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The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York

Amazon.com Price:  $21.21 (as of 02/05/2019 20:42 PST- Details)

Description

Regarded as one of the vital city’s most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had turn into a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation. Challenging the conventional wisdom that New York City’s renaissance started in the 1990s, Osman locates the origins of gentrification in Brooklyn in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Gentrification started as a grassroots movement led by young and idealistic white college graduates looking for “authenticity” and life out of doors the burgeoning suburbs. Where postwar city leaders championed slum clearance and modern architecture, “brownstoners” (as they known as themselves) fought for a new romantic urban ideal that celebrated historic buildings, industrial lofts and traditional ethnic neighborhoods as a refuge from an increasingly more technocratic society. Osman examines the emergence of a “slow-growth” progressive coalition as brownstoners joined with poorer residents to battle city planners and local machine politicians. But as brownstoners migrated into poorer areas, race and class tensions emerged, and by the 1980s, as newspapers parodied yuppies and anti-gentrification activists marched through increasingly more expensive neighborhoods, brownstoners debated whether their seek for authenticity had been a success or failure.

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