Monday, March 19, 2007

Diatribe of the Day: "I Hate Brooklyn"

Where would we be without a Live Journal diatribe about Brooklyn from time to time? Here's the latest one we came across, called "I Hate Brooklyn" from someone that goes by the name of redstripe. (And this is by no means the only entry on the page that might elicit a strong response from some.) We'll copy and past a couple of choice tidbits:
I couldn't pinpoint my blind hatred for this borough until now. After all, I'm the kind of person you'd expect to move to Brooklyn. A student, a transplant from a bumfuck state, quirky...if one overlooked my strong distaste for white girls my age, my conservative leanings, and my thirst for chaos and danger, it wouldn't be difficult to picture me sharing a railroad apartment in Williamsburg with Jennifer, an NYU English major from Oregon, and Michelle, a psychology grad student from Texas.

It's the pinnacle of NYC stereotype and inconvenience. It's almost as expensive as Manhattan, yet most of the borough feels remote, desolate, isolated...but there's an organic deli on every corner, and the bars serve PBR! PBR in a can!

Gentrification in Harlem is fought tooth and nail by the community and met with hostility; in Brooklyn, it seems almost universally undisputed. They welcome the Ikea in Redhook. They push the Prospect Heights boundaries back and begin consuming Crown Heights. Trashy Gowanus becomes Boerum Hill, where studios routinely fetch $1500/month. Block by block, they gut and renovate the buildings in Bed Stuy. And no one says shit.

Soon enough, it'll be nothing more than a homogeneous landmass of typical middle class Americans who would be upper middle class if they hadn't chosen to live in one of the most complicated, exorbitantly expensive, prestige-driven cities in the world. That there are fewer chain establishments here than in Manhattan gives Brooklyn "character", but it's a facade...Or, you know, maybe I'm just not hip enough. I miss the Bronx. It was largely nasty and isolated, but you expect it. Shit, I was paying $1000/month for a 1300 square foot apartment with utilities included. And the 2/5 may have taken a motherfucking hour to get downtown, but I always had a seat.
Hard to know where to begin, so we won't, because we know Brooklyn readers will have plenty of opinions.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Uh, who cares?

9:26 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

that's really an "i love brooklyn" diatribe dressed up (or down as the case may be) to look like an "i hate brooklyn" rant.

it's definitely ALL TRUE. that and more.
brooklyn is starting to suck. but so is the entire city. we're all just tourists trapped in the gotham Cyclone (caveat, rejoinder, qualifier: not the original Cyclone, but the vastly inferior reconstituted new Coney Island Thorclone, dba The Cyclone.)

10:11 AM  
Blogger Richard said...

Brooklyn is a big place. Ride one bus line that bisects the borough -- say, the B-46 (Utica Avenue), the B-41 (Flatbush Avenue), the B-6 (Bay Parkway/Avenue J) or the B-35 (Church Avenue) -- and you can spend hours seeing many places and sitting (or standing) with Brooklynites who don't know what PBR is, don't know what blogs are, and have never heard the word "hipster." Most them aren't young and most of them aren't white.

8:17 PM  

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