I recently took another New York City neighborhood trip with my friend by car—this time to South Brooklyn. We decided at first to travel to isolated Red Hook peninsula (no subway stops there and it is cut off from the rest of Brooklyn by an elevated highway)—a waterfront neighborhood located on the edge of New York Harbor offering striking views of the Statue of Liberty and the ocean. Red Hook, which had retained its working-class, waterfront ambiance for decades, has only in the last 25 years or so begun to feel the effects of gentrification.
For years it was dominated by the mostly six-story Red Hook Houses that were built in 1939. The buildings consisted of two connected public-housing complexes comprising the largest housing development in Brooklyn, inhabited by 6,000 people—primarily Black and Hispanic. The stores surrounding the development today are shabby—bodegas and fried chicken chains—and one can feel how limited the shopping options and economic opportunities are for the project’s residents. There are also Pentecostal churches, and there are more than a few grungy, dilapidated private homes still scattered through the neighborhood.
But Red Hook is also undergoing a slow transformation with some of its historic warehouse buildings turned into shopping centers, art galleries and studios, and upscale bars. There are also private homes that have been completely remodeled, other homes with murals painted on their fronts, and small luxury apartment houses.
Nothing overwhelming—no towers to blot out the sky or luxury chain stores. And around the waterfront, there is a series of dead-end streets lined with razor wire and trash-strewn cobblestones that seem derelict but offer something unique. Red Hook also has many empty lots, and a multi-million-dollar project to redevelop the Brooklyn Marine Terminal is being built. The city plans to transform the 122-acre terminal into a modern maritime port and mixed-use development.
Red Hook is in a flood zone and was badly flooded during Hurricane Sandy, so it is vulnerable to natural disasters. But one sees how artists would be attracted to its human scale and idiosyncratic qualities—its intense mix of the industrial and residential.
We travel from Red Hook to Carroll Gardens, which was once part of the same neighborhood but became a separate section when the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was completed in 1960. The name reflects the large front gardens of brownstones in the Carroll Gardens Historic District and elsewhere in the neighborhood. The neighborhood was largely Italian, but by the 1960s, young, white, middle-class professionals began to move in. There are subways that connect one to Manhattan—making living there convenient. And though there are still Italian bakeries, specialty food shops and restaurants, and American flags hanging from some of the houses, it is no longer an Italian enclave. Carroll Gardens has a much more established and intact neighborhood feeling (also more affluent) than Red Hook—people strolling; a variety of small, vital shops; and many stately brownstones and town houses. The last leg of our trip is driving along Smith Street from Carroll Gardens to Boerum Hill and ending close to the historical core of Brooklyn. Smith Street boasts an eclectic mix of hip bars, restaurants, and boutiques, along with some remnants of the pre-gentrification, working-class neighborhoods that would become what Carroll Gardens and Boerum Hill are today.
A lot of the buildings on Smith Street are mixed use, with shops on the ground floor and living space above. The side streets often contain brownstones and town houses that house upper-middle-class Brooklyn. After more than two hours of exploring, my energy begins to wane; however, the trip makes me feel that I am engaging in life—attempting to observe as closely as possible the varied character of Brooklyn neighborhoods—and that I have not just retreated to reading about the world’s horrors and passively watching anodyne television.
