Gentrification in Brooklyn

– Where The Borough Is Headed Exemplified Through A Close Reading of

Paul Auster’s Sunset Park

By Julia Alexandra Schmedes, BA Degree Program: MA Advanced Anglophone Studies Student Number: 2625930 Email: j.schmedes@gmx.net Course: ‘Gentrification’ in historisch-politischer Perspektive Instructor: Prof. Dr. Michele Barricelli

Table of Contents

1. Introduction...............................................................................................................................................3

2. Definitions and Theories.........................................................................................................................4

3. Gentrification in Brooklyn......................................................................................................................6

3.1 Park Slope and Williamsburg..................................................................................................9

3.2 Sunset Park..............................................................................................................................12

4. Paul Auster’s Novel Sunset Park...........................................................................................................15

5. Conclusion..............................................................................................................................................20

Works Cited............................................................................................................................................23

Appendix.................................................................................................................................................26

Declaration..............................................................................................................................................27

Schmedes • 3

1. Introduction

Lately, the phrase ‘gentrification in Brooklyn’ pops up not only in academic literature

specifically concerned with the topic, but also in popular culture. The premium cable channel

HBO started broadcasting Girls in 2012, a show centered around those people who, a few years

back, would never have walked the streets of Williamsburg, and showcases the life of four young

women amidst the new hustle and bustle of parties in trendy lofts, coffees to-go bought in hip

cafés, and whichever newly-fangled cupcake the hipsters of Brooklyn are currently into. Two

years before Girls, renowned Brooklyn author Paul Auster published his novel Sunset Park, a book

partly concerned with the crisis of real estate in Brooklyn’s one of Brooklyn’s southern

neighborhoods.

Although New York City has been discussed in gentrification literature for a while, it is

mostly focused on Manhattan neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side, the Meatpacking

District, and Greenwich Village. The Brooklyn neighborhood Park Slope and the process of

‘brownstoning’ are newer objects in scholars’ foci.

This academic paper will be concerned with this phenomenon of gentrification, and will

put special focus on the first gentrified area of Brooklyn, Park Slope, and then go on by looking

at recent developments in Sunset Park, an area which stretches along the New York Harbor

between Greenwood Heights to the North, and Bay Ridge to the South. It will then examine the

traces of gentrification in Auster’s book, and will, with the help of academic literature, propose a

hypothesis for the fate of the borough of Brooklyn as a whole, while also taking into account a

neighborhood currently being gentrified: Sunset Park.

Literature on this topic is somewhat scarce, especially that concerned with Sunset Park.

Therefore, I will draw conclusions from unreliable sources such as Internet blogs by current

inhabitants of these parts of New York City. A lot of my literature stems from the Internet, and

especially from Brooklyn-based online blogs, newspapers, and journals. Using this kind of

material enables me to really do my research at the core of the events unfolding, rather than just

relying on published books. Though my theoretical approach is grounded on such published

sources, I feel that, when dealing with a current phenomenon, new media such as the Internet

offers a wider range of opinions, which do not necessarily have to be academic; they only have to

be read and treated appropriately. As this is a paper for History and not for Literary Studies, I will

allow myself to fall prey to the intentional fallacy, and even consider what the author has to say

about his book Sunset Park and about the current situation the neighborhood is in.

Schmedes • 4

2. Definitions and Theories

In order to speak about gentrification adequately, one first has to define the term. This, I

will do with the help of scholars Suleiman Osman, Robert A Beauregard, Sharon Zukin, and

Ruth Glass.

Linguistically, the term consists of ‘gentr[y]’ and the suffix ‘-cation’, signifying a process,

something which does not happen over night but develops and evolves through the help of

different agents. ‘Gentry,’ the ruling class, denotes the involvement of a more affluent class,

possibly that of the middle class, in contrast to the working class. Indeed, Glass writes in her

1964 essay “London: Aspects of Change” that it is the middle-classes which have taken over the

“[s]habby, modest mews and cottages” to convert them into something “elegant and expensive”

(7). The definitions of the term given in The Dictionary of Human Geography varied throughout the

years. In 1994, it was “[a] process of neighborhood regeneration by relatively affluent incomers,

who displace lower-income groups” (quoted in Lees et. al. 3). A mere six years later, it is defined

as “the reinvestment of capital at the urban centre, which is designed to provide space for a more

affluent class” (4). Therefore, it becomes clear that the agents involved are not only the ‘gentry’

and the ‘poorer,’ but also that the economy and capitalism play a substantial role in the process.

Even New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg states in a speech incorporated in the 2012

documentary film My Brooklyn that “if you don’t like wealthy people or successful profit-making

businesses, then you’re not gonna [sic] have a city” (Anderson). This shows that the term, as

harmless as it comes across at first, is in fact heavily politically and ideologically encoded.

Beauregard writes that what we understand as gentrification “has been distorted” by the influence

of capitalist ideology (11). Such institutions as the afore-mentioned mayor, along with

newspapers, real-estate companies, fiscal institutions, or those who claim to preserve history by

preserving and renovating old houses, mostly consist of the more affluent middle-classes, and are

thus ideologically inclined to approve of gentrification (cf. Beauregard 11).

If the middle-classes are so prominent in the process of gentrification, how, then, do they

start it? According to the theories of gentrification, there are always the ‘pioneers,’ those people

who first start settling in a run-down, de-industrialized area. Those pioneers, mostly artists with

disposable money from their middle-class families, “are risking themselves and their savings to

turn a deteriorated and undesirable neighborhood into a place for “good living.”” (Beauregard

11). According to Beauregard, the “prototypical gentrifier is a single-person or two-person

household comprised of affluent professionals without children” (12). They want to live close to

their high-profile jobs in the city, and yet far enough away from it. This “good living”, in turn,

offers space and safety for young families who have disposable income as well, and who flock to

the new up-and-coming neighborhoods to raise their children. As they still want to enjoy the

commodities of city life, and are unable to find their artisanal cheeses in the mom-and-pop shops

Schmedes • 5

and neighborhood bodegas in their new neighborhood, a new industry caters to their every need.

The specialty shops displace the shops owned by families for generations. “These gentrifiers live

in historically preserved or “high tech” domestic environments which reflect their sense of

“taste”” (Beauregard 11), and their shops and other amenities are most often much more

expensive than the shops they ousted. Sharon Zukin asserts in her 2013 book Naked City that

[o]ne neighborhood after another had lost its small scale and local identity. People who had been in place for what seemed like forever – tenement dwellers, mom and pop store owners, whole populations of artists and workers and people of color – were suddenly gone. In their place we found gentrifiers, cocktail bars, Starbucks and H&M. (x)

I will work with different dimensions which have to be considered: the historical, the

cultural, the financial, the social, the ethnic, the political, the mythical, and the dimension of

education, terms which were the overlying analytical strategies in our seminar on gentrification.

All of the above are important factors when working with both current processes of change and

with humans, as the matter of home and belonging are highly inflected by the feelings of the

individuals. These factors will also be of special use when working with the novel, as the

constructed characters respond to the change around them emotionally. Because I will be

working with forum entries and blog posts, both documents written by ‘average’ people and not

necessarily academics researching the field of gentrification, these criteria will give me the

opportunity to examine the unmediated feelings of those directly affected by the process.

According to Zukin, key aspects when dealing with gentrification, especially in New

York’s case, are “upscale[ing], redevelop[ment], and homogeniz[ation]” (xi): all actions done not

by the gentrifiers themselves, but by those with money – the brokers, the financiers, the city

planners. After all, the process of gentrification is only set in motion by the pioneers; as soon as

more and more pioneers and then second generation gentrifiers move to the respective

neighborhoods, financial agents intervene to amass capital and in turn to obtain profit in form of

money or property. New living complexes are built, and the vicinity to the aforementioned

amenities like Starbucks and others allows landlords to ask for higher rents, which will then,

ultimately and percentage point by percentage point, displace the working class and often

immigrant dwellers, and make room for a more affluent audience.

New Historicism is a literary and cultural theory, which emerged in the U.S. in the early

1980s and is, in short, a theory which views historical reality as context. Its main representative is

Stephen Greenblatt, who also coined the term. According to New Historicist beliefs, everything

can be read as a text: novels, films, history, social and cultural norms, or basically any other

products of culture. Greenblatt calls for the transfer of "official documents, private papers [and]

newspaper clippings" from "one discursive sphere to another" (Greenblatt 157).

Schmedes • 6

Thus, in this paper, I will use this theory in order to fully integrate Auster's novel into its

historical frame, and treat both history and the cultural product equally. In my opinion, this

works especially well in a paper not designated for literary studies; it is very fruitful in this

particular case to work with interviews with Auster himself, something which has been frowned

upon in literary studies since Roland Barthes seminal essay "The Death of the Author" from

1967. Using utterances by the author himself makes a lot of sense in the case of gentrification, as

he writes what he observes not only in America as a whole, but also in Brooklyn itself, where he

has been living for decades. In a way, then, Auster himself can be regarded as part of the larger

phenomenon of gentrification, and this makes his work much more vulnerable and all the more

interesting in return.

3. Gentrification in Brooklyn

New York City’s borough Brooklyn saw an early rise in gentrification. In the following

chapter I will map this development and focus on the borough as a whole, before looking at a

few of its neighborhoods like Park Slope, Williamsburg, and, finally, Sunset Park.

Brooklyn used to be a mostly industrial borough, and, had been widely called the

“Borough of Churches”, due to its then mostly Catholic demographic consisting of immigrants

from Ireland, Italy, and Puerto Rico (Hymowitz). These immigrants, who came to America to

find new opportunities, hoped to find them in the United States’ foremost industrial city,

Brooklyn. When it was integrated into New York City in 1898, little changed for the borough and

its inhabitants, as even more manual laborers were needed to work in the many factories and on

the docks lining Brooklyn’s waterfront on the East River (Hymowitz). The borough offered a

large variety of different industries, like the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s

Navy Yard, several paint factories or metal shops near the Gowanus Canal, or the docks

(Hymowith).

Another area of Brooklyn, mostly consisting of Williamsburg, was mainly inhabited by

the Jewish community, immigrants from Eastern Europe, entertaining smaller businesses like

delis or Kosher butchers (Presser at. al. 268). The workers, unable to afford the rents in

Manhattan, and unwilling to travel from the city to what was essentially an industrial estate, lived

in tenement houses, row houses, or in brownstone townhouses where one family occupied a

room, each (Hymowitz). Naturally, though predominantly working-class, Brooklyn was not

exclusively so. Wealthy lawyers and doctors lived in areas like Prospect Park, and the factory and

industry owners employing the laborers afore-mentioned needed a convenient place to live, too.

Their dwellings could mostly be found in the outskirts of Bushwick and Williamsburg, not far

from their place of work (Hymowitz).

Schmedes • 7

What is more, as of the 1930s, housing projects were being built in the borough, then

mostly for the dockworkers and their families. By the 1960s, though, these were largely populated

by African-Americans from the nation’s South, and by immigrating Puerto Ricans that were

dependent on welfare (Hymowitz).

In the middle of all this, in the 1950s, a new surge of people wanted to live in the

borough, someone who author Hymowitz describes as “an educated person with a little more

money and a lot more ‘culture’”. These more cultured people were artists and bohemians, writers

and designers, who were either unwilling to pay the continuously more gentrified prices in

Greenwich Village and Soho in Manhattan, and who wanted a change of scenery, and to be the

pioneers of a new, avant-garde scene (Hymowith). Among these were notables like Norman

Mailer and Truman Capote, who took up residence in Brooklyn Heights, with a perfect view of

lower Manhattan, and only a quick ferry ride or walk across the Brooklyn Bridge away from all

the action of the bustling city (Presser at. al. 271). These bohemians were joined by what is

mostly described as “upwardly mobile professionals” (Hymowitz): people who had enough

money to buy and upscale houses, and wanted to be en-vogue.

Hymowith herself has several hypotheses for their moving to Brooklyn:

Perhaps the Kennedy-era European sophistication led them to scorn the purportedly tacky conformity of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd and to grimace at the sterile white-brick apartment buildings rising in Manhattan to house their kind. Unlike their immigrant parents, who associated city life with poverty, teeming tenements, and foul streets, they saw in the old urban areas the “authenticity” and “community” that the suburbs and the high-rise city lacked… walkable, human-scale, leafy, and historic streets.

Naturally, there was only limited space in the waterfront areas of Brooklyn Heights, and

thus they needed to delve deeper into Brooklyn and soon conquered areas now known as Leffert

Gardens, Prospect Heights, and Vinegar Hill (Hymowitz). Fully aware that they were living in a

predominantly working-class neighborhood, these values were romanticized by them, while at the

same time they quickly tore out the cheap linoleum floor to replace it with hardwood to fit their

own taste better (Hymowitz). This, in turn, generated higher rents – the initial inhabitants were

slowly but surely being displaced, and driven deeper into the borough (Hymowitz). The same

cannot be said for Brooklyn’s industry: though it too was largely in decline as of the 1950s and

1960s, most factories and manufacturers left the borough altogether and settled in upstate New

York or even different states (Hymowitz). 1 The new inhabitants, though, quickly started to feel

at home in the borough, and made it their own. A movement called The Brownstoners was

started2, readily supporting their cause of ‘revitalizing’ the neighborhood with a matching

1 In fact, this process is still somewhat ongoing, as Brooklyn lost more than 9,000 jobs in the manufacturing business in the years between 2005 and 2010 alone (Hymowitz). 2 It actually started as early as in the 1940s in Brooklyn Heights, yet it rose to prominence in the late 1960s, when more and more affluent people flooded into Brooklyn suffering from “brownstone fever” (Osman 98)

Schmedes • 8

magazine titled The Brownstoner, and made “new homes out of old, forlorn but solid and roomy

brownstones, restoring them to pristine glory” (New York quoted in Osman 98). The names for

neighborhoods like Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, and Carroll Gardens were only given to parts of

the area formerly known as South Brooklyn (Osman 98). These people believed their surge into

Brooklyn under the caption of ‘brownstoning’ to be “a cultural revolt against sameness,

conformity, and bureaucracy” (Osman 98), and therefore did not see themselves as intruders or

displacers of the original inhabitants. They were of the opinion that what they were doing was

keeping the “authenticity” in the area by restoring old townhouses (Osman 112). By the 1980s,

however, things changed when the revitalization of Boerum Hill was equaled with displacement

in a public pamphlet published by Accíon Latina and the Tenants Action Committee (Osman

125). Yet, the development did not stop there. More and more people flooded into Brooklyn,

and, according to Osman, it had “even begun to eclipse its neighbor [Manhattan] as an

intellectual and cultural center” by the 1990s (142).

In the new millennium, another wave of gentrifiers have arrived and are still stretching

out all over the borough. This time, they are mostly students or college-educated professionals or

artists. They mostly flock into Williamsburg. The neighborhood is desirable due to the L train

Bedford Avenue or the M and J train Marcy Avenue stops only being one five-minute subway

ride away from Manhattan. In fact, the surge into Williamsburg is happening at such a pace, that

since 2000, the number of college graduates in the neighborhood has risen by 33 percent

(Hymowitz). In fact, this new “postindustrial middle class” (Osman 205) assigns the tern ‘yuppie’

to itself (Osman 235), which implies that they feel pride over their standing in society and their

way of life.

Another part of the borough has had a surge in artists as well. The industrial buildings

and warehouses alongside the waterfront of Brooklyn’s DUMBO, were revitalized in the mid-

1980s through the work of developer David Walentas, and more recently by house galleries,

studios of various trades, and loft apartments (Hymowitz). Nowadays, the area has a high density

of start-up businesses and pricey housing, both of which mix with the workplaces of the creative-

class (Hymowitz).

On the other, far less glamorous, hand, however, there is still a high level of

unemployment in the borough, and there is no way for these businesses to have a higher impact

in the borough’s overall economic state (Hymowitz) – “[a]lmost a quarter of Brooklyn’s 2.5

million residents live below the poverty line”, and the number of unemployed residents doubled

between 2008 and 2009 (Hymowitz).

Brooklyn’s economy is a mirror of the national economy (Hymowitz), and this zeitgeist

also perspires into the creative work of many of the artistic inhabitants of the borough. A Forbes

article by Joel Kotkin shows that, indeed, the borough proves problematic in terms of income

Schmedes • 9

and cleft between its inhabitants. Brooklyn is home to one of New York state’s poorest

populations with a per capita income approcimately $10,000 below the national average, while at

the same time, its median cost of living is the second highest (Kotkin).

3.1 Park Slope and Williamsburg

I chose Park Slope as one of three neighborhoods within Brooklyn to take a closer look

at in this paper because the area is one of those where gentrification has hit severely, and to

which, still nowadays, a lot of artists and bohemians flock. Furthermore it was Park Slope, which,

in the initial onset of brownstoning, experienced it as an activity done by entire communities of

people rather than unorganized individuals. My second choice fell on Williamsburg, as it is the

most gentrifying neighborhood at the current time, and is the topic of a lot of contemporary

literature and newspaper articles. I will not go into chronological detail as I did in the previous

chapter, but will rather focus on outstanding and noteworthy developments in these

neighborhoods as opposed to the rest of Brooklyn.

The general building stock in Park Slope was extremely beneficial for the brownstoners

to build upon, as its northeastern section is home to “magnificent luxury apartment buildings and

large brownstone mansions overlook[ing] Prospect Park” (Osman 408), which were built and

then inhabited by the wealthier factory owners and affluent store owners, lawyers, and doctors.

In fact, this section is what Osman calls one of “Brooklyn’s ‘Gold Coasts’ (525). Though pretty

to look at, due to “haphazard” building, they were in dire need of renovation – something that

only a certain clientele of people were able to afford (Osman 525). Additionally, not all the

houses in the area are former dwellings of the richer classes, but some, though stately from the

outside, housed smaller rental units for more people, and were owned by the developers and then

rented out, rather than owned by the inhabitants (Osman 591). These were built because in the

1940s, the employees of the area’s “4,500 manufacturing jobs” had to have somewhere to live

close to their work, too (Osman 693). Thus, residents hardly socialized amongst each other, and

rather did so through different affiliations such as churches or other social clubs all over

Brooklyn, and not only limited to Park Slope (Osman 751). The residents came from different

parts of the world, a lot of them Irish and Eastern European, and census reports of 1950 state

that 20 percent of Park Slopers were born outside the United States (Osman 766). Each ethnic

group had their own gathering places: churches, clubs – both political and social, or shops

(Osman 766). Multi-ethnic and multi-racial living in Park Slope was not always peachy, however.

As more and more Puerto Ricans and African-Americans made their way into the larger

brownstones’ smaller renting units turned social housing, riots started, and in 1964, a number of

police forces from the whole borough had to be called in to put an end to brawls between black

Schmedes • 10

and white students (Osman 3756). There was a direct reaction to upheaval like that only two

years later: the PSBC – the Park Slope Betterment Committee:

in 1966, the men [two well-educated Park Slope-natives] met with a group of new middle-class pioneers in the basement of a renovated brownstone to start on organization to encourage prospective homeowners to move to the area. The newly formed [PSBC] collected funds to purchase a dilapidated brownstone before it could be ‘snatched up’ by blockbusters and ‘mutilated into small compartments,’ organized an open house, and found a young Manhattan family willing to purchase it… with the goal of recruiting middle-class families (Osman 4016)

to buy and renovate other brownstones. What is more, the PSBC also did extensive publicity for

the area in the form of “booster articles in the real estate section of New York Times” and sent

pictures of white families in Victorian clothing or on carriages to newspapers (Osman 4011) to

reverberate Park Slope’s Victorian past and the buildings’ architectural style, as well as mapping

its new and especially desired inhabitants as part of a new gentry and affluent families. In order to

deny claims of the neighborhood having gone downhill and turned into a slum, they offered

tours of renovated houses to reporters, city officials, and potential buyers (Osman 4032).

Another initiative in revitalizing the area was the planting of thousands of trees along the streets,

and especially along 5th, 6th, and 7th Ave (Osman 4108). Brownstoners further started community

gardens, where they would organize themselves to grow their own produce and then sell it in

food co-operatives (Osman 4108, Zukin 21).

Economically speaking, the area also experienced change. With the new dwellers came

new shops. The old ones either upgraded to higher-end products or were displaced by new shops

keeping up with the new clientele (Osman 4200). One example of such a new shop, is the

Community Bookstore, located on Park Slope’s 7th Ave, which was founded in 1971. Until this

day, the store places a strong emphasis not only on Brooklyn and Park Slope in its range of

books, but also on the activity of brownstoning, and renovating and restoring (Osman 3732).

Community Bookstore also aims at the Park Slope Community not only through its telling name,

but also by regularly hosting events concerned with the state of the area, and with popular

authors living in Park Slope, such as its 40th anniversary party, which had readings by Paul Auster,

Jonathan Safran-Foer and Nicole Krauss, among others. Additionally, to tie yet a tighter knot to

the community, Brooklyn mayor Mark Markowitz was also present to talk about the excellent

atmosphere in Park Slope and amongst its residents, and its multi-ethnic, eclectic cultural

offerings3.

In the 1970s, other organizations, such as the Seventh Avenue Betterment Committee

also sprang up. The latter organized wine and cheese festivals on Park Slope’s busiest street, as

3 Unfortunately, I have nowhere to quote this from except my own mind, as I was personally present at the event held on 16th September 2011 at Old First Church on 7th Ave. The poster to the event and additional information can be found here: http://communitybookstore.net/events/?p=1508 .

Schmedes • 11

well as festivals with belly dancers, artisanal food, local handicrafts, and Victorian doorknobs,

lamps, and other Victoriana to furnish the houses in style (Osman 4186).

Former tenants were forced out of Park Slope due to higher rents, and had to move to

other, not yet gentrified parts of Brooklyn, or to Queens, Harlem, Long Island, or the Bronx. “In

1974, after a decade of brown-stoning, the price of a one-family home in Park Slope had risen to

16 percent higher than the borough average” (Osman 5341).

Williamsburg, on the other hand, is home to a slightly different kind of people, albeit

similarly middle-class and affluent to Park Slope’s current inhabitants. Williamsburg, as

mentioned in the third chapter of this paper, was home to many factories and warehouses, and

also saw a high density in Eastern European Jews, other inhabitants were mostly workers in the

nearby factories. In the 1930s, the majority of Williamsburg houses had no central heating or hot

water. Keeping that in mind, it is hard to imagine that in a very short span of time, Williamsburg

has become one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in New York City. Sharon Zukin gives

a fitting and accurate description of the typical Williamsburg street scenery in her book Naked

City:

First you pass the Northside, the original center of Brooklyn’s hipster culture, a cluster

of art galleries, cafés, bars, and boutiques around the subway station at North Seventh

Street and Bedford Avenue. Then you pass the Southside, where French bistros and

Japanese hair salons have recently joined yeshivas and bodegas, and artists and

graduate students are a noticeable presence on the street. (36)

Zukin then goes on by describing the mixture of Hasidic Jews and ‘Hipsters’ on the street:

women in wigs are juxtaposed to men in tight jeans. The former represent the neighborhood’s

initial residents, the Eastern European Jews. The latter are part of a wave of gentrification which

started in the 1990s (37). The Hasidim live in Williamsburg’s Southside. However, the North of

Williamsburg is getting fuller and more expensive, and the hipsters and artists are expanding and

also moving into the South (Bahrampour). The Hassidim react by publishing flyers which claim

that the young non-Hasidics moving into the neighborhood are a threat to them and their pious

way of life (Bahrampour).

As mentioned in the beginning of the third chapter of this paper, Williamsburg consists

of a lot of old factories and warehouses, and Zukin, hereby referring back to Jane Jacob’s The City

that Lost Its Soul, states that its “growing prominence … during the 1990s confirms Jane Jacob’s

idea that old buildings with low rents will act as incubators of new activities.” (38) These new

activities are for example hip new music clubs, unconventional living, alternative art, and “trendy

restaurant cuisine” (Zukin 38). Just like in other New York neighborhoods like SoHo or the East

Village, Williamsburg’s new image and new dwellers came because of cheap rents in order to be

able to, first of all, be pioneers in a gritty and thus, according to them, more authentic

Schmedes • 12

neighborhood, and to “be artists to form scenes, ‘zines, and experimental art forms with little

market value.” (Zukin 45) Then the reviews started rolling in: first in insider magazines and niche

papers, then bigger newspapers, and finally even travel guides, hailing Williamsburg and its

cultural offerings such as restaurants or the quirky handicrafts of local shops as the next big thing

(Zukin 45). Of course, there are more factors to making a new hip neighborhood.

“Williamsburg’s viability depended not just on the presence of artists, writers, and musicians, but

also on their ability to become cultural entrepreneurs… The clubs and galleries that they

organized were small, but they became social centers for both fellow artists and young cultural

consumers who wanted to be around them” (Zukin 46). The newly discovered neighborhood

was then seen as the new SoHo, as being like SoHo before it itself had been gentrified and taken

over by the mainstream. Williamsburg was celebrated as being authentic, something which was

even further accelerated when the Brooklyn Brewery opened its doors and taps in another old

factory building closer to Bedford Ave (Zukin 49). Though the beer had originally been brewed

in upstate New York, making it a Williamsburg/Brooklyn institution definitely helped the cause.

"Williamsburg's new entrepreneurs crystallized the neighborhood's 'authenticity' into a product

with cultural buzz and shaped their own new beginnings." (Zukin 50).

What followed, though, was on the one hand more of this authenticity, on the other hand an up-

scaling in the real estate market. More and more investors are coming to Williamsburg and build

"loft-condos and townhouses" (Zukin 60), which only the better-off can afford. Furthermore,

developers simply ignore the voluntary agreement with the city council on "reasonably priced

housing" and demand however much people are willing to pay (Zukin 59). Williamsburg's cool,

hailed by magazines and every tourist, is something, which was manufactured, artificially made,

and which has nothing to do with the neighborhood's history. Rather, it now being a

'destination', proves exactly what the hip classes together with government officials and investors

have been able to achieve, without any regard for the initial inhabitants. Though the young

hipsters want to preserve what they deem authentic, they still appreciate all the commodities their

coming across the East River brought with it: expensive food, chain stores, and artisanal coffee

houses are apparently worth the high rents.

3.2 Sunset Park

Located to the North of Bay Ridge and the South of Greenwood Heights, the South

Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope has had the reputation of being a working-class and

immigrant area (Johnson). Initially, Sunset Park was mostly inhabited by Scandinavian

immigrants: “First came the Finns, the Norwegians and Swedes, then the Irish, Polish and

Italians, the Puerto Ricans during the ‘70s and most recently the Dominicans, Ecuadoreans,

Mexicans and Chinese” (Cohen). Very recently, however, the gentrification has been making its

Schmedes • 13

way further South through the borough of Brooklyn and is starting to be tangible in the

neighborhood. The first pioneers, in the form of artists and other creative people, are making

their way to Sunset Park. They are “drawn in by sense of fresh creative energy in this

neighborhood, as well as the beautiful park [Bush Terminal Piers Park], the city views, and the

historical Co-ops” (Higgins), and, naturally by the considerably lower rents in contrast to the

artists’ mecca Williamsburg (Higgins). An artist leasing loft apartments tells the Brooklyn-based L

Magazine that “[they] were just about the first artists in [this building]…The whole neighborhood

was light industry, and for the next few years there was a steady stream of artists moving their

studios [there]...[B]etween 30 to 40 of his tenants are now artists – approximately half the

building.” (Johnson)

These prerequisites are very similar to those in Williamsburg, yet what has been lacking

thus far is the rise in rents. This is due to the fact that most of Sunset Park is still industrially

zoned by the city, and therefore rents cannot be too high (Johnson). There are also so-called net

leases, specifically tailored for the artists. These leases are fixed over a longer period of time, and

the rent cannot be increased during that time. At the same time, this also means that during this

long period of time, the artists are entirely responsible for the apartment – “from the electrical

work to the lighting.” (Johnson) Sometimes, the artists rent their studios or apartments from

institutions who have these net leases with landlords, often bigger corporations. To make the

problems this poses a little more transparent, I will refer to the artists as (C), to the institutions as

(A), and to the landlords as (B): (A) has a net lease for a whole apartment complex owned by (B)

over the span of, say, 15 years. During this time, (A) rents out smaller units of the apartment

complex to (C) to live and work in. Due to the net lease, (A) is able to offer affordable studios

and apartments to (C). During the 15 years, however, (A) upgrades the apartments considerably,

but, due to recession, is unable to fully recuperate from the financial strain the renovations put

on (A) in the span of 15 years. At the end of the net lease, though, (B) sees that (A) put work and

money into the building, and managed to rent it out, and (B) further notices that the

neighborhood is on the upswing, and in turn wants to raise the rent considerably. This is

happening in Sunset Park, with the corporation Industry City acting as landlord, and the

institution NARS Foundation, whose goal it is to offer affordable space to artists, as their tenant

(Johnson). Soon, the artist will not be able to afford the spaces anymore, and a new, more

upscale, clientele will be moving to a slowly but surely more and more gentrifying Sunset Park,

which now even sports coffee shops to accommodate the still small but constant wave of

hipsters (Johnson). New York University student Ben Muessig writes in an essay published with

the online publication NYULIVEWIRE that he, as a fairly affluent student from an Ivy League

university, is one of the people who are in fact “destroying” Sunset Park. Attracted by low rents,

Schmedes • 14

and a wide variety of cheap ethnic food, and mom-and-pop shops, he moved to Sunset Park. Yet,

he foresees a future reminiscent of current-day Williamsburg for the neighborhood:

College students are the best gentrifiers. We move to neighborhoods with low rent and high crime rates. We feed the local economy with our parents’ money, but frequent bodegas only until a CVS opens. The businesses we close make room for bars, coffee shops and ethnic restaurants that better fit our demographic. We invite our friends and our friends’ friends for parties; the next year, our friends and our friends’ friends move in. Many of us relocate every year. Whenever one of us moves out, our landlords increase rent by more than 4 percent – the typical inflation rate. After a couple of years of collegiate immigration, longtime residents can’t afford to stay. (Muessig)

This, in fact, is a very important part of gentrification put in a nutshell. Students revitalize a

neighborhood. And apparently, the scenario described above is exactly what is happening in

Sunset Park. Of course, longtime residents do not let themselves be displaced by higher rents

without putting up a fight. One such instance is an initiative brought to life by Sunset Park’s

Spanish-speaking community, called Sunset Park Autonomous Zone, which has the fitting tag

line “HELL NO, CONDO!”. Two main things immediately attract attention when looking at the

website. First of all, every text is written in both English and Spanish and frequently interspersed

with Spanish expletives, and second of all, the blog stopped in 2009. When looking at the

penultimate blog post from November 2009, the blogger talks about a rezoning review process,

however there is no mention of the outcome. Judging by what can be found online, there is

indeed some sort of restructuring going on. However, no complete rezoning of Sunset Park has

happened yet, as can be deduced from the more recent articles with which I worked for the first

part of this chapter. Still, the impression that does remain when looking at the blog, is a strong

connection within the community, and the fact that neighbors help each other, organizing a

People’s Transportation Program, or a Food Coalition “which is trying to bring healthy food into

the area.” They further organize to resist rezoning, and conduct rallies and protests to give their

community a voice. As already mentioned before, the two biggest ethnic groups in Sunset Park

are Hispanics and Chinese. The latter voice their anger over the change in their neighborhood,

too. In late summer of 2009, so again in the year the rezoning of the neighborhood was to be

discussed, Pratt Center published a pamphlet by the Coalition to Protect Sunset Park, which

consists of the Chinese Staff & Workers Association, the Chinese New Promise Baptist Church,

and the Asian American Legal Defense Fund (Coalition). In the pamphlet, they demand, among

other things, “no up-zoning of avenues [as well as a s]top [to] the gentrification seeping down

from Park Slope. [They want the City of New York to [e]nd the gentrification of [their]

community by designating Sunset Park as a Special District with anti-displacement and anti-

harassment provisions [and to p]rotect current manufacturers providing jobs in Sunset Park.”

They lament a development similar to Park Slope and Williamsburg of the building of “luxury”

Schmedes • 15

condos, and the loss of small local businesses. They want to protect and keep the neighborhood

they know, and which they have made a home over many years.

4. Paul Auster’s Novel Sunset Park

The following chapter will deal with the 2010 novel Sunset Park by postmodernist author

Paul Auster. This novel, though, does not exhibit Auster’s trademark postmodernity as much as a

very real, post-Lehman Brothers-crash New York City, riddled with remnants of the past for all

the characters in it. Naturally, I will not delve too deeply into literary theory and methods, but I

will still employ the method of close reading – of reading certain aspects concerned with the

neighborhood of Sunset Park in Brooklyn in terms of gentrification, and of reading utterances

and thoughts of the characters in terms of feelings such as memory, loss, or nostalgia. Thus, I

hope to show that even works of fiction can possess what is innate to the people who are given

agency in gentrification itself.

My first such person is Bing, who is an old friend of the protagonist Miles. I will look at

his introduction in the novel and at the same time I will be able to give a first characterization of

Sunset Park, focalized through Bing Nathan.

Bing is introduced as someone focusing “on the local, the particular, the nearly invisible

affairs of quotidian affairs” (Auster 71) rather than on anything political or the world as a whole.

He focuses his energy on where he works, which is, at the beginning of the book, Park Slope.

This is not where he lives, though. He lives on the Upper West Side. The street is not specified,

but rents in Manhattan are generally horrendously high, and thus he probably lives in a small

studio apartment, or more probable, in a shared apartment in which he has his own tiny room.

He owns a shop called “Hospital for Broken Things”, in which he repairs old things like “manual

typewriters, fountain pens, mechanical watches, vacuum-tube radios, record players, wind-up

toys, gumball machines, and rotary telephones.” (Auster 73) These things are all items, which

were replaced some time in the 20th century by something newer, better, more profitable, or

simply more advanced. Although his store is described as something gritty by calling it a “hole-in-

the-wall storefront” (72), it is not clear if his store can be seen as something honing ‘the good old

days’ or something which is already catering to hipsters and quirky artists in Park Slope, who

enjoy an aesthetic of the old, but still want the amenities of their MacBookPro and have the

income to support it, and thus to pay more than the established but considerably poorer residents

of the area. The store is “flanked by a Laundromat on one side and a vintage clothing shop in the

other” (72), and thus finds itself right in the middle of the old Brooklyn represented by the

Laundromat4, and the new, hip Brooklyn, represented by the vintage clothing store. Due to a

4 Although I classify the Laundromat as ‘Old Brooklyn’, it is something which survives the turmoils of gentrification in a city like New York and will make its way to ‘New Brooklyn’ as clothes will always have to be washed, and as

Schmedes • 16

20% increase in the rent of his store (Auster 79), probably due to Park Slope’s growing

desirability, (Auster 79), Bing sees himself driven out of his now too expensive apartment, and

eventually decides to move to Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. The first housemate he finds is Ellen, who

first told him about Sunset Park and the considerably lower rents there, albeit it being a “rougher

neighborhood” (Auster 80). Ellen is aware of Sunset Park because she works in a real estate

agency (Auster 78), situated on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, the area where the rents are the

highest, and the original inhabitants are all but displaced. Due to this fact, Ellen Brice, real estate

agent by day and artist by night, becomes a slightly problematic character in the face of

gentrification itself. She is not in favor of a gentrified and increasingly more expensive New York

City, because she herself is not able to support herself anymore with higher rents. Yet, to be able

to pay any rent at all, Ellen needs to work a vaguely profitable job, and decides to work for none

other than the devil who is running her vicious cycle, a real estate agency on Park Slope’s most

prestigious avenue, liaising apartments and brownstones to people for rent, which she could

never afford.

The novel’s introduction to the neighborhood is very matter-of-fact, and does not differ

from any introduction to any neighborhoods read in research for this paper:

[Sunset Park comprises] the territory between Fifteenth and Sixty-fifth streets in western Brooklyn, an extensive hodgepodge of an area that runs form Upper New York Bay to Ninth Avenue, home to more than a hundred thousand people, including Mexicans, Dominicans, Poles, Chinese, Jordanians, Vietnamese, America whites, American blacks, and a settlement of Christians from Gujarat, India. Warehouses, factories, abandoned waterfront facilities, a view of the Statue of Liberty, the shut-down Army Terminal where ten thousand people once worked, a basilica named Our Lady of Perpetual Help, biker bars, check-cashing places, Hispanic restaurants, the third-largest Chinatown in New York, and the four hundred and seventy-eight acres of Greenwood Cemetery (80).

This attributive list not only gives the geographical location of Sunset Park, but also gives further

information of who lives there, and a hint to what the neighborhood was in its hey-day, before

industry moved further up-state. Just the last sentence gives a very detailed description of what

the neighborhood once was; a working-class area giving the workers their place of work and a

community catering to their cultural needs such as familiar food and religion which they built

themselves, while also outlining what is desirable about Sunset Park for the advancing

gentrification: its Statue of Liberty views, the old factory houses and waterfront building, which

are a lot like those found in Williamsburg or DUMBO, and which will see and in some case are

already seeing a similar fate. The house Bing and Ellen decide to move into is “a dopey little two-

story wooden house with a roofed-over front porch, looking for all the world like something that

many apartment buildings do not have on-site washing facilities. Naturally, this might change through more and more affluent inhabitants surging to the area, but even a very well-situated neighborhood like Greenwich Village or the Upper East Side has Laundromats. The prices of every washed pound may vary according to the Laundromat’s location, but since prices are not specified in the novel, these are the only assumptions I can make based on the occurrence of a Laundromat.

Schmedes • 17

had been stolen from a farm on the Minnesota prairie and plunked down by accident in the

middle of New York. It stood between a trash-filled vacant lot with a stripped-down car in it and

the metal bones of a half-built mini-apartment building on which construction had stopped more

than a year ago.” (Auster 81) This passage, while also conveying a desolate feeling of the house

and its surroundings, is at the same time able to show its potential. The eclectic architectural style

of the neighborhood with aforementioned factories and now with an architectural style which is

not at all metropolitan but rural, and thus makes the area even more interesting from the point of

view of gentrification pioneers. The house is the only one on its block, and because the former

owners died and their children were unwilling to pay property taxes on it, the house now belongs

to the City of New York. Yet again, because of city development and more and more people

surging to Brooklyn, and the space for people to live becoming smaller and smaller, the potential

in terms of zoning comes to mind when reading this passage: because the house is owned by the

city, and because there is enough room to build new and upscale apartment buildings, the area is

perfect for expansion of ‘Hip Brooklyn’. Bing, however, sees a whole different kind of potential

there: the potential to live “rent-free”, as he believes the area and the house are uninteresting to

the city, “ for as long as it took the city to notice him and give him the boot” (Auster 81).

I believe that, although they are all victims of the process of gentrification, the characters

in the book squatting in the abandoned house in Sunset Park are nothing short of gentrification

pioneers. The condition of the house is abysmal when they move in, but Ellen says that “[e]lbow

grease [is] all it [is] going to take” (Auster 82) for them to make it livable. Though their initial

situation is different to that of the pioneers of gentrification mentioned in this paper in that they

do not buy a cheap house to make it their home, but squat in it, they still improve it through their

labor. After all, pioneers are people who want a more untouched, more authentic urban living

space, where they have more room and less to pay in contrast to where they lived before. They

even fit the profile of the idealistic artists so often read about when reading about the pioneers of

gentrification. The third inhabitant of the house, Alice, is forced to move out of her previously

rent-controlled sublet in Morningside Heights, a Manhattan area which is also constantly

becoming more and more expensive due to its proximity to Columbia University. She is just

looking for somewhere cheaper to live, as she describes herself as “nearly broke” (Auster 83). As

a graduate student currently writing her dissertation, she too fits the profile of the pioneer: a

student. Her options are limited due to her similarly limited income through a stipend, and she is

unable to move in with her boyfriend who lives in a “stamp-sized” apartment in Queens (Auster

83). The foibles of wanting to live in New York City are that one has to either accept the limited

living space offered by already highly inhabited areas, or one has to go where there is room.

Although the novel heightens the fact that thus far, all three of the house’s inhabitants are victims

of gentrification, I argue that due to the definitions of pioneers, they are also somewhat of a

Schmedes • 18

driving force behind the process. Although the novel undertakes, to some extent, to take the idea

of pioneers away from the characters through their squatting and not paying rent or buying the

house, the general characteristics of wanting more space and their occupations still remain. Still,

the novel stays problematic in terms of judging the house’s inhabitants as pioneers of

gentrification or activists against an unjust system, as after having established that its characters

have similar character traits to the classic pioneers, they, especially Bing, become more and more

activist as the novel progresses.

They are made into what I would like to call ‘reluctant sort-of pioneers’, as through

effects of gentrification in other areas of New York City, they have no other choice but to take

their pioneer character traits to an un-gentrified neighborhood. Alice asks herself “how [a person

can] rent a new apartment [after losing the old one] when the person in question doesn’t have the

money to pay for it” (Auster 89) and thus sums up their whole situation of them then becoming

‘reluctant activists’. Throughout the novel, the narrative makes the characters more and more

victims of their circumstances, as the house is referred to as “shabby” (Auster 207, 124) on more

than one occasion. The narrative justifies their squatting by mentioning that no one is interested

in the house anyway at this point in time (cf. Auster 89) or that the terrible condition of the

house still gives them a better home than no house at all (cf. Auster 207), and Miles, the last one

to move into the house, sees the worst that could happen as their squatting resulting in “an

untimely eviction” (Auster 208). It is only on page 242 of 308 pages that the narrative exposes

Bing as political, as someone with “contempt for the hypocrisies of American life”, as someone

who knows the “value of resistance”, and someone who believes that it is “possible to participate

in the meaningless games society [is asking people] to play”. When Miles’ father Morris comes to

visit the “Sunset Park Four” (Auster 279), he is delighted to see Bing, someone he has known for

a long time, but has not seen in a while. He notices that Bing “appears to be flourishing”. This

observation makes Bing into even more of an activist, as the political act of squatting makes him

happy, despite of or maybe even because of the fact that “they have already been served with two

eviction notices” (Auster 279). He is not scared, but declares that they will be “holding out till the

bitter end” (Auster 279). Bing seems to be the only one who thinks like that, though. In a chapter

focalized through Alice, it is revealed that the city is not budging and continues to try to drive

them out of the house:

Yesterday, another court order was delivered to the house by yet another New York City marshal, bringing the total number of eviction notices they have received to four, and earlier in the month, when the third notice arrived, she and Ellen agreed that the next warning would be the last one, that they would turn in their squatters’ badges at that point and move on, reluctantly move on. (Auster 286)

Both Ellen and Alice feel that they have done everything they could and have held out for as long

as possible, but they both know that Bing sees things differently, when Alice attributes him with

Schmedes • 19

having “aggressive, hotheaded pronouncements” about their squatting in the house (Auster 286).

When both women decide that “the grand experiment is over” (Auster 294), and when Miles

returns to Florida, as returning to his home New York City has always been just temporary, Bing

would be alone in the house. Before this happens, however, they are, in fact, evicted. The event

of the eviction is focalized through Miles. It starts with “heavy footsteps clomping up the stairs”

and Bing shouting expletives at the police while telling them not to touch him.

[Bing’s] wrists [are] shackled in handcuffs as a second enormous cop holds him by the hair with one hand and jabs a nightstick into his back with the other, and just when [Miles] is about to turn around and run out of the house, he sees the first enormous cop push Alice down the stairs, and as Alice tumbles toward him, cracking the side of her head against a wooden step, the enormous cop who pushed her races down the stairs, and before Miles can pause to think about what he is doing, he is punching the enormous cop in the jaw with his clenched fist (Auster 300 f.)

The narrative goes on with Ellen and Miles being able to escape, but I would like to focus on the

way the police action is narrated in the novel, which evokes images of the Tompkins Square Park

Riot in Manhattan’s Lower East Side of 1988, one of the most important dates in the history of

gentrification in New York City. On August 6th of that year, several different kinds of people like

“activists, artists, punks, skinheads, squatters and anarchists” were protesting a curfew enforced

by the city on the park because the city believed that this would reduce loitering and thus drug

dealing. The protest turned into a riot due to police brutality, as the police “knock[ed]

demonstrators and bystanders to the ground and clubb[ed] them till blood flowed.” (Zukin 2)

Sharon Zukin states that this riot not only “marked the end of politics as art and life as a

performance” but also that “the police denial of access to the park signaled the local triumph of

gentrification.”

How, then, can Sunset Park’s bout of police enforced violence on squatters be read? First

of all, one needs to take a closer look at the practice of squatting. Generally, it is politically

organized by either organizations or a loose group of people in order to give people “without

adequate housing into empty, often abandoned buildings.” (Hartman 539) Hartman goes on by

writing that a lot of squatting activities have been organized by ACORN (the Association of

Community Organizations for Reform Now) which is active nationally in the United States (539).

According to Kearns, there is even somewhat of a squatters’ network across Europe (589), and

through ACORN, the same goes for the U.S. The squatters come together in their endeavor “to

bring to light the contradiction of having empty houses at a time when people need housing.”

(Hartman 539) Thus, the definition of squatting always includes a political aspect; the act of

squatting itself is political, and this political stance is what brings squatters to unite for their

common goal. This is not the case for what Miles Heller’s father Morris so aptly dubbed The

Sunset Park Four (Auster 279), however the did join together because they needed housing in a

time when there was an empty house. Although the notion of squatting is slightly changed

Schmedes • 20

because the house’s inhabitants main motivation to squat is them wanting a roof over their head

(cf. Auster 207), the mere act of squatting, whether intended or not, is somewhat political.

Without actually saying it or writing it on banners, The Sunset Park Four saw the lack of

affordable housing in a city where there is an abundance of housing, and even if it is just their

own need they are expressing by squatting in the empty house, the need is still there. This is

further reinforced in the novel, as the reaction by the city is so vehement and violent. The

narrative, then, acknowledges the political nature of the Sunset Park Four’s squatting, when it

‘punishes’ them in a similar way to the squatters and demonstrators in Tompkins Square Park in

1988: with vile and completely disproportionate police violence. Thus, I believe that the novel

predicts a fate for Sunset Park similar to that of other already gentrified neighborhoods. Just as

the squatters in the novel are displaced by the consequences of gentrification and are either

forced to drastically downgrade their living standards or move out of New York City, the

inhabitants of other neighborhoods in Brooklyn’s inhabitants will suffer similar consequences.

According to an article on Sunset Park in AM New York, a daily newspaper in the city,

gentrification is in full swing in the neighborhood right now. Only a mere five years after the

novel’s setting, when reading about Sunset Park in contemporary publications, there is mention

of “re-purposing” of old industrial buildings for artist studios and smaller businesses (Cohen).

The same article speaks of a lure due to the neighborhood’s “vibrant mix of culture” and its open

spaces, and, of course, because of the property prices and rents which are much lower than in

other parts of Brooklyn or even Manhattan (Cohen). Thus, the narrative of Sunset Park predicts

this fate for its namesake neighborhood, a neighborhood which the author of the novel himself,

called “a downtrodden place” and “not a beautiful part of Brooklyn” (Pierce). It is exactly this

‘grittiness,’ which attracted pioneers to other neighborhoods before. As for The Sunset Park

Four, their fate mirrors that of others being displaced all over New York City and other

metropolises.

5. Conclusion

In this term paper I have taken a look at the process of gentrification in New York City’s

Borough Brooklyn. In order to do this, I have perused a variety of different kinds of literature

such as blogs, pamphlets, guidebooks, and naturally several scholarly articles from journals,

newspapers, and books. I started out by defining the term ‘gentrification’ and outlined its

implications in terms of the social and the economic. Thereafter, I revisited the history of the

borough as a whole, which turns out to be mostly industrial at first, with social housing and

upscale brownstone houses added to the mix later. This explains the very diverse mix of different

social and economic groups, which can be found throughout the entire borough. Brooklyn’s

economy mirrors that of the United States as a whole (cf. Hymowitz), and New York City

Schmedes • 21

mayors across the decades did not see any need to operate against this in any way. In fact, in 1985

then-mayor Ed Koch proclaimed in when asked about the high rents in Manhattan that “there

[were] other boroughs” those who could not afford Manhattan could move to (Wishnia 5). As

mentioned on page two of this term paper, Bloomberg had a similar stance, as he too favored city

planning driven by economy rather than anything else (cf. Anderson). To further shed some light

on the state of gentrification in Brooklyn, I then zoomed in to three boroughs, which I see in

different stages of gentrification. The first one I gave an in-depth analysis of is Park Slope, which

has also been called one of “Brooklyn’s Gold Coasts” (Osman 525). Here, the process of

gentrification is pretty much completed. In Williamsburg, however, gentrification is not only in

full swing, but the clientele is slightly different. The once almost entirely Hispanic and Jewish-

Hasidim neighborhood has seen a flood of so-called hipsters in recent years, and is globally hailed

as the new destination neighborhood. This is so much so the case that investors swarm over the

Williamsburg bridge to convert factories and brownstones into chic lofts or townhouses. The

main neighborhood this term paper is focused on, however, is Sunset Park. I chose it for one

because it is the setting of the novel which I worked with for this paper, but also because the

process of gentrification has only just begun there, and one can quasi watch the houses and areas

being remodeled and rezoned, respectively. The process here is pretty much the same as it had

been in Park Slope and Williamsburg before: artists and students are moving closer and closer to

Greenwood Cemetery and are slowly but surely displacing the former, ethnically diverse,

inhabitants of the neighborhood. Yet still gritty in many parts, Sunset Park becomes more and

more gentrified with condo complexes and chain super markets being built.

The novel Sunset Park by Paul Auster also explores the topic of gentrification in the

neighborhood, but it does so by focusing on a group of middle-class, educated twenty-

somethings. This was particularly interesting to me, as it opens up a whole new dimension of

gentrification: it can affect everyone at some point to a certain extent, and class does not

necessarily have to be a factor, as in our current economic climate, the borders can somewhat

blur. None of The Sunset Park Four has the ability to afford living in New York City, and thus

displaced from their former dwellings due to the low-income liberal arts education they all sought

after, they are forced to relocate to a less desired part of New York City. The fact that they are

college educated and do not have an awful lot of money mirrors the state many liberal art college

graduates find themselves in in the USA, and it further shows that those whose first concern is

not economic, end up “not having a city” as Bloomberg pronounced (Anderson). Thus, without

a city, they move somewhere which has previously been ‘outside the city,’ simply due to its gritty

status. The narrative further exemplifies this by the fact that they do not pay any rent at all. They

decide to live outside of the capitalist doctrine of the USA, and are eventually shown that there is

no escape of gentrification and hence no escape of capitalism. By likening the images employed

Schmedes • 22

to those evoked by the Tompkins Square Park Riots of 1988, the text further emphasizes this.

This sentiment does not seem to be far from the truth and from the way people actually feel. The

anti-gentrification blog Die Hipster closed in early 2013 after six years when whoever ran it felt

that there is no stopping of gentrification trickling into the southern Brooklyn (cf. Rosenberg).

The blogger’s prophecy for the entire South of Brooklyn is very grim: “In 30 years Brooklyn will

be one giant flea market under a tent made out of flannel and beard hair... us natives will be living

in the sewer tunnels for only $1,200 a month.” (Rosenberg) This statement is clearly very

sarcastic, but judging from what is going on in Sunset Park and other places like Bedford

Stuyvesant or Bushwick, it really does seem like there is no stopping of the process of

gentrification.5 What is essentially happening in former gritty Brooklyn neighborhoods is “tearing

down neighborhoods and building different neighborhoods“, which are more profitable

(Goodyear). It is hard to say what exactly should be done in Brooklyn in order to not further

displace economically less profitable inhabitants. Activist and filmmaker Kelly Anderson

demands “rent-stabilization and co-existence” between old and new residents (Mathias), but it is

uncertain and to some extent fantastic to believe that things will change all of a sudden and that

Brooklyn will not go the way Manhattan has.

5 Bushwick has been called “the new place to be” (Higgins) and Bedford Stuyvesant is experiencing “bidding wars” over its houses (Cate).

Schmedes • 23

Works Cited

ANDERSON, Kelly. “My Brooklyn – Trailer.” 05 May 2012. Online video clip. Youtube. Accessed

on 21 December 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD_t-OMy3dM>. Web.

AUSTER, Paul. Sunset Park. New York: Henry Holt, 2010. Print.

BAHRAMPOUR, Tara. “A ‘Plague of Artists’ Is a Battle Cry for Brooklyn Hasidim.” The New York

Times. N. p., 17 February 2004. Web. 15 December 2013.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/17/nyregion/17williamsburg.html>. Web.

BEAUREGARD, Robert A. “The Chaos and Complexity of Gentrification.” Gentrification of the City.

eds. Smith, Neil and Peter Williams. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986. 35-55. Rpt. in Lees,

Loretta, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly. eds. The Gentrification Reader. London and New York:

Routledge, 2010. 11-23. Print.

CATE. “Bed Stuy Townhouse Closes for $1.34M.” Web log post. Brownstoner. Brownstoner.com,

13 Dec. 2012. Web. 07 Jan. 2014. <http://www.brownstoner.com/blog/2012/12/bed-

stuy-townhouse-closes-for-1-34m/>. Web.

COALITION TO PROTECT SUNSET PARK. Coalition to Protect Sunset Park.6 Web.

COHEN, Marjorie. “The Rise of Sunset Park: A Diverse Nabe with Many Draws Sees

Revitalization.” am New York. 29 May 2013. Web. 14 November 2013.

<http://www.amny.com/urbanite-1.812039/the-rise-of-sunset-park-a-diverse-nabe-with

many-draws-sees-revitalization-1.5364995>. Web.

GLASS, Ruth. “Introduction.” London: Aspects of Change. London: McGibbon & Kirk, 1964. xviii-

xix. Print.

GOODYEAR, Sarah. “‘My Brooklyn’ Tells a Story of Gentrification and Loss.” The Atlantic Cities.

The Atlantic, 07 Jan. 2013. Web. 07 Jan. 2014.

<http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/01/my-brooklyn-tells-story-

gentrification-and-loss/4330/>. Web.

GREENBLATT, Stephen J. “Towards a Poetics of Culture.” Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern

Culture. London: Routledge, 1990. Print.

HARTMAN, Chester. “The Right to Stay Put.” Land Reform, American Style. eds. Geisler, Charles

and Frank Popper. Totowa: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984. 302-318. Rpt. in Lees, Loretta,

Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly eds. The Gentrification Reader. London and New York:

Routledge, 2010. 531-541. Print.

HIGGINS, Michelle. “Brooklyn's New Gentrification Frontiers.” The New York Times. 8 May 2013.

Web. 15 December 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/realestate/moving

deeper-into-brooklyn-for-lower-home-prices.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&>. Web.

6 Please find the pamphlet enclosed, as I was unable to find a link to the original online while compiling the list of works cited.

Schmedes • 24

HYMOWITZ, Kay S. “How Brooklyn Got Its Groove Back.” City Journal 21.4 (Autumn 2011): n.

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Appendix

Coalition to Protect Sunset Park Chinese Staff & Workers Association ƒ Chinese New Promise Baptist Church ƒ Asian American Legal Defense Fund

Sunset Park has been experiencing rapid changes that threaten our community. The appearance of

luxury condos in this neighborhood of working families has accelerated rent increases, forcing

residents to crowd fifteen to twenty people into a single apartment in order to afford the rent. These

newly built luxury apartments are utterly unattainable for our community’s residents, even with hard-

earned savings. Many small local businesses are now unable to afford the rising rent and are left with

no choice but to close.

The proposed plan to up-zone 8th

Avenue will allow developers to build even taller luxury

condominiums, which will pave the way for gentrification and exacerbate the dearth of affordable

housing that presently afflicts the community in Sunset Park. We are coming together to oppose the

proposed up-zoning of any avenue of Sunset Park and to protect our homes, our jobs, and our

community that we have built and developed over the years. Our community does not need more

luxury condominiums or development that ignores our voices and needs. Rather, the government must

be accountable to the community and develop low-income and affordable housing for current and

future Sunset Park families.

We demand the City of New York:

1. No up-zoning on the avenues, especially 4th and 8th Ave. Stop the gentrification seeping down

from Park Slope.

2. End the gentrification of our community by designating Sunset Park as a Special District with

anti-displacement and anti-harassment provisions.

3. Work with NY State’s Housing Trust Fund to build low-income and affordable housing.

4. Conduct an Environmental Impact Study, accounting for the people as part of the environment.

5. Protect current manufacturers providing jobs in Sunset Park.

6. Conduct a study on housing conditions in Sunset Park, in addition to the land use study

currently underway.

7. Work with local banks to strengthen their Community Reinvestment Act requirements.

For all inquiries, or to drop off petitions, contact Coalition to Protect Sunset Park, c/o Chinese Staff and Workers’

Association, 64-11 7th

Ave, Brooklyn NY 11220, (718) 633-9748, cswa@cswa.org

Schmedes • 27

Declaration

I hereby confirm that I compiled this text myself and used no other sources or aids than those I

have referenced, and I agree to my text being checked by plagiarism recognition software.

Date Signature