THE PRICE
This is what we see: Brooklyn changing, constantly, loudly, intrusively. Seismically.
This is what we don’t see, or hear when we feel ourselves not as beneficiaries of all that remarkable change, but on the receiving end: the price.
The price is exacted, at turns, subtly, and overtly. But it’s there when graffiti artists in Bushwick sue a shoe designer for using their work as the backdrop for an ad campaign that screams: edgy.
It’s there in the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Midwood where two generations battle for a vision of the future in their enclosed world.
It’s there in the shadow of the Barclays Center, where activists who long ago lost the battle to stop Atlantic Yards still throw “seed bombs” into construction lots in the hope that sunflowers will bloom.
It’s there in Bay Ridge where longtime residents pine for life as they choose to remember it in “Old Brooklyn.”
This week The Brooklyn Ink will introduce you to the people — many of them your neighbors — who are trying to sort through all the change taking place around them, and the price they feel themselves paying.
Change is messy.
It comes at a price.
We’ll make the journey by subway, following the lines that reach across the borough. We’ll begin with the L train, with stops in Bushwick, Greenpoint, and Williamsburg
Chapter One: The L train — the noxious symbol of Girls and oat milk lattes — transports the rider and subsequent reader to places far more revealing than assumption would lead to believe. From artists at war in the streets and the courtroom, from therapists at the limit to the struggle between churches to survive, this swath of Brooklyn contains much more than what your friends Instagram at Sunday brunch.
Chapter Two: The A and C lines run from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Rockaways. Today, we’re stopping in Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. We’re going to return to a home unrecognized, walk a block simmering with friction, and visit two neighboring schools that occupy completely different worlds. These are neighborhoods that have undergone sweeping transformations over the past decade, but the price of change is often paid most dearly by those who have been around the longest.
Chapter Three: The R train rattles along from Brooklyn Heights to Bay Ridge. It stops in Gowanus, where the oligarchical Kushner family seeks to grow their fortunes. It spits you out a block away from an infamous Irish bar in Sunset Park. And at the end of the line in Bay Ridge, old Brooklynites strive to remember a past that isn’t real.
Please stand clear of the closing doors.
Chapter Four: The Q line runs all the way from Dekalb Avenue to Brighton Beach in Coney Island. We're stopping at Atlantic Avenue, in the shadow of the Barclays Center, where a group of activists is fighting the intrusion into their lives of the giant Pacific Park development. Then onto Avenue J, to Midwood, home to the insular world of Orthodox Jews, which is seeing two generations clash over their respective visions of a future bound by faith.
Chapter Five: The J, M, and Z subway lines run from the Williamsburg Bridge to East New York. Today we’re stopping in Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. We’re going to see hipsters, Hasidim, and Hispanics pin their aspirational hopes on a lottery, residents fighting eviction after putting years of labor into an urban farm, and a thriving church where members are expected to pledge both ten percent of their income and their unwavering loyalty. Residents are being priced out of their neighborhoods but give everything they have left to hold onto a sense of home. For them, home is a shiny new apartment, a community garden, or a charismatic church.
