where you lived. But about 20 years ago, that changed. Creatives priced out of Manhattan came across the bridge to repopulate destitute neighborhoods in Brooklyn, beginning with Smith Street in the Williamsburg neighborhood. Once again, the shift was heralded by an explosion of new music.
Ted Leibowitz is a computer consultant and founder of BAGeL Radio, a streaming music station devoted to alternative rock. “When I was a kid, if you wanted to see bands play and hang out in cool bars with the other freaks, you did it downtown, in Manhattan,” he says.
Over the years, Leibowitz’s career took him to Boston, London, and San Francisco, but he would return to New York every year to hear the latest cutting-edge acts at the CMJ music festival. “I remember the year when I thought, ‘Wait. I saw more shows in Brooklyn than I saw in Manhattan.’ That was 2005. Now, 13 years later, the shift has continued. I now see 80 percent of my shows in Brooklyn.”
But that change carries a price. Historically, Brooklyn has been a place of ethnic enclaves, communities living side by side who, over the years, learned to deal with each other. “The people I know who are from here are much more inclusive than [those in] most other places,” says Leibowitz. “Everybody is just everybody. It doesn’t matter what race or religion anyone is. We’re all getting along. We’ve been getting along since kindergarten. We never thought about it.”
As people move across the bridge from Manhattan, rents and property values rise in Brooklyn. Some people are finding themselves priced out of neighborhoods where their families have lived for generations. Williamsburg, a magnet for the last decade’s gentrification movement, was once occupied predominantly by immigrants, like Leibowitz’s grandparents, who came to America from Romania. “They had no money and two kids,” he says, “so they lived in a tiny apartment in North Williamsburg.”
Now, the location where they lived is one of the most expensive ZIP codes in the country. “I know people who moved from North Williamsburg to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, because it was cheaper,” says Leibowitz “It’s beyond comprehension for someone with a 40-year perspective of New York.”
Art Decade
In a city famous for its arts, the Brooklyn Museum has long been overshadowed by Manhattan institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. After years of struggling, the 560,000-square-foot museum saw a major influx of money that coincided with the early-twenty-first-century Brooklyn renaissance.
Public art pieces such as this color the streets of Brooklyn, a place known for its arts and creative inhabitants who’ve relocated from all over the world.
The Brooklyn Museum scored a major coup last year when it landed the blockbuster “David Bowie Is …” exhibit. That Bowie, a 20-year resident of Manhattan, had his tribute staged in Brooklyn is yet another indicator of the rapidly shifting culture of New York.
This year, the museum looks to repeat that level of success with “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving.” The largest exhibit of the Mexican painter and cultural icon’s work in more than a decade, it will include never-before-seen items from her private collection, such as the artist’s clothing and personal memorabilia, pre-Colonial jewelry, and even hand-painted corsets.
The Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection comprises more than 1.5 million pieces, including a huge section of Egyptian antiquities and works by Norman Rockwell, Edward Hopper, and Winslow Homer. One of its most profoundly moving galleries is the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, which opened on the fourth floor in 2007. The centerpiece of this huge gallery of artwork by women is The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. The 1979 work is an installation consisting of a huge, three-sided table with 39 elaborately crafted place settings, each with a card identifying a woman who left her mark on world history, beginning with the Greek primordial goddess Gaia and extending all the way to Georgia O’Keeffe, whose art also appears in the museum’s collection. The piece, set in its own specially designed gallery, is both homey and monumental. The question that hangs over the space is, if those chairs were occupied, what would the dinner conversation be like?
Feeding the World
Brooklyn’s unique ethnic diversity means there’s an incredible variety of restaurants to choose from. The borough has long been a center of Jewish culture in America, and you can get a taste of Israeli cuisine at Miriam on 5th Avenue. The hummus, made with green tahini, is, of course, amazing. but you should branch out on the menu with the slow-cooked vegetarian couscous or the lamb scharwarma. Miriam is also one of Brooklyn’s favorite brunch spots, with breakfast-y food like shakshuka — poached eggs in tomato-pepper sauce — served until 4 p.m.
Trays of breakfast pastries tempt patrons at La Bagel Delight.
Nowhere in the world will you find a better bagel than in Brooklyn. There’s something unique about the chewy yet crispy bread you get in the New York area that you simply won’t find replicated. There are plenty of places you can find fine examples of bagels, but the best advice is not to try anything too fancy. Just pick a little shop like La Bagel Delight on Fulton and trust them to get the basics right.
For many years, Brooklyn cuisine was synonymous with the working-class diner. The New Apollo Diner on Livingston has superlative versions of all varieties of New York comfort food represented on their voluminous menu. I had my first real pastrami on rye sandwich at the New Apollo, and it lived up to the hype.
The humble pastrami on rye sandwich is elevated to a work of art at the New Apollo Diner.
Located in Fort Greene, just across Fulton from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is Boqueria Spanish Tapas. The opening attraction on the small plates menu is the curated selection of charcuterie. Spanish Jamon ham, sliced thin enough to see through, and sausages made from acorn-fed pork will spoil you. But fear not, non-carnivores. There’s an extensive and tasty vegetarian selection in the tapas column, such as the crispy patatas brava and the fire-roasted eggplant escalivada.
But perhaps the best cuisine discoveries in Brooklyn are the ones you find by accident. Searching for a place to meet a Memphis expat, we stumbled upon the Hare Krishna Center on Schermerhorn Street, which hosts a lunch buffet of healthy vegetarian food in its basement. For just a few dollars, you can enjoy some of the best Indian food you’ve ever put in your mouth, in a modest, friendly space insulated from bustling Brooklyn just outside the door.
Creative Class
New York’s cosmopolitan reputation has always attracted artists from all over the world, people who want to be in the thick of things. In the twenty-first century, that has meant moving to Brooklyn. Many Memphis artists have made the move, including actor Kim Howard, who cut her teeth in the Bluff City’s theater and indie film scene before absconding to the Big Apple in 2012. “I felt like being in Memphis I had reached a wall in personal growth and development,” she says. “I was hoping to find that in New York, and I guess I have, to some extent. There are definitely more opportunities here — jobs that just don’t exist in Memphis and Nashville.”
She says the hardest thing to get used to was “wet socks.” Coming from the automotive-obsessed South, getting around by a combination of subways and walking can be quite a culture shock.
But for an actor, this is the place to be. “I think theater is probably the most special thing about New York,” she says. “There are great live experiences that just can’t be had elsewhere.”
Photographer Tommy Kha grew up in Bartlett and graduated from Memphis College of Art. After receiving his master’s degree from Yale, he couldn’t wait to move to Brooklyn. “There are so many things that overstimulate me,” he says, “I really love being here. I can do things all night, and then wake up in the morning and do it all over again.”
Kha says making it in New York means being a member of the “hyphen generation. I ended up in that state, being an artist, a photographer, a studio assistant, a teacher, writing a comic book, doing some acting, making a short film, and drinking coffee on the side like it’s my job. Balancing that is hard to do. … When’s your day off? You don’t ask an artist that. I don’t have one. My day off is when I’m dead.”
Aaron Hillis moved to Brooklyn in 2001 to find work as an illustrator. After 9/11, he found a place at a video store. “That led to a 15-year career in film journalism,” he says. “One opportunity led to another, because New York is just like that.”
He’s had a front-row seat to Brooklyn’s evolution. “It’s changed for better and worse. It’s still an inspiring, influential place, where there are a lot of opportunities for someone who works in a creative industry. But it’s tough. It’s always been tough. I often say I live in the greatest city in the world, and it’s killing me slowly.”
Recently, Hillis moved into his fifth apartment in 15 years. “I keep getting pushed out as gentrification rears its ugly, amenity-filled head.”
A path winds through Prospect Park. The 526-acre green space, which features a zoo and lake, draws some 8 million visitors a year.
His new place is in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Bed-Stuy was largely an African-American neighborhood forever, and it still is,” he says. “I’m a minority there. But regardless of the color of people’s skin, it feels like an actual neighborhood. It’s the Sesame Street idea of Brooklyn. There are rich people and poor people and families and students and artists. It’s a wider swath of differences. People are friendlier in Bed-Stuy. … But having said that, I live in Bed-Stuy and and I’m white. I’m part of the wave of poor creatives who come in [to a place] before it’s cool. Then stockbrokers come in and drive families out. It’s complicated.”
Learning from Brooklyn
What lessons can a Memphis on the rise take from Brooklyn? One answer is located in a decommissioned subway station on Schemerhorn Street. The New York Transit Museum emphasizes that the story of Brooklyn has always been dictated by transportation. In 1642, a man named Cornelius Dircksen started taking people across the Hudson River in a canoe. The business proved to be so lucrative, he soon owned three canoes.
Brooklyn is Brooklyn because its people planned for a future that included everyone, and when that starts to falter, it’s often because of plans by the privileged for the few.
Brooklyn grew outward from the ferry dock on Fulton Street. By the early 1800s, horse-drawn omnibuses were the preferred means of intra-city transit, and the Nassau, a steam-powered ferry, revolutionized the river crossing. Trolleys were introduced soon afterwards, and grew so popular that residents of Brooklyn would come to be called “trolley dodgers.” In 1884, the nickname was applied to the city’s all-star baseball team, the Dodgers. By that time, elevated railways were moving people rapidly across the bridge and throughout the town. Then, taking a cue from London, the city embarked on a grand project of building an underground rail system. The subway would become the arteries of New York, with neighborhoods living or dying based on their proximity to a station.
The collection of elevated railway coaches and subway cars parked in a converted station is the Transit Museum’s most fascinating exhibit. It’s easy to put yourself in the shoes of someone who lived a century earlier when you’re hanging onto the same strap he or she gripped on their trip home from work. When you’re walking on the teeming streets above, the city feels like a natural phenomenon. But it was designed and built by people, and runs on an invisible infrastructure that seems like a miracle when it runs smoothly and like a curse when it doesn’t.
Brooklyn is Brooklyn because its people planned for a future that included everyone, and when that starts to falter, it’s often because of plans by the privileged for the few. That’s the lesson a changing Memphis needs to learn before it’s too late.
