The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York

The gentrification of Brooklyn has been one of the most striking developments in recent urban history. Once considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slum districts in the 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become home to new and expensive enclaves with hip bars, used bookstores, yoga studios, renovated townhouses, and invented "historic" names like Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens.

In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman examines the history of this unexpected transformation. While both proponents and critics of gentrification often point to the 1990s as the start of New York City's renaissance, Osman locates the roots of Brooklyn's revival much earlier in the social movements of the 1960 and 1970s. Rather than a scheme of downtown developers and bankers, gentrification in Brooklyn began as a grassroots movement led by young and idealistic white college graduates searching for "authenticity." With ties to the New Left, the counterculture and the environmentalist movement, brownstone gentrification was rooted initially in a new type of middle-class romantic urbanism. Where postwar city leaders championed new highways and modern public housing, "brownstoners" (as they called themselves) championed a new urban ideal that celebrated historic architecture, traditional neighborhoods, ethnic heritage, and local folk culture. Lodged between the institutional space of Manhattan and the "wilderness" of the ghetto, Brooklyn's nineteenth-century townhouses represented a "middle cityscape" that offered an imagined refuge from an increasingly technocratic society. By the 1970s, a new "neighborhood movement" spearheaded by middle-class activists began to reshape city politics. As brownstoners migrated into areas with poorer residents, however, race and class tensions soon emerged. By the 1980s, as developers built postmodern skyscrapers draped in faux historic imagery, newspapers parodied yuppies, and anti-gentrification activists marched through unaffordable neighborhoods, brownstoners debated whether their search for authenticity had been a success or failure.

Osman offers a new perspective on the postwar American city, challenging the prevailing story of urban decline and showing how neighborhoods from Brooklyn to Georgetown, Haight-Ashbury to the Back Bay, were revitalized by new residents.

Suleiman Osman is Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. He grew up in Brooklyn's Park Slope and now lives in Washington, D.C.