Brooklyn to Brooklyn in Three Generations

The cycles of urban life never cease to surprise me. The Upper East Side of my childhood was a small provincial village, extending from 59th Street to 96th Street, from Fifth to Third Avenues.. Until the construction of Lincoln Center, I had never been to the West Side, where I have now lived for forty years. Until I went to college, I had never met anyone from Brooklyn, or Queens. My urban youth was not much different from that of any small town boy, except that I did not need a car to get around and there were more museums. My boarding school roommate came from Riverdale, in the Bronx; I remember my first time, in the late 60s, traveling with him by subway at night up to 242nd St. I was terrified.

At the same time, other children were growing up in other parts of the city. In Brooklyn and Queens, parents, many of them recent immigrants or the children of immigrants, were raising children who yearned to move to Manhattan, to “the city.” Not the small part of the city in which I lived, which had little to offer in terms of excitement, but the Village, the cafes, the music and culture which existed away from their ordinary environment. And many of these kids waited eagerly to be able to move into “the city,” like Tony Manero’s ideal girl Stephanie in Saturday Night Fever.

So the migration began. Young men and women of my generation went to college, got good jobs, and moved from Bay Ridge and Kew Gardens and the Grand Concourse, or from the New Jersey and Westchester suburbs, into Manhattan. They worked hard, and as they became more successful they bought homes on Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, in the Village and on Central Park West. Those neighborhoods, which during my childhood had been so self-referential, began to open up. The neighborhood crossover which has become a central fact of New York City life today began back then in the latter part of the 1970s, as the crime rate was rising throughout the city and people everywhere wanted to move into safer areas.

As crime began to recede, and Manhattan became more and more expensive, the children of those young people who had so eagerly moved to Manhattan a generation earlier began to look back at the boroughs outside Manhattan. Space was cheaper and there was terrific housing stock, and even Manhattan areas like SoHo and TriBeCa, which their parents had pioneered, had become expensive and bourgeois. The children of the Brooklyn emigres began to move back to Brooklyn, and then Queens. Townhouses were refurbished. Condos were built. Today the beautiful Deco apartment buildings of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx are being refurbished. Everything old is new again.

Variations on this theme are occurring in cities all across America. For many, the ravaged downtowns where crime engendered flight to the suburbs now revive through a combination of better urban planning and economic opportunity. Townhouses are being refurbished. Condos are being built. A friend told me this past week that artists, now priced out of Bushwick, are moving to Detroit.

The lives of cities ebbs and flows. As we become a more urbanized society, this trend towards reclaiming neighborhoods, even entire downtown areas, will only accelerate. The only constant in the evolution of New York, and all our American cities, is change.

 

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