The backlash continues.
I actually enjoyed the "I Hate Brooklyn" piece in this week’s New York magazine. Passionately written by Jonathan Van Meter, his article may well become the Emancipation Proclamation for all those who refuse to budge from Manhattan.
"I have an irrational fear of leaving Manhattan. For one thing, it’s so difficult to get here, to get in- in the first place, it feels like you might lose your spot should you leave it unattended, even for a day. For another, there is the ever-present anxiety that, God forbid, you might miss something…"
This writer certainly has an ax to grind about Brooklyn. And a lot of anxiety. There’s a certain pathos to what he has to say. Born and bred in South Philadelphia, he wants no part of what he left behind in the old neighborhood.
"A class-jumper like me can’t go home again. You can bet that Saturday Night Fever’s Tony Manero did not move back to Brooklyn during the dot-com boom because of the "amazing deals" to be had on townhouses in Sunset Park."
Van Meter left Philly to meet the holy grail of career ambition in New York. But he was also lured here by the action. "I wanted to go where the people danced," he writes.
Clearly his dislike of Brooklyn is a little over the top. But it’s partially due to the fact that he’s lost so many friends to what he calls the new suburbia: "I detest Brooklyn because it has siphoned off so many that I once held so dear and scattered them to the winds in a borough so huge that it has no center, no beating urban heart that I’ve been able to find."
Sawing away at the world’s littlest violin, Van Meter sounds a little lonely now that Brooklyn has become so in. Well, he can keep Manhattan as far as I’m concerned. Brooklyn is getting a tad crowded anyway (see Postcard from the Slope_Weekend Crowds, May 3) and we’re not recruiting to our side of the river anymore.
Na Na Na.
Speaking of sides: is their going to be a big Manhattan vs. Brooklyn baseball game? A color war? Are people gonna start sticking their tongues out at each other?
Can’t we be adults about this?
Nobody ever said that Manhattan wasn’t way more exciting than Brooklyn. Or that Brooklyn culture surpasses the cultural landscape of the borough next door. We’re not knocking the Metropolitan Museum or Opera, MOMA, the Guggenheim, the Frick, the 57th Street galleries, Chelsea, or what’s left of SoHo.
Who doesn’t miss the ease of a quick walk or bus ride to some great Manhattan destination for shopping, eating, seeing movies or theater? And if you work in Manhattan, walking to and from work is utterly luxiurous. Being able to stagger home after a late night at Area, the Mudd Club, or the Tunnel (ah, but I date myself) was essential back in the go go eighties.
Most of us aren’t doing that anymore.
What’s Van Meter getting so agitated about? We all love Manhattan and couldn’t live without it. Brooklyn wouldn’t be Brooklyn if Manhattan wasn’t next door: it’s our lifeline to the bigger world beyond our little brownstone paradise.
Some of us just don’t choose to live there anymore. Or can’t afford it. Or prefer the scale of Park Slope, Ft. Greene, Prospect Heights or Kensington. And the diversity. The public schools. Prospect Park. Three bedrooms.
Van Meter’s closing paragraph moved me because it reveals so much about the writer himself (and maybe all of us): "Despite all of Manhattan’s recent letdowns-the unbearable expense, the runation of great neighborhoods, the disappearance of favorite bars and friends – I keep choosing the First Borough again and again not merely out of habit, but because giving up on Manhattan would be giving up on the dream."
This Brooklyn backlash is about so much more than meets the eye. It is at the very core of what we dream about, long for, aspire to become.
It is so very New York, isn’t it?
Thanks for your sympathetic review of VM’s article. Do send part of it in a a letter. I’m sure he will get a lot of mail ( hate mail particularly). I hated the article when I first read it – so ego-centric. But you make a good point that it is really about his own anxiety and fears regarding his place in society. I think the fact that I grew up in manhattan, lived in one of the best neigborhoods ever ( the upper westside) for more than half my life, and know that I’m a New Yorker through and through made the jump to Brooklyn fairly easy. Of course, there was the anxiety and remorse to be leaving my very special perch on the UWS – Sure, I would have preferred to buy an apartment over “there”, but the financial reality was that Brooklyn was more affordable. And it has come as a wonderful surprise that living here is really unique and distinct from living in Manhattan. It’s a little bit quieter ( that is here in Park Slope – I can’t speak for Bedford Stuy or other neighborhoods), it has a small town feeling, there are great resources that are fresh and idiocyncratic ( great shops and restaurants. It doesn’t feel corperate and you aren’t barraged by Gaps, Starbucks and Banana Republics. There’s an individuality here that most New York neighborhoods just don’t have anymore… It is sad that Manhattan is no longer affordable for most of us – That, like our parents, living in a “classic 6” in a manhattan apt. building is no longer a given – It is a struggle in that big city over there – Thank God that we have Brooklyn.
Hasn’t the Brooklyn/Manhattan war been going on for longer than a century? I love Brooklyn, I love Manhattan. I hate Queens and the Bronx is passable. Haven’t decided yet about Staten Island.
Yes, so very, very New York. The last paragraph got me too. Once you have lived in Manhattan you can never let go. You can’t stop loving it, needing it and claiming it as your own. It’s in us–a little heart shape inside our hearts. Dontcha think?
Manhattan’s center is contained within the ego of those who choose it as their biggest fashion accessory.
So much wasted energy on this topic. Again. I don’t get it. Manhattan is a nice place to visit. But Brooklyn is home and that’s the way many of us like it.
The Manhattanite knows he’s suffering from an illness he’s not yet ready to treat.
That first sentence of Van Meter’s that you quoted says it all, highlighting the words “fear” and “anxiety.”
How to address that fear of losing your spot in Manhattan? People have tried a caf