Download The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York AudioBook Free
The gentrification of Brooklyn has been one of the most striking developments in recent urban record. Considered one of the city's most notorious commercial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial surroundings of hip bars, pilates studios, and magnificently renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Technology of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking record of this sudden transformation. Challenging the conventional wisdom that NY City's renaissance were only available in the 1990s, Osman locates the roots of gentrification in Brooklyn in the ethnical upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Gentrification started out as a grassroots movement led by young and idealistic white college graduates looking for "authenticity" and life outside the burgeoning suburbs. Where postwar city market leaders championed slum clearance and modern structures, "brownstoners" (as they called themselves) fought for a fresh romantic urban ideal that celebrated historic buildings, commercial lofts and traditional cultural neighborhoods as a refuge from an increasingly technocratic society. Osman examines the introduction of the "slow-growth" intensifying coalition as brownstoners signed up with with poorer residents to battle city planners and local machine politicians. But as brownstoners migrated into poorer areas, competition and class tensions surfaced, and by the 1980s, as newspapers parodied yuppies and anti-gentrification activists marched through ever more expensive neighborhoods, brownstoners debated whether their search for authenticity had been a success or failure. The Technology of Brownstone Brooklyn deftly mixes architectural, ethnical and political record in this eye-opening perspective on the post-industrial city.
