Hipsters v. Yuppies, Another Manufactured Conflict

From the Gothamist, a piece on a silly New York Observer article pitting Williamsburg, which as we know is all hipsters all the time, against Park Slope, which is of course full of yuppies with $1000 strollers and Ivy League educations.

None of the elite streaming out of Manhattan and over the pretty bridge to the mirror world on the other side want to live on St. Marks Place. But what do they want exactly? Brooklyn isn’t a united front. The North Brooklyn of do-it-yourself fashion and vinyl siding (Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick) just feels separate from brownstone South Brooklyn (from Fort Greene to Park Slope). South Brooklyn is rich and pretty; North is rougher-edged and moody. “I’m firmly committed to the notion that there’s an unbridgeable divide,” said a 27-year-old Bushwick resident, who explained that he even feels this way about “literary-minded, quasi-hipsters” like himself who live in the nether regions of the Hills and Slopes and Heights. “I’ve always felt deeply uncomfortable in Park Slope. And for everything that’s hateable about Williamsburg, I have this feeling that they’re my people.”

Well, except that you live in Bushwick, dude. Which means that you bear the same kind of relationship to Williamsburg as I, a resident of Kensington/East Windsor Terrace/Whatever We’re Calling It Now, do to Park Slope — close, but no cigar.

The next paragraph of the Observer piece reads like the kind of thing a rockbound Manhattanite would write about Brooklyn, meaning that the writer may very well have friends with brownstones or lofts in these neighborhoods, but she rarely actually goes to visit, so she thinks that of course the rest of the ‘hood looks like her circle of friends:

Of course, all of gentrified Brooklyn is somewhat similar. It’s mostly white. It’s mostly partial to some form of indie rock. Refugees from small colleges like Vassar and Wesleyan may trudge North; shiny Ivy Leaguers could prefer the South—but the bottom line is that they all attended fancy colleges. Southerners reluctantly fork over deceptively low salaries for DVF dresses and Paper, Denim, Whatever jeans; Northern chicks would rather jump off the Williamsburg Bridge than wear something they didn’t iron on themselves. But in the end, they all care a lot about what they wear.

I’ve spent a lot more time in the Slope than I have in Williamsburg, and to this I say: you’re full of shit. They “all” have degrees from “fancy colleges?” They “all” care “a lot” about what they wear? Who is this “all” you speak of? I could just as easily conclude, from observing the people from the Slope that I know, that they “all” have dogs and they “all” dress comfortably and casually. Or that they’re “all” hippies who belong to the Food Co-Op (they don’t call it the People’s Republic of Park Slope for nothin’). Because those are the people that *I* know.

It’s very easy to look at current real estate prices (which are ridiculous in both Williamsburg and the Slope, which is why white people are moving into Bushwick, and my part of Kensington is changing from a very ethnically mixed, middle-class neighborhood to a younger, whiter and more affluent one) and assume, if one is a lazy writer, that “everybody” who lives in the neighborhood bought their place or rents their place for that price, and that that is reflective of their lifestyle and values. But just as with any neighborhood, there are a hell of a lot of people who have lived there prior to the real estate bubble and who therefore don’t fit the nice little narrative of someone who seems to think that these neighborhoods didn’t exist until “the elite stream[ed] out of Manhattan and over the pretty bridge to the mirror world on the other side.”

And somehow, the Atlantic Yards development is responsible for the divide between Williamsburg and Park Slope, even though it’s nowhere near either.

So why can’t they get along? It might be that development, from Ratnerville to waterfront condos, newly threatens the borough’s beloved low-rise lifestyle. The gentrifiers are being gentrified. Even Heath Ledger has stood up and declared, Not in my three-car garage! And like citizens of the Holy Roman Empire, Brooklyn residents turn in on each other, clinging to the rapidly eroding identities of their neighborhoods in a desperate bid for that increasingly rare New York commodity: personal authenticity.

Atlantic Yards is an abomination. Seriously, it’s hideous, Frank Gehry or no Frank Gehry. It’s utterly out of scale with the neighborhoods around it, which are indeed low-rise. And it was stuffed down the throat of Brooklyn because politicians got cozy with the developer, Brett Ratner. The point of it is to bring the Nets into Brooklyn, but nobody cared if the Nets came to Brooklyn; they did care that long-time residents and businesses were moved out to make way for these ugly buildings. As for waterfront condos, that’s Red Hook, which was nothing but industrial before. But somehow, this is Heath Ledger’s fault?

Maybe it’s fun for Manhattanites to impose cute little civil-war narratives on Brooklyn, secure in the knowledge that *they* would never cross the bridge and that their friends *must* have the same kind of neighborhood v. neighborhood rivalries that they do. But honestly, I don’t really think that much about Williamsburg. It’s not terribly convenient for me to go there, and while it would have been convenient to work, it’s a little long on cutesy boutiques and bars and a little light on grocery stores and dry cleaners for me to seriously consider living there. Plus, I can’t afford it, “fancy” education or no.