Jill Weiskof of New York Magazine emailed me today to say that there’s an article in this week’s New York about Red Hook and the concept of degentrification. Contributing editor Adam Sternbergh examines what happens when gentrification doesn’t follow through as promised, with the prime example being Brooklyn ’s Red Hook. It sounds like one of those New York Magazine exaggerations to me. Whatever. Let the discussion begin. Here’s an excerpt from Sternbergh’s article:
“For the last two years, people in Red Hook have been waiting—some hopefully, some fearfully—for that wave to crash, the hordes to come, the towers to sprout.
Weirdly, though, none of that has happened. In fact, for all the heraldic attention, the neighborhood now seems to be going in reverse. The Pioneer bar has shut down. So has the bistro 360 [I read on Gowanus Lounge that there are signs of life at 360] and, just recently, the live-music venue the Hook.
Buildings put on the market for $2.5 million have stayed empty and unsold. Landlords hoping to get $2,500 a month for a Van Brunt storefront—the rent that Barbara Corcoran was asking—have found no takers. In fact, Corcoran’s spot sat unrented for over two years, until a local business took the space at the cut rate of $1,800 a month. The perception of the neighborhood got bad enough that in August the Post ran a story headlined "Call It ‘Dead’ Hook." Somehow the neighborhood went from "undiscovered paradise" to Dead Hook in just over a year.”
Read more of “The Embers of Gentrification” here.
I’ll take a stab at this: Degentrification is when an area or neighborhood starts to gentrify so quickly that it does not ‘organically’ gentrify and certain elements of that process break down and begin to erode the process. (meaning, the process is too rapid to have ever happened over time, culturally of its own accord.) In the case the north brooklyn, the gentrification has almost been forced or pushed by condo builders in orderto sell condos offering incentives that they never had any intent on producing. When this happens, word spreads fast and those reasons which originally inspired people to mve there become reversed and disappear. Take a look at all of the condo buildings that have gone rental and you’ll see degentrification at work.
Thanks for the info. Louise
As far as the Pioneer goes, my girlfriend used to cook there, and the reason it closed was simply that the owner got sick of running it (he got married and moved to Canada). I heard that it was recently sold.