The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back

(Paperback)

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Featured in The New York Times Book Review

Only a few decades ago, the Brooklyn stereotype well known to Americans was typified by television programs such as The Honeymooners and Welcome Back, Kottercomedies about working-class sensibilities, deprivation, and struggles. Today, the borough across the East River from Manhattan is home to trendsetters, celebrities, and enough 1 percenters to draw the Occupy Wall Street protests across the Brooklyn Bridge. Tres Brooklyn, has become a compliment among gourmands in Parisian restaurants. In The New Brooklyn, Kay Hymowitz chronicles the dramatic transformation of the once crumbling borough. Devoting separate chapters to Park Slope, Williamsburg, Bed Stuy and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Hymowitz identifies the government policies and young, educated white and black middle class enclaves responsible for creating thousands of new businesses, safe and lively streets, and one of the most desirable urban environments in the world.

Exploring Brownsville, the growing Chinatown of Sunset Park, and Caribbean Canarsie, Hymowitz also wrestles with the question of whether the boroughs new wealth can lift up long disadvantaged minorities, and the current generation of immigrants, many of whom will need more skills than their predecessors to thrive in a postindustrial economy.

The New Brooklyns portraits of dramatic urban transformation, and its sometimes controversial effects, offers prescriptions relevant to phoenix cities coming back to life across the United States and beyond its borders.

Reviews

Kay Hymowitz offers a nuanced defense of gentrification as a process of creative destruction, one that results in winners and losers (although sometimes in unanticipated ways). . . . That said, I really enjoyed this book. She tells a good story, one that cannot be ignored, even if I do not particularly agree with the conclusions she draws from her story. She has given me a lot to think about and offered some interesting hypotheses to pursue more rigorously. * Journal of Urban Affairs *
The New Brooklyn deftly narrates these familiar developments through personal history, on-the-ground reporting and a close reading of the scholarly literature. * The Wall Street Journal *

[H]er descriptive prose disproves the thesis that a picture is worth a thousand words.... Two chapters cover 19th-century Brooklyn industry's rise and fall, necessary to establishing land-use patterns and the inventory of local architecture. Six case studies argue for the diversity and interdependence of gentrification; Park Slope's urban homesteaders find recreation and artistic objects among creative people in Williamsburg, who grow their businesses in the revived industrial space of the Navy Yard. Three chapters argue for the importance of class over race and of value systems over all: Sunset Park's education-minded Chinese and Bedford-Stuyvesant's black professionals belong among the gentrifying forces, but black Brownsville remains the eternal ghetto. Hymowitz argues that gentrification displaces fewer people than is generally thought and improves life for the poor who are able to remain.....

Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries.

* Choice Reviews *
[T]his story of What It Takes To Bring a City Back, to quote the book's subtitle, is a good and true account for Park Slope.... [The]chapters about Sunset Park and Bedford-Stuyvesant are informative. * Reason *
"Hymowitz presents a temporal and geographic tour de force examination of one of NYCs most storied neighborhoods, Brooklyn. In nine chapters, using a mixture of popular and scholarly sources, Hymowitz describes Brooklyn as it was (the Borough of Homes and Churches) and as it is (the Coolest City on the Planet). She also describes the social, economic, political and cultural changes, collectively gentrification, that will (presumably) shape its future. . . . The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back is a readable, understandable and interesting book [and] should appeal to anyone interested in contemporary American cities and urban life. * The Pennsylvania Geographer *
Brooklyn was long a magnet for immigrants and migrants wanting to pursue the American dream. Now, after harsh decades, Brooklyn is back. In her new book, Kay Hymowitz shows how the old Brooklyn bloomed and wilted and now how the New Brooklyn - both its gentrified, poor, and immigrant neighborhoods - is thriving and struggling in its place. -- Michael Barone, American Enterprise Institute, author of Shaping our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics, and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics
Kay Hymowitz knows Brooklyn: what it was, what it is and what's been sustained, added and lost in its remarkable transformation. The New Brooklyn goes past nostalgia and branding to deliver closely observed insights into what the actual place has become, how it got there and why it matters. -- Harry Siegel, New York Daily News columnist, Daily Beast senior editor and lifelong Brooklynite

Author Bio

Kay S. Hymowitz is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She is the author of 4 books including Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age, Liberation's Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age, and Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys. She has resided in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York since 1982.