Brooklyn, Eternal

Author's note: this essay was originally published in Foothills Magazine

“They held a concert out in Brooklyn/To watch the Island bridges blow/They turned our power down/And drove us underground/But we went right on with the show” —Billy Joel, "Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out on Broadway)"

I like to think, at times, that I possess some small claim to have seen the very last days of Brooklyn gentrification. There was still the occasional marker, when I was a young child there in the 2000s, of the “bad old days” of the 1970s—the time of recession and white flight and urban crime that adults seemed to speak of with an odd mixture of utter terror and nostalgic reverence. I find it truly remarkable now, looking back on my memories, that now-safe parts of Brooklyn were rough around the edges back then. Even some of today’s fanciest neighborhoods were once decidedly normal-feeling places—places where one got the sense of regular people living their lives, and where one did not feel out of place or unworthy for not having come from money.

But I often feel that I truly saw nothing, that I have truly seen nothing. The party must

have ended before I got there. The changes wrought on Brooklyn before I was born were simply unfathomable to anyone who did not live through them, and were perhaps unfathomable even to those who saw every moment.

Jonathan Lethem’s book Brooklyn Crime Novel, published in 2023, directly fictionalizes

his childhood in the ’70s and ’80s, when Brooklyn was at the beginning of its gentrification. The model for this change, and even the neighborhood he grew up in, was simply invented out of thin air by these gentrifiers—the “brownstoners,” as they named themselves, after their pension for fixing up the dilapidated brownstone row houses. The one block that the novel focuses on is a “False Oasis” of relative racial harmony, integration, and safety. Beyond those borders is “The Dance,” a landscape of everyday petty crimes and racial tension that every child of the area learns to unwillingly take part in, as victims or otherwise. This world of children enacting, as Lethem says, their “legendarily unsupervised ’70s childhoods in the legendarily dangerous and unpatrolled city,” may as well be post-apocalyptic compared to the Brooklyn of my childhood, with safe enough neighborhoods and after-school programs, than a fictionalization of a world that existed in Lethem’s time.

Brooklyn is maybe the only place in the world that I feel I know deeply. That borough is

a world unto itself. Despite how utterly strange and different the world of Brooklyn Crime Novel is compared to my childhood days there, so much of the book still feels recognizable to me. “They are from Idaho, Manhattan, Pittsburgh, France. Anywhere but Brooklyn,” the novel says of the brownstoner parents—parents just like mine and those of my friends, who were not from Brooklyn and had no connection to it before moving there, and who very expressly chose Brooklyn as the place to raise their children. Am I myself then, in some way, a direct descendent of the kids of Brooklyn Crime Novel? Had their brownstoner parents not undertaken the project of grand gentrification, of painstakingly building up Brooklyn into the ideal city to raise a family, it seems unlikely that my parents would have ever lived there, or that I would ever have been born a stone’s throw away from the last dying gasps of Brooklyn’s industrial working waterfront. In this way, Lethem’s era is not totally lost; the brownstoners started their mission and it could not be undone, leading to a wholly different time that my own body inhabited in the same way their children’s bodies did.

Before Whole Foods—that classic symbol of excess wealth—built their first location in

Brooklyn, the site it sits on was a burned-out warehouse building in an overgrown lot on the side of a famously-polluted canal. And yet, for how honorably I can claim to have really witnessed the sign of the old times that the store replaced, I cannot recall ever considering it when going there for groceries in the years since. A seemingly dramatic change, and yet, strangely, I don’t seem to have much stake in bothering to remember it. Brooklyn Crime Novel’s second vignette says that it is a story “set in a place nobody doesn’t think they know. Yet nobody knows anything about this place, and they never did…Still, not many can be bothered to know.” Fair enough, I suppose. Changes like that tend to be lost to time, or unintentionally forgotten in the blur of everyday life. If everyone, even those who very clearly saw the past, seems to forget what once was and can’t particularly be bothered to remember it again, then I suppose there is nothing, or no one, to compare the present to the past. Everything, instead, stands eternal; a change that no one remembers might not even be a change at all.

What I was left with from Lethem’s book more than anything is the idea that for all the

differences of my childhood and those of the novel’s characters—which are really the differences between my childhood and Lethem’s—Brooklyn itself is still one and the same. Brooklyn Crime Novel is a fiction of a real place, of real people who existed in Lethem’s time and continue to exist into my time, of real changes that made a place into how I experienced it as a child; I would venture to say that there were far more similarities than differences between Lethem’s and my childhoods. And that, I believe, is why Brooklyn Crime Novel is a book that has been so hard for me to grasp, and one that I have felt so deeply in my soul.

Despite any very real differences, my childhood was Lethem’s childhood. This isn’t

because of any stolen valor on my part, of my pretending to have seen more than I saw, but

because at its core Brooklyn Crime Novel is Brooklyn. It is most certainly the Brooklyn of past

days, but it is also the Brooklyn of the present and future, because everyone who has lived in the city has seen their version of Brooklyn, and everyone in the future will, too; the paradox is that a city constantly in flux is rendered no different in how we truly see it—changes that we think would leave the world unrecognizable become part of the everyday. Those older than I can claim to have seen the last days of Brooklyn gentrification, just as those younger than I can, because the secret to the paradox is that there are no last days. Changes are wrought, undoubtedly, and yet we rarely consider them day-to-day; our lived reality, how we really experience the world, stays the same. Life goes on, the world changes, and Brooklyn stands eternal.

d a concert out in Brooklyn/To watch the Island bridges blow/They turned

our power downThey held a concert out in Brooklyn/To watch the Island bridges blow/They turned

our power down/And drove us underground/But we went right on with the show”

—

 Billy Joel, Miami 2017 (“Seen The

 Lights Go Out

 on Broadway”)

38/And drove us underground/But we went right on with the show”

—

 Billy Joel, Miami 2017 (“Seen The

 Lights Go Out

 on Broadway”)

3