The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

by Alan Ehrenhalt

  Art fairs in Bushwick are not events calculated to appeal to mainstream tastes. They look for all the world like celebrations designed to shock conservative sensibilities, except that there is scarcely anyone with such sensibilities around to be shocked. These are in reality projects through which a small coterie of local artists seek to display their sheer edginess to one another.

  There is no disputing that Bushwick has brought together a sizable community of people who consider themselves—and some who are considered by others—to be serious artists. But it is nothing like the SoHo of the 1970s or the Chelsea of the 1990s. There is little in the way of commercial art sales. Most of the studios are in lofts and living rooms; most of the public galleries are open only on weekends. Very few artists make significant money selling anything, conventional or unconventional, to the outside world. It is very much a self-contained community. Some of its residents occasionally describe one another as hipsters, invoking 1950s terminology that would no doubt please Norman Mailer were he around to hear them.

  Who are these pioneers of Bushwick? To all appearances and personal testimony, they are not all (or even mostly) artists, but twenty-first-century products of the hippest liberal arts colleges—Wesleyan and Vassar, Bard and Sarah Lawrence. They live doubled up in small lofts and crammed into larger ones that sleep as many as eight or nine people. Many of them carved out an alternative mode of life for themselves as undergraduates, and they are eager to find a place to re-create it in their postcollege years. They are aspiring filmmakers, video producers, and creators of fabricated music acts—for every actual art gallery in Bushwick, there seem to be several recording studios. The newcomers can live cheaply in Bushwick, at least in New York terms. Instead of paying hundreds of dollars more a square foot for a fashionable ersatz loft in Chelsea or on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, they can pay $500 a square foot in Bushwick for unretouched loft space in a genuine industrial building, often with the marks of its former existence in plain sight.

  In the mysterious way that such a process typically proceeds, the flourishing of the Bushwick art scene has brought in other urbanites in their twenties and thirties, some of whom hold down eminently conventional jobs in Manhattan, to come and live among them. In 2000, the white population of Bushwick was about 4 percent. In 2007, it was 9 percent—in demographic terms, still a drop in the bucket. The change occurred mostly in districts that were almost exclusively rental, rather than in the visually more attractive precincts where struggling minority home owners had more incentive to hang on. But in certain well-defined parts of the neighborhood, the signs of change were everywhere.

  In the northeast section of the community, close to the Queens border, the middle years of the past decade saw an increasing pace of condo development on land that once housed breweries and textile sweatshops. Some of it is brownfield land requiring extensive environmental remediation before it can be developed for residential use. But at least until the real estate recession hit in 2008, there was no shortage of developers and real estate agents willing to build and promote it. Sometimes they went to extra effort to make medium-rise condos that respected the neighborhood’s history, with metal paneling rather than glass for the exterior. “They didn’t want a glass tower in Bushwick,” one developer explained in 2009.

  Some of the developers are going further to appeal to upper-middle-class tastes. Across the street from the Jefferson stop on the L subway line, on a block where a trendy pub and a coffeehouse attract musicians, painters, writers, and dancers, a new residential project managed to lure a wine shop and an organic grocery. At Flushing and Knickerbocker avenues, in the old commercial heart of the neighborhood, another new development contains sixty rental apartments and space for twenty-one stores. Both these projects were leased, with relative success, in the still-recession-plagued early months of 2009.

  EVEN CONSIDERING all of this—the appeal to artists, the old industrial properties available for cheap residential use—it is hard to avoid a fundamental question: Why would people who have a choice want to move to Bushwick in the first place?

  Even with the arrival of some relatively affluent newcomers, it remains a very poor neighborhood. It has hundreds of apartment buildings in acute need of repair, some of them in blatant violation of city housing codes. Many of the apartment buildings are plagued by bedbugs, the result of the purchase of infested reconditioned mattresses. The asthma rate, due to the vestigial presence of the old industrial properties, is higher than in almost any other neighborhood in any of the five boroughs.

  Of course, not everyone lives this way, but anybody who moves to Bushwick faces an irony of local life: There are really two distinct parts of the neighborhood—the southern section centered on Broadway and Bushwick avenues, on the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the northern section, closest to Queens. The southern area actually has some attractive residential streets lined with trees and early twentieth-century brownstones, but it is also the more dangerous part of the community and the place where African American renters run the risk of having landlords raise their rents without warning, in the hope that they will move out and the unit can be rented to a white newcomer at a much higher price. The northern and eastern parts of Bushwick, along Myrtle and Wyckoff avenues and adjoining the Ridgewood section of Queens, are safer and confront relatively few displacement issues, because so much of the land was industrial rather than residential. But these streets are not pretty places to live. There are long, dreary blocks lined with abandoned textile factories and large strips of vacant land. One can buy or rent a townhouse on, say, Jefferson Street, restore it with painstaking care, and still have to look across the street at a long row of old storage sheds crammed with used mattresses, refrigerators, and air conditioners.

  Even some of those who have been part of Bushwick’s revival in recent years seem to wonder why the whole phenomenon has taken place. “I think it’s bizarre that there are people who think we move here because Bushwick is wonderful,” the writer and activist Jeremy Sapienza declared in 2008. “No. We move here because it’s CHEAP. Why is it cheap? Because it’s dirty, it’s (comparatively) crime-ridden, it’s run-down. Bushwick is manifestly NOT wonderful.”

  BUSHWICK WAS NEVER what many people would call “wonderful,” but for a century it was a comfortably safe working-class neighborhood where first German and then Italian immigrants raised families, and where many organized their social lives around St. Barbara’s Church, a massive and spectacular baroque edifice that still towers over the neighborhood. The German immigrants came to Bushwick in large part because of its breweries—at one point, there were 121 of them in the community and Bushwick was known as the “beer capital” of the northeast. The largest of them, the Rheingold Brewery, occupied 6.7 acres and produced more than a third of all the beer consumed in New York State. The owners built mansions on Bushwick Avenue, which was known as “Brewers’ Row.”

  Mae West and Jackie Gleason grew up on the Bushwick streets; Gleason used the address of his birthplace, 364 Chauncey Street, as the location of the apartment Ralph and Alice Kramden occupied in the Honeymooners television series, and the drab interiors portrayed on the show were designed to resemble the places where Gleason lived as a child.

  Bushwick remained a stable neighborhood for more than a decade after nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville deteriorated. But most of the breweries closed in the 1950s and 1960s, and by 1970, Bushwick was as badly decayed as any neighborhood in New York. The New York Times reported that “in a five-year period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bushwick was transformed from a neatly maintained community of wood houses into what often approached a no-man’s-land of abandoned buildings, empty lots, drugs, and arson.” Between 1969 and 1977, one out of every eight buildings in the neighborhood was damaged or destroyed by fire. Not all the fires were intentional, but many of them were made worse by the fact that the narrow wooden houses were built with “cocklofts,” or half attics, that joined one dwelling to the next and hasten
ed the spread of flames.

  But the worst was to come. On July 13, 1977, Bushwick suffered through the most disastrous episode in its entire history: the looting and arson that followed the legendary citywide power blackout. These crimes occurred in many parts of New York, but the devastation in Bushwick was by far the worst. By the time it ended, 134 stores had been looted and 44 buildings had been set on fire.

  In the aftermath of the blackout rampage, the half-empty streets of Bushwick became more crime- and drug-ridden than before. Knickerbocker Avenue, so recently a thriving commercial thoroughfare, degenerated into an open-air drug-dealing mall known as “the Well” and tightly controlled by the ruthless and widely despised crime boss Carmine Galante, who was finally gunned down while having lunch on the patio of Joe and Mary’s Restaurant at 205 Knickerbocker in 1979.

  Nothing much improved in the 1980s. The crack epidemic led to a still higher surge of violent crime, with seventy-seven murders in the neighborhood in 1990 alone. Bushwick differed from the South Bronx only in its failure to achieve national notoriety, and in its relative obscurity even to the residents of the other boroughs of New York City. Hardly anyone set foot in Bushwick who didn’t have to.

  The following decade brought a few signs of hope. Vito Lopez, who was elected to the state assembly in 1984 and rose to become chairman of its housing committee, turned out to be a prodigy when it came to prying loose state money for low- and moderate-income housing, much of it promoted by Lopez’s political power base, the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, and the semiprivate New York Housing Partnership Development Corporation. The huge Rheingold Brewery site, once considered too badly contaminated for residential reuse, was cleared for a construction project that eventually yielded nearly three hundred homes, condominiums, low-income rental apartments, a day-care center, and a community center.

  What these efforts proved, however, is that it is possible to construct large numbers of affordable housing units in a neighborhood, even attractive and comfortable ones, and still not substantially improve the area’s economic fortunes. As the new century began, Bushwick was still pockmarked by whole swaths of vacant land and abandoned industrial buildings. Some 34 percent of its residents were living below the poverty line. The median household income was $31,531, near the bottom among all of the city’s neighborhoods. As late as 1998, only two permits were issued for new private residential construction in the entire community.

  And then, in a very short space of time, Bushwick began to change. The artists and self-styled artists started reclaiming the industrial lofts. Amid the housing bubble of the new decade, condo buildings began to rise. By 2003, the number of new private building permits had grown from 2 to 173. The population began to grow as well, from just over 100,000 in the first year of the decade to about 130,000 eight years later.

  Why did all this happen? There is no simple explanation. The community was far safer in 2005 than it had been a decade earlier, but there were large portions of it—there still are—where young single women have reason to be nervous walking alone at night. Much of black and Latino Bushwick was actively hostile to gentrification and organized to fight it, unlike the underclass in Chicago’s Sheffield that simply left when the rents went up. In 2006, antigentrification protesters staged a march in the southern part of Bushwick, with protesters shouting, “Fight, fight, fight, housing is a right,” and one of the protest leaders urging white newcomers to “build this in your own neighborhood. Don’t build it here.”

  In the northern part of the community, where safety was less of a concern, there was the undeniable fact that the newcomers were moving to a physically unappealing place, where any new resident, however well-appointed his condominium or apartment, still had to contend with abandoned factories, barbed wire, and vacant lots.

  There is, alternatively, the simple argument from economics. Housing prices had risen astronomically in Manhattan in the 1990s, and by 2000 they were rising rapidly as well in Williamsburg, the part of Brooklyn just across the river from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Bushwick was right next to Williamsburg, and livable apartments were available there at barely half the Williamsburg cost. A fair portion of the newcomers to Bushwick came directly from Williamsburg, where they found themselves priced out of the housing market or felt the neighborhood’s amenities were becoming too costly for their tastes. “People move here because somewhere else is more expensive,” Bushwick tenant activist Angel Vera said in 2005. “That’s the system.”

  No doubt there is some truth to this. But it doesn’t entirely explain Bushwick, either. There were at least a dozen Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods that were about as cheap as Bushwick in the early 2000s, were considerably safer, and didn’t have Bushwick’s abysmal reputation. Some of these places did prove moderately attractive to the white middle class, but more of them, such as Sunset Park in Brooklyn and Astoria in Queens, did better at attracting the latest generation of immigrants from around the world.

  The missing pieces of the puzzle have to do mostly with time and transportation. Neighboring Williamsburg has always been directly across the river from Manhattan, but it was not until the 1990s that many people seemed to appreciate that they could get from Union Square in the heart of lower Manhattan to Bedford Station in Williamsburg on the L line in five minutes. Or, more important, that they could get there in five minutes without having to worry about being mugged. The decline in New York’s crime rate has had many consequences, but one of the most important of them has been the safety of the trains and the willingness of middle-class people to ride them to work in the daytime and to restaurants at night. Once it became widely known that the L line was safe, the renovation of Williamsburg was all but assured.

  Bushwick has more problems than Williamsburg, but it is right next door, and a fifteen-minute subway ride from Union Square is only a little less convenient than a five- or seven-minute ride. Once it became safe to travel to Bushwick, the short ride was a powerful temptation to young people who worked in Manhattan. Between 2003 and 2007, the New York Transit Authority spent $50 million to build a shiny new subway station at Myrtle and Wyckoff avenues in western Bushwick that is one of the showpieces of the entire transit system. Bushwick may not be a pretty place—it will not be one anytime soon—but it is possible to get there quickly and safely. That matters a lot to young people who work in Manhattan and consider their free time a commodity at least as important as money.

  “The train is the entire reason this is happening,” says loft entrepreneur Kevin Lindamood, echoing the flat pronouncement of real estate agent Ted McLaughlin that “these days, convenience trumps aesthetics.” Deborah Brown, from her studio on Jefferson Street, puts it a little more colorfully. “I’m fine,” she says, “with having no view, barbed wire across the street, and the subway right next to me.” Which is exactly what she has.

  In every community in America, residents talk about what the place will be like ten or fifteen years hence. But in Bushwick, this sometimes seems to be almost the only issue. There are those who believe that by 2020 Bushwick will be another Williamsburg, chic, middle-class, and only slightly edgy, and that this will be a good thing for the city. There are those who believe that this will indeed happen, but that it will result in the cruel displacement of the Hispanic and African American majority that has resided there for a generation. And there are those, like the policeman who wrote in a neighborhood blog, warning Bushwick that “its fifteen minutes of fame can disappear and disinvestment will leave it just another high-poverty neighborhood.”

  And there are those somewhere in the middle, including most of the local political establishment, who believe that Bushwick is destined in the coming years to become more white and less poor, but that in the process it will retain its current edgy quality, making it very different from Williamsburg or lower Manhattan. It will remain a more ethnically diverse place, for one thing. The dominant minority population in much of the neighborhood will not be disappearing anytime soon. �
��Gentrification can’t be prevented,” said Vito Lopez, the state assemblyman and the area’s most powerful political figure. “So the question is: How much can you control it?”

  IT’S TEMPTING to wonder what Jane Jacobs would think of present-day Bushwick if she were alive and meandering down its streets. More than likely, she would render a mixed verdict. In the southern half of the neighborhood, she would find the vitality she looked for, with adults socializing on the corners, mom-and-pop groceries and bodegas seemingly everywhere, and children playing unsupervised in the streets. But she would also find little of the diversity she favored; indeed, she would encounter an outright scorn for diversity, if that means a large influx of white middle-class residents and rising rents that threaten the poorer people residing there. In the northern half, she would see the creativity and the diverse mix of interesting young people she felt a neighborhood needs, but she would find the physical environment depressing: long, uninterrupted blocks lined with drab industrial buildings and very little street life of any kind at most hours of the day. Probably she would shrug and say that one can’t expect miracles. Bushwick would never come to resemble the Greenwich Village of the 1950s that she considered a model of successful urban life.