Casual
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Casual The city. That's what my neighbors and friends in Brooklyn call the borough of Manhattan. As in, "Are you going into the city tonight?" Or, "I had dinner with her in the city." Or, "My...
...Bobos had to dial 10 numbers to reach their city friends, but only seven to speak to the Brooklynites of old who lived in neighborhoods like Ralph Kramden's Bensonhurst and Canarsie, where the notorious "dese, dem, and dose" accent they dreaded their children might inhale with the Kings County air remains the lingua franca...
...Even though most Manhattanites do not partake of the legendary glories of the city—they rarely attend the theater and have never been invited to swank soirees on Park Avenue—they feel weirdly graced just to be in close proximity to them...
...I feel like I'm dying," a friend of mine with a senior position at a newsmagazine and a baby on the way said in the early 1990s when he signed his Park Slope lease...
...I know they know full well that Brooklyn is the city too...
...In population terms, it's the largest of the boroughs, with a million more inhabitants than Manhattan—and the most famous, possessing one of the world's best-known place names...
...Now it was official...
...Everything about Brooklyn was suddenly wonder-ful—the parks, the neighborhood shops, the slower pace, even the long subway ride into the city that allowed you to get through the newspapers before starting the work day...
...They set up food co-ops, progressive nursery schools, and vegetarian restaurants...
...In time, as the cost of living in Manhattan with a family became prohibitive for anyone earning less than $300,000 a year, upper-middle-class New Yorkers who would rather die than move to the suburbs began following the original Bobos across the river...
...The East River may be narrow, but it is wide enough to vitiate that sense of proximity...
...It's no use complaining...
...I wear it with defiant pride on the Brooklyn Bridge as I walk above the East River— and into the city...
...Or, "My dentist is in the city, on 54th Street...
...It's basic black, natch, with the numbers "718" embossed on the front...
...And I have come to understand that the urge to complain is a mark of my newcomer status here...
...My own apartment is about half a mile as the crow flies from Wall Street, separated only by the far-from-mighty body of water called the East River...
...Maybe a little too enthusiastically...
...Williamsburg, which had always been a slum, was now the "new SoHo," with artists and galleries inhabiting formerly industrial space...
...Manhattanites who moved to Brooklyn for their children felt they were going into exile...
...And it's not as though Brooklyn is some distant Connecticut suburb...
...They stripped 80 years of paint from walls and doors, revealing oak panels and elaborate moldings...
...Browse in the fiction section of a Barnes & Noble and you will find an endless number of first novels by glamorous young writers whose dust-jacket bios invariably declare the author's home to be "Brooklyn, New York...
...That feeling only deepened in the early 1980s when the city outgrew the 212 area code, and the boroughs outside Manhattan were assigned the new "718...
...In 1994, the crime rate went into its glorious plunge, and neighborhoods that no middle-class New Yorker would even drive through instantly became Bobo destinations, the new versions of once-raffish Manhattan areas now overrun by investment bankers...
...Existential crises are no fun, and soon enough the angst-ridden new Brooklynites were talking enthusiastically about their new home...
...I moved to Brooklyn almost a year ago, a straggler in the yuppie cross-migration that began 25 years ago when some shaggy survivors of the 1960s discovered that they could house themselves cheaply in the 19th-century mansions lying fallow near Prospect Park in the neighborhood of Park Slope...
...Could one really be a New Yorker and a Brooklynite at the same time, with all that the term "New Yorker" implies...
...My friend who once feared a living death in Brooklyn recently bought me a T-shirt at a Boerum Hill boutique...
...For Brook-lynites as for everybody else in the world, New York City and Manhattan are synonymous...
...Whenever I hear this, I cringe...
...The move was made grudgingly, often provoking an existential crisis...
...They tore down plasterboard and restored their homes to their original Victorian and Edwardian dimensions...
...A no-man's-land called Boerum Hill was the "new East Village," home to tiny, funky restaurants and chic boutiques...
...These days, the six "friends" in the TV series of the same name would doubtless be living in Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens...
...JOHN PODHORETZ...
...This collective act of urban home-steading inaugurated a nationwide trend that came to be called "gentrifica-tion," though another couple of decades would pass before THE WEEKLY STANDARD's own David Brooks (himself once briefly resident in Brooklyn) would find the term juste for the homesteaders and their descendants: "Bobos...
Vol. 6 • May 2001 • No. 33
