The Brooklyn Rail

I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn in 1990, well into the years of the brownstone boom but before the full-on transformation of more recent times. When I told a colleague at the time, a native of the borough, about my new address, she scoffed a bit and said, “That’s not the real Brooklyn.”

I didn’t think it was fair, but I knew what she meant. Her neighborhood was a lot further from the city, and not marked by new homesteaders. But it got me wondering: what is the real Brooklyn? Is it the place of Walt Whitman, marked by “ample hills” and farmland, though growing so rapidly that he saw it become a booming metropolis? Or the home of Henry Miller, who described the Williamsburg of his youth as a tough place where he got into frequent fights, but also one with exciting vaudeville houses like the Novelty Theatre or the Unique Theatre, known locally as Da Bum? The churn never ends, as the thriving but vicious waterfront scene described by Hubert Selby Jr. in Last Exit to Brooklyn gives way to the almost bucolic quiet of current day Red Hook.

In recent decades, Brooklyn has sometimes been called New York’s Left Bank, after the ostensibly lower-key side of the river in Paris. (An amusing offshoot of that is that Brooklyn has earned such a hipster reputation that it is shorthand in French for “cool,” as in “Trés branché, trés Brooklyn.”) You could argue the borough is marked by ethnic and racial enclaves, like Polish Greenpoint or Black Bed-Stuy, though these areas have changed considerably over time. Of course, everything does. And Brooklyn is such a large area with a long, complex history that it can’t reasonably be said to belong to any one set of markers.

Defining Brooklyn has always involved comparisons to Manhattan, and for at least the last hundred years, it has been the distinctly more low-rise of the two. (This is notwithstanding the more recent Dubai-like overdevelopment of downtown Brooklyn.) It is more spread out, and its cultural centers are fewer and farther between. But it has long been the home to large numbers of artists and musicians, as well as places for them to show and perform. And like the borough itself, they have shown a great capacity for reinvention and rebirth, often paying homage to their forbears. The Brooklyn jazz scene of the 1940s and ’50s, for instance, included long-shuttered clubs like Tony’s Grand Dean and Putnam Central, where greats Charles Mingus and Max Roach were regulars. The heirs to those clubs can be found in spots like Bar LunÀtico and Ibeam—small, driven toward experimentation, usually run by musicians. And organizations like the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium have also emerged to preserve and extend the legacies of these places.

One such group that more recently came across my radar is called Connection Works. Co-founded in 2007 by musicians Rob Garcia, Michel Gentile, and Daniel Kelly, its mission is to operate as “an artist-run non-profit organization that engages the Brooklyn community with world-class jazz performances and educational events.” They maintain two resident ensembles, the trio WORKS and the seven-piece chamber ensemble Wide Open. Over the years, they have presented nearly three hundred concerts, master classes, and workshops, and collaborated with great contemporaries like Joe Lovano and the late Joseph Jarman.

An initiative of the last decade has been the series “Me, Myself and Eye,” solo performances by progressive musicians held at Park Slope’s artist-run space 440 Gallery. This month, on February 16, the guitarist Anders Nilsson will perform. Memorably described by fellow guitarist Marc Ribot as “Blind Willie Johnson meets Bernard Hermann,” the Swedish-born Nilsson pulls from diverse sources to created shimmering, dark soundscapes. And the series is welcome for presenting innovative performers in a gallery context, drawing on the natural alliance between art and music.

But you have to wonder how long these sorts of grassroots endeavors can last if the Manhattanization of Brooklyn continues apace. Anonymous glass towers have already maligned the waterfront from the Brooklyn Bridge up to Long Island City, and there’s no sign of this spread slowing down or stopping. Yes, neighborhoods change, but there has to be some thought given to what makes the borough special, or its essential character will be obliterated.

This all serves as a sad reminder of the fight over the project once known as Atlantic Yards, now rechristened Pacific Park. In its original incarnation, this was a Robert Moses-level exercise in hubris, with sixteen massive sixty-eighty story buildings planned for the site; it would have made for one of the most densely built square miles in the country. (One astounding moment in the history of disinformation occurred when the development group behind the project, Forest City, printed a fake community newspaper appearing to show support for it.) The group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn took as its mission stopping this travesty and replacing it with something more humane. They fought nobly against the project for years, and were effective in bringing awareness to the situation, but ultimately what slowed the project nearly to a halt was a sluggish economy. Now the rebranded development is filling its imprint on the borough more slowly and at a slightly smaller scale, but with equal disregard for what makes a livable city.

Almost fifty years ago, the Canadian scholar Edward Relph published a book called Place and Placelessness in which he examined the kinds of institutions—shopping malls, convenience stores, fast food chains—that degrade the landscape by removing any sense of meaningful context. We all recognize the pervasive presence of these non-places, but used to think New York was somehow immune to them. But they are creeping in at an alarming rate.

Cities have the ability to provide a strong sense of connection, to combat placelessness, provided that what makes them distinctive doesn’t get blanched out of existence. In that way, they share something important with music. What I have always loved about music is the sense of deep connection it provides. In its recorded presentation, we can merge into its disembodied form and enlarge ourselves. In its live form, we gain an even stronger connection—sharing space with molecules of sound is simply irreplaceable.

With a frightening new presidential administration in place, one that is openly hostile to New York City, it is more important than ever to heed the advice to think globally, but act locally. If you don’t like chain stores, shop at a local greengrocer instead, if you can find one. And if you’re tired of the crazy fees and impersonality associated with huge music presenters like Live Nation, patronize local clubs instead. You’ll be preserving local culture and getting better offerings in the bargain. Because the real Brooklyn isn’t just a set of markers we fondly remember, but someplace we create together. And the strong sense of connection to Brooklyn many of us feel is rooted in many qualities, from the heterogeneity and creativity found across the borough to the beauty of its streets and neighborhoods. That is the place we are proud to call home, and our affection for it allows us to link its storied past with the hope for a livable, thriving future.