Alexander McQuilkin
Sep 5, 2018 · 4 min read

What color is change in New York City’s most conservative district?

In 1652, Dutch traders “purchased” from local Indians a plot of what would eventually be a part of south Brooklyn on New York harbor just inside the narrows. Just like the mythical purchase of Manhattan island, the story comes to us framed not as a white colonizer annexing a foreign land and brutally displacing its inhabitants, but as a rational real estate transaction, a fitting origin story for a city that would come to be obsessed and defined by its financial prowess.

Last week I met a friend for dinner at a nouveau American restaurant in Bay Ridge that’s been around since the early aughts. As I waited at the bar I took note of the way the older male regulars casually harassed the female staff and how almost everyone seemed to be white, despite what I knew were the neighborhood’s diversity bona fides.

Bay Ridge’s water views and it’s Goldilocks proximity to Manhattan made it a popular place for the rich to erect grand homes in the 19th century. The arrival of the subway in the early years of the 20th century would make it an affordable haven for the eastern and Southern European immigrants that were so reviled at the time but are now just considered plain white Americans.

When my friend arrived we got a table outside, the better to enjoy the late summer sun and observe the evening neighborhood beat. As it often does, our conversation turned to the politics of the day, privilege, gentrification, police brutality, affirmative action.

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, despite displacing hundreds of families during its construction in the 1960s, would become both a literal and cultural link between the neighborhood and the forgotten borough, the suburban borough, for a while the fastest growing borough, the only red borough in a militantly blue metropolis: Staten Island.

An old Chinese man approached us with a handful of those thin DVD packages and asked if we’d like to buy any. It’s thrilling — the juxtaposition, sometimes clash, sometimes serendipity that can occur when bourgeois plein air dining runs up against some of the grittier realities of street life in the big city.

I shook my head, “no thank you,” but the next woman who got his offer shouted him away with vile, racist accusations and threats. I wanted to stand up for him, tell her to mind her own business, and give the poor hustler a break. But instead I took a nervous sip of wine and silently resumed my place on the haute patio of privilege.

Movies like Dog Day Afternoon (shot in Windsor Terrace in 1975) and Saturday Night Fever (Bay Ridge, 1978) helped solidify and perpetuate an image of south Brooklyn as a scrappy, desperate redoubt of white city life in the era of white flight, urban decay and New York City’s fiscal collapse. All mafiosi, blue collars, petty crime, clapboard siding and a healthy dose of red sauce.

An older Hispanic man and his daughter stood around a parked minivan while a black man came and went every once in a while with big bags. Shamefully, I wondered what kind of illegal shenanigans they were engaged in. Watching something on her smart phone in the back seat, the daughter discarded chicken bones into the gutter. Seeing my glaring disdain, the father motioned to her to stop, and kicked the bones out of sight under the van. Whoops, by now their shenanigans were clear: they were picking up dirty laundry and delivering washed and folded bundles.

South Brooklyn’s image of itself as a vanilla middle class enclave was shaken perhaps less by foreign immigration (of a more colorful variety this time: Arab, Latino, Chinese), which happened slowly beginning in the 1980s, than by the influx of richer white outsiders from elsewhere in the city and country, which happened quickly starting in the 2000s. In 2014, Business Insider announced the yuppie invasion in terms so brash it’s hard to imagine it giving the same treatment to a story about gentrification in a non-white neighborhood.

For a while there was a couple seated next to us and from time to time I would look over and try to read them. The young man had a beige-ish, indistinct complexion. They may have been on a date, I couldn’t make out any of their conversation but apparently we were audible enough for them. While she was in the bathroom, and he was getting up to go, he leaned into my friend and said, “I hope one day I can be as comfortable in my privilege as you are.”

This November, voters in New York’s 11th congressional district will choose between Democrat Max Rose, a Purple Heart-earning Afghanistan veteran, and incumbent Republican Dan Donovan, the Trump-endorsed former District Attorney who argued against homicide charges for the police officer charged with Eric Garner’s strangulation death in 2014.

Back on the terrace on 3rd Avenue, locals were expressing their politics in more personal ways. The 19th century Parisian sidewalk cafe was a place to experience and be a part of outdoor urban life, a street theater at once both indulgent and democratic. But in Bay ridge in 2018, dining on a sidewalk cafe, discussing police brutality and crime in the abstract felt too much like a self-indulgent display of white privilege, an affront to the delicate coalition being forged between the neighborhood’s older white immigrant descendants and the newer, darker immigrants proper. A thin, transparent membrane between classes that feels particularly penetrable in the dog days of summer.