The list of neighborhoods that lie within Brooklyn’s 33rd City Council district reads like something out of a real estate developer’s wet dream: Greenpoint; parts of Williamsburg including the waterfront and the Southside; Boerum Hill; Downtown Brooklyn; Brooklyn Heights; DUMBO; and Vinegar Hill.

Two wooden boats sit on warehouse-style pallets in the courtyard of the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York. One is stained a sandy red, the other a washed-out seafoam green.

Revolutionary leaders like Lenin and Mao, if they could return today, would find a political left transformed beyond their recognition. While they believed in the absolute truth of their ideas, or at least wrote as if they did, most modern leftists see truth as partly contingent on one’s point of view.

When the community art space ABC No Rio was founded in 1980, its dilapidated building fit in well on the Lower East Side. But the neighborhood has changed around it, and No Rio’s entrance, with its crumbling plaster, rusty gates, and quasi-geological layers of graffiti, no longer has much in common with the chi-chi boutiques, cafes, and art galleries that occupy many of the nearby storefronts today.