You gotta have a homebase : strategies for survival in a constantly changing Brooklyn neighborhood.

You Gotta

Have A

HomeBase

Strategies for Survival

In a Constantly Changing Brooklyn

Neighborhood

Neri de Kramer

Masters thesis

University of Amsterdam

July 2001

SCR 7056

I'd take a guy a lifetime

To know Brooklyn t'roo an t'roo. And even den, yuh

Wouldn't know it all.

Introduction

Groups and Methods

Chapter 1. Carroll Gardens A word about Brooklyn

Carroll Garden Some figures Some history

Chapter 2. Changes and Images

Contents

Chapter 3. Strategies for survival Italians Older newcomers Latest newcomers Summing Up Conclusion Appendix Notes References 4 9

15

Introduction

Cities constantly change. According to historian Mike Wallace, author of

Gotham, the history of New York City is: " ... nothing if not a history of endless re-composition and transformation and it's usually people in flight from somewhere else and trying to sustain some sort of bastion, which never holds."

This applies perfectly to the borough of Brooklyn, the quintessential immigrant city. It also applies perfectly to Carroll Gardens, an Italian

neighborhood in Brooklyn that, iike many other neighborhoods in many other modern cities, is in a constant state of flux. This thesis is about how people try to sustain some sort of bastion in a constantly changing neighborhood.

When I was getting settled into Carroll Gardens in May of 1999, going for strolls, exploring its boundaries, finding the best places to shop, eat and do laundry, I automatically got to know the people and was struck by their talkative nature. This was not what I expected when I came to New York. Everywhere I went, people talked to me: the baker, the butcher, the deli owner, everybody.

Typically, the conversations would go as follows: First, it was

established that I was new in the neighborhood, then I was asked where I was from, then I was welcomed into the neighborhood and the conversations invariably ended with an exposition on the recent and not-so-recent changes in the neighborhood. People seemed to be figuring out aloud what was

happening to their neighborhood.

The changes they talked about were typically: the massive flow of newcomers to the neighborhood, the exploding real estate prices and rents, the disappearance of large Italian families, the emergence of many new restaurants, and the arrival of tourists in the area.

Developments like this are generally recognized as outcomes of

gentrification. Very broadly speaking, this refers to the process in which old working-class neighborhoods are transformed into wealthy middle-class neighborhoods (Smith and Williams 1986). It is a widespread development in neighborhoods throughout the world, SoHo being perhaps the most famous

example. Gentrification can be seen as the local, highly visible outcome of large economic, social and political developments in advanced capitalist societies. I will discuss some of these developments in the second chapter. The process is dynamic and different in every locality, which makes a definition difficult.

Despite this academic problem, however, Carroll Gardens' residents gladly accepted the term. In ordinary, daily life, the term proved suitable to give the changes in the neighborhood a name and a meaning. Above all, the concept is symbolically important, and the theoretical meaning less relevant:

"In the public media, gentrification has been presented as the preeminent symbol of the larger urban redevelopment that is taking place. Its symbolic importance far outweighs its real importance ... " (Smith & Williams 1986: 19).

The fact that the changes were such a hot conversation topic is in and of itself nothing new. Changes are interesting. That which is always the same is not. And since cities are always changing, city-dwellers are always talking about changes. What was different in Carroll Gardens, however, was that people did not agree on the nature and the effects of the changes and told me very conflicting stories. When I also discovered that what people thought was happening in Carroll Gardens not always corresponded with official facts and figures, I decided to make these contradictions the focus of my research.

This topic then was practically handed to me by the people I lived amongst. From these chats with local storeowners, the conversations I overheard in the neighborhood's public places, and the reports in the local and national press, my research quickly materialized. I started by uncovering the various meanings the neighborhood has for its different groups of

residents, which partially explained the contradicting stories. My next task was to discover the function of these stories.

In the pages to follow, I will show that Carroll Gardens' residents have created images of the neighborhood in which they themselves play a crucial role, an image that proves their unique entitlement to the neighborhood. I will argue that this creation of an image is one of the strategies city-dwellers

employ in their attempts to ward off the constant threat of having to move out of their homes. Besides this social strategy, residents also employ economic and political strategies to ensure their position in the

neighborhood. Economically, people can brace themselves against the threat of having to move out by taking actions such as buying their homes, renting out rooms, and by adapting their business to the changes in the

neighborhood. Politically, they can brace themselves by becoming active in the community board, founding advocacy groups, organizing appeals against rent raising landlords and so forth.

Of the three kinds of strategies people have at their disposal, the use of imagery interests me the most. However, the idea that people create an image of their urban environment is not new. Urban sociologist Anselm Strauss argues in his book, Images of the American City, that: "The city, as a whole, is inaccessible to the imagination unless it can be reduced and simplified" (1976: 8). Therefore, a need exists for symbolic representations of cities to order all its spatial, historical and social characteristics and all the

experiences and impressions it has to offer. "The city ... sets problems of meaning. The streets, the people, the buildings, and the changing scenes do not come already labeled. They require explanation and interpretation" (1976: 12).

Clearly, not everybody explains and interprets what he sees in similar ways. Strauss argues that everybody defines his own relation with the city and that symbolic representations of the same city can be contradictory, just like a characterization of a person can be paradoxical. Furthermore, these various personal representations are dynamic and are constantly adapted to changing circumstances.

Kevin Lynch begins his book, The Image of the City, 1 with the same idea that personal images of the city vary: "The environment suggests distinctions and relations, and the observer -with great adaptability and in the light of his own purposes- selects, organizes and endows with meaning what he sees .... Thus the image of a given reality may vary significantly between different observers" (Lynch 1960: 6).

matters. "Each individual creates and bears his own image, but there seems to be substantial agreement among members of the same group" (Lynch 1960: 7). Urban images are related to the way the urban environment is used and this usage, in turn, is related to social class and cultural background. Or "lifestyle": "Ordinarily, the identifying characterization of any particular city, and the symbolic implications of that characterization for the quality of life it represents, are picked up, more or less incidentally, by each resident as he works out his personal "lifestyle" in that city" (Strauss 1976: 5).

Furthermore, since an image is built up as a result of all past

experiences of the possessor of the image (Boulding in Spradley 1972: 43), the urban image is also related to residential history. In his doctoral thesis on the appreciation of the city, Stefan Metaal explains that preferences for certain urban locations are both directly and indirectly related to educational and professional trajectories. Directly, since the trajectories of educations and professions to some degree determine where somebody will live, (universities are typically in cities for example) thus influencing the

residential history (Metaal 1998). Indirectly, since education and profession, together with social and cultural background, lie at the base of a person's

habitus: a set of unconscious dispositions that precede and influence the judgment of taste (Bourdieu 1984: 101-102, 170).

Metaal explains that, according to the symbolic-interactionists, all meaning stems from empirical life and that both the trajectories of education and occupations, as well as residential history, can be viewed as a long series of empirical encounters. During these encounters people "store" the required unwritten rules and regulations as sets of memories that are being used to shape future perceptions and interpretations. Consequently, the

perceptions and meanings of the city stem from the actual encounters in both the physical and social domains people have dwelled in, as well as from the educational and professional trajectories that led to these encounters (Metaal 1998: 44).

It is not possible to understand how people live in cities without understanding how they think about them. In order to function, people make certain images of their world and the theories I mentioned above help explain

where these images come from. The residents of Carroll Gardens perceive, use and symbolize their neighborhood in different ways and I found clear evidence for the idea that a neighborhood is not only a physical and historical entity, but also a symbolic construction.

The above theories don't account for the tension I discovered in Carroll Gardens however. I would like to go on by saying that these images are not static, but subject to change, just like the city is and that they are used in dealing with that constant urban change. The central premise of this thesis is that the images people make of themselves and their neighborhood are used as tools to maintain the bastion I mentioned earlier. By creating a (n imaginary) role for themselves in the neighborhood, residents strengthen their position vis-a-vis each other.

Chapter one starts off with a description of Carroll Gardens, some statistics, and some history.

In chapter two, I describe and explain the changes that took place in the neighborhood after World War Two. I relate these changes to the more general economic and social developments that affected many cities in the western world during the last 50 years. Chapter two is also about the image and popularity of Carroll Gardens and the influence of local organizations and the written media on this image. I use restaurants as indicators of the most recent changes in the neighborhood.

Chapter three forms the body of this paper. Here, I introduce the data I collected and demonstrate the strategies residents use in attempts to maintain their position in the neighborhood.

This is followed by the conclusion, which in turn is followed by an appendix. The appendix can be used as a reference throughout the text. It

consists of a list of my informants and is intended for the confused reader who has trouble telling all these people apart.

Before all that, let me start with introducing the groups of

neighborhood residents I included in my research and by saying a few words on methodology.

Groups and Methods

The methods I relied on were observation and the recording of casual conversations, formal interviews, a survey, local and national media, the little amount of statistical (census) data I found on Carroll Gardens, and the files from the Brooklyn Public library.

The spontaneous statements I collected on the streets, in the stores and in the coffee shops proved valuable for the formulating of the questions for the formal interviews. This way, I mitigated the effects of my own set of expectations on my informants.

Robert Park, the reporter who turned ethnographer in Chicago in the sixties, and who laid the foundations of urban sociology, inspired me to use the media as a research-tool. Like him, I started my research as a reporter, trying to find out what was news in my community. That which makes it into the papers is apparently of interest to the readers, which makes the media a good way to start an ethnographic investigation.

Unfortunately, it hasn't been possible to include all cultural or ethnic groups in the research. It is clear that Brooklyn is not a homogeneous socio-cultural unit, and Carroll Gardens isn't either. In Carroll Gardens, there are people of many different nationalities and people with ancestors from

various countries.

Urban communities contain distinct sub cultural groups which share many similar cultural forms and appear to live in the same

environment.. .. But if culture involves the forms people have in mind, the fact that people share the "same" urban environment and

institutions may obscure important cultural differences .... The

underlying values, attributes, and meanings which each group assigns to urban life must be discovered if we are to do justice to the

pluralistic nature of the city. (Spradley 1972: 238)

The findings in this thesis are derived from the residents that were most involved in the neighborhood, most concerned about its changes and hence most accessible. I divided these people in three groups: Italians and Italian-Americans2, older newcomers and latest newcomers. Since I started off with studying the Italian community, the bulk of information is derived from them. It should be clear that these three groups are not clean-cut, because

people don't tend to fit into neat categories. It should also be clear that these are no "official demographic" groups as recognized by the census, but

unofficial groups recognized by me, as well as by Carroll Gardens' residents. I used three criteria for the identification of these three groups: I looked for similarities in demographic situation, I looked for the existence of social networks, and finally and most importantly, I listened to how my neighbors defined themselves and each other.

I figured that if I wanted to present the insider's point of view of Carroll Gardens, I had to use the sub..,cultural distinctions the insider makes. Although there is no exact agreement on who belongs to which category, I do believe that the di vision presented here reflects the insider's model of the social world that is his neighborhood. By following and using the

distinctions the people under study use themselves, I avoided making the mistake of imposing my own set of perceived characteristics on the people I lived amongst. This is what Conklin has warned against:

We should like especially to avoid the pitfalls of ( 1) translation-labeling analysis, wherein the units are provided not by the culture studied but by the meta-language given before the investigation begins; (2) translation-domain analysis, wherein the boundaries and

establishment of larger contexts are similarly provided by prior agreement instead of by ethnographic investigation." (Conklin in: Spradley, 1972: 239)

Most of the Italians and Italian-Americans I got to know were either

operating their local business or retired longshoremen. I met them in Carroll Garden's stores, on the corners of certain streets where they would hang out, and in the senior citizens center. Interviews I held in an Italian coffee shop and in the senior citizens center. The storeowners and the people I met on the street were at first not aware of the fact that I was doing research and was making mental notes of our conversations. I didn't inform them until later, when I started conducting formal interviews. I did inform the seniors about my project right away because I had to explain my presence in the senior citizens center.

American residents who moved into the neighborhood anywhere between 5 to 15 years ago. I met most of them in a coffee shop on Smith Street where I came to drink my morning coffee or afternoon tea and I established a modest network when I started working there. It was here where most of the

conversations with this group of older newcomers took place. Initially, I didn't tell most people about my research but later I had to reveal my motives when I decided to do a survey among "my" customers.

The customers that patronized the cafe were not a homogenous group of people, for the cafe was an inviting place that welcomed everybody and it was conveniently located on Smith Street, one block from the subway

station. The survey showed that the average age of the 178 steady customers that filled out my questionnaire was 33 and the average amount of years spent living in Carroll Gardens was 7. Eighty-nine percent of the respondents were white and the majority were employed in the arts, education, or

publishing.

The reason these people dominated in the cafe probably had to do with the nature of these professions. Because many of them were self-employed or worked on a free-lance basis, many worked from home and had flexible

hours. Consequently, these people were in the neighborhood most of the day, not stuck in an office, and came to the cafe to meet people like themselves.

The third group I included in my research were the young people my age who recently moved to the area. Most of them were just out of college and were starting their professional careers in Manhattan. I met them through my roommates and would engage in conversations with them when they

visited our apartment, at parties or when going out. My roommates in their turn had met their friends in the neighborhood gym and through each other. Without my roommates' networks, it would have been difficult to become acquainted with this group of later newcomers since they were not as social as the Italians and not as eager to talk as the older newcomers. These young people don't hang out on the streets like the Italians do, and even though some of them would come to the cafe; this was not to socialize as they usually ordered their coffees to go.

constitute a representative sample of the population of Carroll Gardens. However, these residents made and make their mark on the neighborhood most emphatically, these people were most visible. Despite this

incompleteness, the different images these three groups have of the

neighborhood are interesting and provide enough evidence for the idea that a neighborhood is a symbolic construction that must constantly be reinvented.

People I met frequently but didn't establish a relationship with were Korean deli- and Chinese restaurant owners. Although the people in these establishments recognized me after a while, I never got into conversations with them, mainly because of the language barrier. Economically, they must be an important part of the neighborhood and the presence of their

restaurants is as much a sign of change and an indicator for the presence of groups of people like myself as are the new trendy restaurants on Smith Street. They seemed to be a socially self-sufficient ethnic group and they were not engaged in the dynamics of the neighborhood. Consequently, I don't know much about this ethnic group, which I regret because I think they are an important and interesting group of people and I would have liked to discover their perception of Carroll Gardens.

Another group of people I couldn't include in my research were the people of Hispanic origin. They, too were present in the neighborhood, but even less visible than the Koreans, who at least had the counters in their shops and restaurants. Despite this, I did discover the existence of a Hispanic subculture in Carroll Gardens. Although they didn't establish themselves as such, they did organize themselves. I discovered it by accident: across from my apartment was a building, with a "Members Only" sign on the door. Since the door was always closed and the adjoining windows were covered with layers of foil, it was impossible to look inside and I had just figured it was one of the abandoned Italian social clubs I had been reading about. However, one evening, leaning out of my window, I was surprised to see that the door was open and that there was loud Spanish music coming from inside. It turned out to be a Hispanic social club that was opened every day, but because it was so well insulated and covered it didn't have much influence on the neighborhood' s look or character. Although I made friends with the

owner and barman, the building was sold before I could start working on my Hispanic network. With the closing of the social club went my connection with the Hispanic population of Carroll Gardens. I would have liked to find out what this bar meant for the people that patronized it and how important it was in Carroll Gardens' Hispanic social life, but I didn't have the time or the opportunity to find out.

MAPS

Northwest part of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan

Carroll Gardens

Chapter 1 - Carroll Gardens

The communities studied by anthropologists are not isolated entities. They are part of a larger geographical and historical whole. An anthropologist who takes himself seriously should take this larger whole into account if he wants to understand his community and find out what factors helped shape it. So, as a good anthropologist should, I will start off with

A word about Brooklyn

Brooklyn is a classic. It has a global identity. Thinking of Brooklyn, powerful images pop to mind: The Brooklyn Bridge, Coney Island, Spike Lee, the Dodgers, and so forth.

Brooklyn is also huge, if it wouldn't have merged into New York City a hundred years ago, it would now be, with its 2.23 million inhabitants, the fourth largest city of the United States. And if the United States is a nation of immigrants, Brooklyn is America's quintessential hometown. Brooklyn would be the most diverse city of the United States; over 150 nationalities reside in this borough and one out of four Americans can trace their roots to Brooklyn.

No wonder it speaks to the imagination. But although prevalent, a lot of the images used to represent Brooklyn are outdated. Brooklyn is not just glorifying its past, on the contrary: according to Brooklyn! A soup-to-nuts guide to sights, neighborhoods, and restaurants: "Brooklyn's back. It's hip. And it's hot." And indeed, as Manhattan is getting more and more expensive, Brooklyn seizes its opportunity. Horne of major cultural institutions like the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Brooklyn

Botanic Garden, a legion of restaurants, a thriving downtown area, and various well-known shopping strips; Brooklyn is a city in its own right.

I was often told that Brooklyn is more "authentic" than Manhattan: "If you want to study real New York, go to Brooklyn". And indeed, it seems that Brooklyn is where it all happens now: priced out of Manhattan, beginning artists flock to Brooklyn, forming their own communities, the best hiphop

comes from Brooklyn, Brooklyn just founded its own Restaurant Association and so forth. For a while now, Brooklyn has been spotted and is closely watched by the popular media and New Yorkers in general, yet in academia not much has been written about what is going on in Brooklyn.

Carroll Gardens

Carroll Gardens is a friendly-looking, mainly residential neighborhood in the part of Brooklyn that is called South-Brooklyn. The F-train stops at two places in the neighborhood and takes you to Manhattan in about 20 minutes. The neighborhood is bounded on the south by the Gowanus Canal, and by the major transport routes the Brooklyn-Queens-Expressway on the west and the Gowanus-Hamilton-Expressway on the east. In the north, Carroll Gardens adjoins the neighborhoods Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill. (See map.)

It is a di verse and reasonably well-off neighborhood. Its houses and gardens are well kept and trash is picked up when it should. Depending upon the time of day, there are mothers, fathers, and nannies with strollers

walking up and down the streets or sitting in the park, kids hanging out by themselves, older Italian men standing on the corners of certain streets talking. The traffic is concentrated on two of the neighborhoods north-south streets: Smith and Court Streets. These streets also form the commercial heart of the neighborhood. Most of the older, Italian business is found on Court Street, while the new business in the area generally opens up on Smith Street. The other streets in the neighborhood are mainly residential, with an occasional deli or coffee shop on a corner.

Some figures

Carroll Gardens forms, together with the surrounding neighborhoods Columbia Terrace, Gowanus, Park Slope, Red Hook and Cobble Hill, the Community District number six.

According to the 1990 census information, 12.54 percent of the total number of residents in Community District six lived in Carroll Gardens. This

brings the total population of Carroll Gardens to 12,883 in 1990. The number of households totaled 6,080 and the median household income was $37 ,026. The percentage of unemployed residents was 6.5 in 1990 and the percentage foreign-born residents 16.14. fo the entire Community District six, the

percentage of the population with Italian ancestors was 19 .1 in 1980 and 14.1 in 1990. Another large group is of Irish descent. However, in ten years a lot can change and as I write this, the new data are not yet available. The 1990 census data do not reflect 1999 Brooklyn.

The median price of a town house in Carroll Gardens today is

$500,000. According to Jean Austin of Brooklyn Bridge Reality: "One family homes range from $325,000 to $750,000, while two-family houses cost from $350,000 to $850,000. A three-family house starts at around $300,000 and goes to about $700,000. Price increases averaged 4 to 5 percent in the early 90' s, and then rose sharply beginning in mid-1996. The median sale price in 1997 was $400,000; in the first quarter of 1998, it was $500,000." (The New York Times, 5-3-95, updated May 1998.)

Some history

Like much of Brooklyn, the Dutch originally settled Carroll Gardens in the 1600's. It was not a separate neighborhood then, but part of a larger whole called South-Brooklyn, which referred to the southern portion of Breukelen: one of the six original villages established by the Dutch. South-Brooklyn included the neighborhoods we now know as Cobble Hill, Columbia District, Gowanus, Park Slope and Red Hook.

By 1846, according to the Long Island Historical Society, its residents were the wealthy and middle-class, who lived in older, custom-designed homes. The brownstones, the row houses that are so typical of this

neighborhood, were built after the Civil War. Carroll Gardens' browns tortes are usually three to four stories high with a short flight of steps to the front door. Most are 16 to 25 feet wide and 40 to 50 feet deep on a 100-foot lot (Jeanette Jeames: A History of Carroll Gardens 1970).

waterfront. From the turn of the twentieth century the Brooklyn docks provided jobs for the Irish immigrants who came to Brooklyn in search of a better future. About fifteen years later, Italian immigrants arrived in waves on the Brooklyn shore.

The relationship between the two ethnic groups was everything but friendly and the stories about their battle for control over the neighborhood are still being told till this day. The Italians proved stronger: church by church they fought their way up, taking over the neighborhoo.d from the Irish. And although the Italians are diminishing in number, Carroll Gardens is still the second largest Italian enclave in Brooklyn, the largest being Bensonhurst, which is truly Brooklyn' s little Italy.

Since the Italians established themselves in the area, they have been in control of the waterfront. They founded their own dockworkers union: the Italian Longshoremen Association. It is said that the notorious Gambino crime family controlled the waterfront and the union, and continues to do so till this very day. As a consequence, the stories about the life at the docks hint at the area's rough and corrupt past and are told with some secrecy. Roberto, one of the older Italians in the neighborhood, remembered that one was never sure whether one could work on a given day: "In the morning, you had to get down to the ILA's hiring hall, and if the guy that was distributing the work liked you, you had the job for the day. We had to load and unload ships. Often fruit. During the day, when we were carrying the boxes of fruit on our backs, stuff would fall off. This fruit was collected and at the end of the day it had grown into a big pile. In the evening, the foreman's son would come driving up the docks in his big Mercedes to pick up the fruit which he sold in his fruit stand."

Due to global transformations in the production system, and the labor saving device of containerization, the economic significance of the

waterfront has declined, leaving the Brooklyn docks largely quiet and abandoned by 1990. This development had its effects on the entire borough of Brooklyn and the economy of New York City. The consequences are

specifically felt in this part of Brooklyn, for here the docks were not only the economic, but also the social base of the community. The ILA was in charge

of the social life of the community, not only by organizing the work but also by providing other services on the side like a hospital and a day care center. The waterfront and the union provided meaning and a sense of belonging for those who had left everything behind to make a new start in America.

Carroll Gardens used to be an Italian neighborhood, known as much for its rough-and-tumble as its rows of nicely kept homes. It was a tight-knit community where the little old ladies in black leaned out the brownstone windows and knew everything that went on in the street. Fathers and sons worked at the nearby docks. The strikes, the graft, the ups and downs of the longshoremen, whose union is still located here at Court Street, wasn't just a story in the newspaper, it was often a very personal matter, sometimes of life and death. (Brooklyn! A soup-to-nuts-gufde to sights, neighborhoods and restaurants: 1999)

There is still a small group of people who cling to this now almost mythical past. They are among the senior citizens who still strongly identify with the waterfront and each other. The past might be gone and the docks may be quiet, but thanks to them, the image remains.

This then constitutes one of Carroll Garden's images. As time went by the economics of Carroll Gardens continued to change. Several groups of newcomers have moved in and out of Carroll Gardens in a constant flow, making and leaving their marks on the neighborhood. By moving in, these various newcomers not merely altered, but added to the neighborhoods' history and imagery, making it more complex and diverse and helping to create the contested meanings this thesis is about.

In the next chapter we will look more closely at the changes that took place in Carroll Gardens after World War Two. However, some of these changes that seem factual, economic and historic, are sources of contention in themselves, as we will see in Chapter 3. Besides this, we will discuss the various images of Carroll Gardens and the role community based

Chapter Two - Changes and Images

After World War Two, a lot started to change in the American urban

landscape. Large numbers of blacks from the South started moving into the cities of the North and an immigration flow of people of Hispanic origin, most notably Puerto Ricans, got under way to the cities on the continent. A lot of American cities suffered under this sudden influx of poor people to their centers, the most notorious examples being Detroit and Cleveland.

Carroll Gardens was originally a section of Red Hook, and in the fifties and sixiies, housing projects were built in this area to intercept the large groups of immigrants. In South-Brooklyn, as in many cities, these developments were perceived as threats and initiated an outflow of white, middle class residents to the suburbs. This outflow was spurred by the construction of new roads to the suburbs and by federal mortgage programs that made new homes available to young families. When the Verrazano

Bridge opened in 1964, many Italians from Carroll Gardens took off to Staten Island, which is now a vast Italian encampment.

In 1964, partly in response to this flight, neighborhood residents formed an organization to improve the area and to keep the successful second-generation Italians from moving. It was called the Carroll Gardens Association and one of its goals was to differentiate Carroll Gardens from the surrounding, troubled neighborhoods where the projects were located. Their first step was to rename the area and when the construction of the Brooklyn-Queens-Expressway in the sixties physically cut the neighborhood off from Red Hook, the neighborhood with the bad reputation, it was

officially named Carroll Gardens.

"Carroll" refers to Charles Carroll from Maryland. He was the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, and leader of the Maryland regiment that defended the "Old Stone House at Gowanus", a local landmark, against the British in the Revolutionary War. "Gardens" refers to the unusually deep front-gardens in the neighborhood, designed by landscape architect Richard Butts, and to the fact that many houses have both front and rear gardens.

In his chapter on varieties on American urban symbolism, Strauss discusses the rural symbolism that played a role in the city-country dichotomy a few decades ago. While there have always been people who think of cities as valuable cultural places, centers of opportunity and

diversity, in the sixties, the dominant conception of cities was one of sites of demoralization, artificiality, crime and vice. "Rural life'', on the other hand: "is slow and unhurried. People are friendly and their relationships are

informal, yet orderly. The agricultural population is homogeneous in custom and culture, if not in racial stock .... The very physical surroundings are healthy, home-like, restful, not dense with population" (1976:108).

This rural imagery was sometimes applied to cities in attempts to make them sound more attractive. For instance: " ... 'city of gardens' arouses

connotations smacking of outdoor life, suggestions of qualities bred in close contact with the soil, of urbanites living a life of relaxation" (1976: 109).

Likewise, the name Carroll Gardens has a friendly and safe

connotation. It evokes an image of a quiet, green, village-like neighborhood, which is the effect the Carroll Gardens Association had in mind. To

illustrate, the following passage is from a brochu-re from the Carroll Gardens Association from the sixties:

Carroll Gardens, noted for its brownstone ambiance, is an Italian-American, family oriented community liberally sprinkled with Mom and Pop stores. It possesses a small town atmosphere within an urban setting where knowing one's neighbors is the norm. There exists in Carroll Gardens a continuity, from past to present, that is rarely encountered in New York -truly a neighborhood of deep roots, close family ties and a strong sense of traditional values.

The name and image change worked, for the brownstone movement came under way in Carroll Gardens. The first wave of newcomers to the area was comprised of young, middle class and upper middle class couples looking to buy a home. "All of a sudden doctors were moving in," said Mr. Scotto, founder and president of the Carroll Gardens Association, "We were used to poor Italian immigrants and these brownstoners were something different. They came from Ohio, Wisconsin, God knows where. They didn't have families or church ties here" ("If you' re thinking of Ii ving in: Carroll

Gardens". The New York Times: 8-5-1983).

They were attracted by Carroll Garden's affordability, centrality, and architecture. Their interest in the brownstones made the cost of a brownstone escalate to the point that the young second-generation Italian-American couples that wanted to stay were now unable to afford to do so.

This evoked frustration and attempts by some neighborhood residents to undo this favorable, charming Old World image of Carroll Gardens. The most prominent one is Juliana, who, according to some long term residents regularly tried to provoke the Carroll Gardens history walking tour

participants by showing up along the route wearing a t-shirt that said: "It

ain't Carroll Gardens, it is Red Hook". Michael: "She would show up as a guerilla community activist trying to counter the relatively newly

constructed image of the area as safe and different from the past. She tried to counter pose this image that is inherent to the name change with an older image that still has potency. She seemed to be trying to say: "Don't kid yourself, you can still get axed up here."

The influx of newcomers continued. After this first wave of historic preservationists in the early sixties, several waves of newcomers have been replacing each other in an almost constant flow till this day.

The flow was interrupted in the seventies, when a national economic crisis took its toll on many American cities. Inflation, unemployment, drug abuse, and a new wave of poor immigrants threatened the quality of life in Brooklyn as seriously as it did in other American cities.

In an attempt to safeguard the newly constructed positive image of the neighborhood, Scotto and his Carroll Gardens Association managed to have part of the neighborhood declared an historic landmark by the Landmark Preservation Commission in 1973. But business and real estate investments slowed down anyway, as well as the stream of young professionals moving into the neighborhood. The lack of big housing projects prevented Carroll Gardens from turning into a danger zone like such Brooklyn neighborhoods as Flat Bush or Bedford Stuyvesant, but the urban crisis was felt,

... despite its calm appearance, the problems of 20th century living have not entirely bypassed Carroll Gardens, ... as Scotto sees it, the problems facing New Yorkers today are so complex that the family is no longer a viable problem-solver. Like most New Yorkers, Carroll Gardens'

Italians don't have any family antidotes that can be pulled out of the cupboard to stop the increasing usage of drugs by their teenagers, to head off the raging inflation and unemployment causing a dent in their pocketbooks, or to seal off the deteriorating waterfront which sits a few blocks away. ("No one lives in Brooklyn. They live in

neighborhoods". Sunday News June 16, 1974)

This waterfront provided excellent living- and studio space for beginning artists, however. Artists can often be found in unusual housing because of their specific needs: accommodations should be cheap because artists typically have no money, it should have plenty of space and light, and it should be relatively close to the urban art scenes were they'll most likely sell their work.

In her book Loft Living (1982) Sharon Zukin traces the rise of the market in residential lofts in SoHo in the sixties and seventies. She points out that during this time artists were aided in their specific housing needs by big- time real estate investors and city officials. The economic recession created major job losses in New York City, and the transition from the industrial to the post-industrial city had left them with a lot of invaluable and unused manufacturing space like lofts and warehouses.

Conversions like these took place in many cities throughout the United States, and usually resulted in the social and economic upheaval of the

neighborhood, with middle class residents moving in. Consequently, artists have often been portrayed as adventurous pioneer-gentrifiers but Zukin shows that this widespread conversion of former manufacturing space into residential- and cultural production space would not have been possible without the circumstances in the economy nor without the strategic help of investors and city officials who were likely to profit from these conversions and the consequent upgrading of urban neighborhoods.

Some of these developments in SoHo spilled over to Brooklyn during the early eighties, on the fringes of Carroll Gardens, on Columbia Street and also in Red Hook, simply because there was only so much room for real

estate conversion in SoHo. The economic significance of the waterfront in Carroll Gardens started to decline as early as the seventies, leaving many of the warehouses on the waterfront vacant and available for conversion into housing and studios to accommodate New York City's growing artist community.

Zukin goes on to explain that as soon as these developers and investors could bank on their conversions, the artists in SoHo were abandoned. In response, artists in SoHo mobilized to ward off the threats of the people with power in the real estate market. Likewise, Carroll Gardens witnessed the formation of a small artist community and some of the newcomers from that time still live in the area. They still organize their free exhibit every year in Red Hook, on the water, on the piers in front of their homes and studios.

The economic, social and spatial restructuring of cities throughout the modern western world is related to the transition from the industrial to the postindustrial economy. In their introduction to the book Dual City (1991), Manuel Castells and John Mollenkopf sum up the transformations in the worldwide capitalist system that underly the origin of the postindustrial city: a major technological revolution, the formation of a new international

division of labor, the growing importance of finance versus manufacturing, the spatial concentration of global financial markets, the growth of global telecommunications networks, and the migration from third world

industrializing nations to the core cities of the first.

These developments changed the composition of the labor force in metropolises like New York City. Typical urban professions of today are managers, attorneys and accountants. The effect this shift to service employment had on Brooklyn was twofold: In the first place, Brooklyn started to function as a spillover place for Manhattan by offering attractive living space for the rapidly growing professional class. "The expanding professional class created a new demand for housing. This led to an increase in condominiums, the conversion of manufacturing loft space in Manhattan and the gentrification of 19th century brownstone neighborhoods" (Castells and Mollenkopf: 1991: 8). Clearly, Carroll Gardens was one of these

area from the eighties on. This resulted in raising rents and real estate and the consequent displacement of a part of the traditional blue-collar Italian-American residents, many of whom moved to Staten Island. Plenty of

residents were not happy to see many of these new people with money move in. Henry, the owner of the coffee shop I worked in and loyal exhibitor of local artists complained: "Any rent increase causes a big change of people and that has happened I don't know how many times now. With each

successive turnover you get less of those people like artists and more

established people with money. This last wave of newcomers can't afford the rents in :Manhattan anymore but are willing to pay the rents they used to pay in Manhattan here in Carroll Gardens. So those people are the very people that you run into at Starbucks and that you can't stand waiting on."

Secondly, Brooklyn's own industrial base changed. The members of the new middle class are not only producers, but also consumers of the new

service industry and they created a demand for services like dry cleaners, video stores and restaurants in the neighborhoods they moved into. These demands are reflected in Brooklyn's economic base. By April 1999, the docks were out of use, but the Brooklyn Restaurant Association was launched:

It was announced today that the Brooklyn Restaurant Association devoted to greater awareness of the diversified dining out

opportunities that Brooklyn offers will officially launch this month .... Perceived as the coming together of one of the nations most unusual and creative groups of eateries, the association will afford its members a broader base of public as well as national and international media attention. The efforts of the Brooklyn Restaurant Association will entice and encourage the public to explore the culinary diversity of Brooklyn .... The first for Brooklyn, the 4 th largest city in the nation and

the world's ultimate melting pot, will create a new dimension for its community. (press release Brooklyn Restaurant Association 8-4 1999)

It is this emergence of middle-class residents and consumer services in former working-class, brownstone neighborhoods that has come to be known as gentrification. Since the sixties, gentrification has received a lot of

attention from urban sociologists, geographers and planners who are engaged in an ongoing debate about the origins and definition of the process. 3 I do not

about urban change in general terms, without giving it a too specific, or fashionable name. 4 Worldwide developments may have comparable effects on different cities; the outcomes of these developments will ultimately vary in every locality.

Not in the least because in many neighborhoods change has directly resulted from local initiatives. As we have seen, this was also the case in Carroll Gardens, where a few individuals united in the Carroll Gardens Association worked hard to protect their neighborhood from the trouble that was surrounding it. And where an organization called the South Brooklyn Development Association with a grant from the city government economically helped notorious Smith Street, turning it from a dump into the commercial heart of the area.

Smith Street was an area that seriously suffered from economic crisis in the seventies. Until well into the eighties, Smith

Street Smith Street

remained unable to turn the bustle in the rest of the neighborhood into an economic advantage. The bad condition of the sidewalks, the 27% vacancy rate, the illegal activities like pit bull breeding, gambling and prostitution that took place in some of the buildings and the hanging out on the corners gave Smith Street a seedy look and feel. Consequently, the newcomers to the area passed right by Smith Street to go shopping someplace else.

When in the early eighties the city government was beginning to invest in neighborhood economic development and started to give grants to retail strips, Smith Street received its share. In 1984, the South Brooklyn Local Development Corporation received a grant for the renovation of a 1.4 mile stretch of Smith Street. The grant offered ten million dollars for repavement,

fa~ade improvement and rebates to owners who would improve their

property.

Now, 16 years later, Smith Street is known as one of Brooklyn's hippest streets: business exploded, bringing the vacancy rate down to zero. And with all the stores and restaurants came lots of foot traffic on the reconstructed sidewalks. Without the revitalization program, Smith Street will eventually have profited from the real estate boom around the corner, but probably not to this degree. (source: South Brooklyn Local Development Corporation)

Today, when people talk about the gentrification of Carroll Gardens, they mainly refer to this recent outburst of economic development on Smith Street, for it is here that the change is most manifest. It is particularly the restaurants that are discussed and described. As a result of their high visibility, restaurants have become the icons of gentrification. Not just in Carroll Gardens, but in changing urban neighborhoods all over the world, in the media and by the man in the street, restaurants and gentrification are always wedded.

Smith Street was a prosperous commercial strip once, but it declined in the 50's. Now, with Manhattan real estate values soaring and Carroll Gardens filling with professionals, it is on the rise again. Since June, six new shops and restaurants, most with a Manhattan sensibility, have opened on a four-block stretch from President to Douglas Streets. Up the block is Patois, a French bistro that opened two months ago. With its red banquettes and tiled floors, it is the kind of new restaurant that is becoming popular in the East Village and SoHo. (The New York Times 8-2-1998)

New restaurants, stores and spirit are making Smith Street a vibrant shoppers paradise. Come now, before the crowds - and Starbucks franchises- follow. Fifth A venue. The great white way. Park. Lex. Madison. And, we now bring you, Smith. Yes, Smith Street, across the river and beyond the grime - in Brooklyn. It is the next hip, happening

retail boom .... It's new moniker: Little Restaurant Row. (The Daily

News: 5-3-1999)

Smith Street has unaccountably emerged as the borough's most

innovative, exciting restaurant row. (New York Magazine 15- 7-1999)

Juliana: "I think, and you may quote me on this, that the gentrification has had an adverse effect on our neighborhood. Why? Because who needs restaurants? What we need is a vet."

For urban reporters it has always made sense to write about restaurants and grocery stores, because they make up the street scene and since "you are what you eat" these businesses give a quick sense of a neighborhood' s ethnic, social and economic

composition. For me,

restaurants were important in my study because it was in my neighborhood's

restaurants, coffee shops, deli's and bakeries where I met everybody, which convinced me that food really is the best tool to get to know people.

Restaurants are Pasta at Vinny's

particularly interesting places of study today for the complex role they play in the postindustrial city. Restaurants not only serve, but also employ the

members of the new service economy. They are meeting places for the expanding white-collar middle class and employ the minorities previously employed in unskilled manufacturing labor. For immigrants, restaurants have

expanding white-collar middle class and employ the minorities previously employed in unskilled manufacturing labor. For immigrants, restaurants have provided the cultural opportunity to blend in and the economic opportunity to move on.

As indicators, restaurants can teach us a lot about the city as a whole, but restaurants are also agents of urban change. For example, restaurants are sites where "the local reproduction of global cultures takes place". With this, Sharon Zukin (1995) means the evolutionary process that characterizes the modern city in the course of which foreign styles and products introduced by immigrants are being adapted to local taste, thus creating something new. Brooklyn, the ultimate melting pot, would be a good place to study this process.5

In Carroll Gardens, the way in which the new restaurant scene actively altered the social life of the neighborhood is through the use of public space. The new restaurants on the streets of Carroll Gardens are much more "open" than the more traditional Italian restaurants in the area. Most of the new restaurants have sidewalk terraces, folding doors and big windows as

opposed to the Italian restaurants, which are often difficult to look into. The occupation of the public sidewalk by diners is an example of the increasing "privatization of urban public space" (the use of public space for what used to be considered private purposes) that characterizes the modern cityscape (Zukin 1995). By offering a stage and a scenario for the display of a modern lifestyle that includes cell phones and sidewalk dining, the modern

restaurants have introduced a new public culture in Carroll Gardens and contributed to the safety on the streets.

Fairly suddenly then, Carroll Gardens became trendy. This did not mean that the neighborhood' s older stores and restaurants vanished in the air, but old and new businesses came to exist next to each other. In the next chapter we will see how the Italian businesses have incorporated both "old" and "new" Carroll Gardens by adapting to the needs and demands of the new residents, while at the same time staying true to their Italian customers. Likewise, the neighborhood' s young population and trendy-ness did not mean that Carroll Gardens' nostalgic, authentic image was no longer valid. Like

the businesses, these two images are not mutually exclusive but exist next to each other instead. And just as the new restaurants are used to describe new and trendy Carroll Gardens, so are the old restaurants used to describe the old and authentic feel of the neighborhood. For dining is not only trendy, food is also a powerful way to stay in touch with the past. Food brings back memories.

Carroll Gardens has long had a strong Italian-American flavor, and that flavor is still very much in evidence. Court Street, the area's

commercial district has more Italian restaurants and pizza stores per square inch than almost any other New York neighborhood. Residents and business people in the neighborhood talk about food followed by a culinary walking tour by the neighborhood's best restaurants and

stores. (The New York Times: 6-7-1995)

For those who know Brooklyn, a trip to this quiet small area a third of a square mile is usually motivated by a craving for that New York sense of "real Italian." Freshly made Italian food -the taste of fresh pasta sauce and soft, warm mozzarella, the aroma of coffee newly roasted in an old cast-iron roaster is an allure ... Homey Carroll Gardens retains a palpable sense of ethnic community. (Brooklyn! A soup to nuts guide to sights, neighborhoods, and restaurants 1999:

134)

"Authenticity" and the sense of continuity happen to be very important for today's middle class. In Carroll Gardens, it is the older newcomers who particularly care about this image of Carroll Gardens as a neighborhood with history, which "authentic Italian food" evokes. In the next chapter, we will further explore the power of this middle class ideal when we discuss the different meanings Carroll Gardens has for its residents. I will show how my neighbors use a variety of imagery in attempts to maintain their entitlement to, and position in this constantly changing neighborhood.

Chapter Three - Strategies for Survival

Let's recall historian Mike Wallace's summation of the history of New York City from the introduction: "[the history of New York City is] ... nothing if not a history of endless re-composition and transformation and it's usually people in flight from somewhere else and trying to sustain some sort of bastion, which never holds." The reason why people so desperately try to sustain a bastion is an important topic in anthropology. To have a home base is a fundamental human need. Not for nothing is moving ranked second in the list of most traumatic human experiences, directly following the loss of a family member in the first degree. Clearly, somewhere in between the hunter-gatherers and the present, people have developed attachments to space.

In New York City specifically, location is an issue. As Saul Bellow wrote: "What is barely hinted at in other cities is condensed and enlarged in New York" (in Mollenkopf and Castells 1991: 5). Unless you own your apartment, home is hardly ever a secure place in New York City, and living space here is so hard to cnme by it has become the local obsession. New Yorkers will do anything for an apartment. Two months ago, the decomposed bodies of a young couple were found in trash bags in the Harlem River. The motive? Their Uptown apartment ("Pair charged with murdering tenants to steal their apartments" NYJ News, 5-29-01). Last year, a mother and son were convicted of slowly poisoning an elderly lady, in order to take over her Upper East Side townhouse ("Mom and son make a killing in real estate" The New York Times 18-5-01).

So, given that everybody in Carroll Gardens is trying to sustain a bastion, the central question in this chapter now becomes how. There are different strategies on hand: First, people can economically brace themselves against the threat of having to move out by taking actions such as buying their homes, renting out rooms, and by adapting their business to the changes in the neighborhood. Second, they can politically brace themselves by

becoming active in the community board, founding advocacy groups, organizing appeals against rent raising landlords, etc. Third, they can achieve social power by creating a social role in the neighborhood for

entitlement to Carroll Gardens. This role is created in constant negotiation with the other residents who also want to stay and also need a role. In a way then, there is a kind of battle being fought in Carroll Gardens. A battle about who "belongs" most in the neighborhood.

Of course, these three different sorts of strategies are interrelated. For instance, having a popular neighborhood business automatically creates a social role, and may turn into a political position if the customers are both landlords and renters. Below, I will explain for each group respectively what strategies they use to sustain their bastion in Carroll Gardens. I am most interested in their social construction of the neighborhood, because it is here that I found the intriguing contradictions that led to this thesis. I'll

deconstruct the roles these three groups have created for themselves and we '11 see that people deny those facts and contest those images, which threaten their construction. The more threatened their position, the stronger the contention becomes.

Italians

Tony and one of his Jaguars

The economic strategies the Italians have employed over the years proved successful and the economic position of the ones who are still living in

Carroll Gardens is strong. They are typically

homeowners and many of them rent out rooms. Homeowners in Carroll Gardens have seen the value of their properties multiply over the last twenty years. Rent returns are huge, and a large proportion of the Italian old-timers live much more

comfortably than they did in the old days.

Likewise, there are many (family-owned) Italian businesses in the neighborhood that have been able to multiply their profits by adapting to the demands of the wealthier newcomers to the area. I realize that by the time I arrived in Carroll Gardens, most displacement had already taken place, but I can safely say that the Italian-American storeowners I met were all very successful. The Italian stores and restaurants in Carroll Gardens are doing great. The store owners often don't understand why the new people eat the way they do and would spend the kind of money they do, but they have learned how to turn the new people's eating habits into a profit.

There is a very small group of Italian seniors who Ii ve in rental

apartments and feel economically threatened. They, under the supervision of community activist Juliana, have employed the political strategy of founding an advocacy group in an attempt to protect themselves against the threat of having to move out. It is called Advocates for Senior Housing and received some media attention now and then. Aside from Juliana however, I have not met one member of this group.

The social role of the Italians is also strong. Being the oldest residents, the dinosaurs, they are the providers of the authenticity many transient New Yorkers long for. Consequently, they mostly talk about the old days, stressing their unique knowledge and their position

One of the best examples of a flourishing Italian business is D' Amico Foods on Court Street. Frank D' Amico was one of the first Italian-Americans I met. His store has made one of the most successful adjustments to the

changing times and changing clientele in Carroll Gardens. Fifty years ago, he started with selling one blend of Italian coffee. Today, he sells 53 different blends, has expanded his business with sandwiches, imported cheeses and glossy culinary magazines. He recently made his entrance on the web and now sends his products all over the world. His selection of coffee was praised in the Zagat gourmet marketplace guide. D' Amico Foods is one of the most successful businesses in the neighborhood. As a matter of fact, he is doing so well he could afford to shut the store down for a week in the middle of August to go on vacation. When I interviewed Frank and asked him what

of the changes in Carroll Gardens he said: "I like everything. It has given me a lot of opportunity and business. I worked hard. We 're expanding. We do mail orders now. We're on the web. I am grateful for what Buddy Scotto [the founder and president of the Carroll Gardens Association] has done for this neighborhood. Without him, this would have been a ghetto. Wall Street is developing and because it is prohibitive to live in Manhattan nowadays, all the people from Wall Street are moving in here. And they all want coffee. Coffee is what

they all talk about , these days. Without this gentrification, initiated by Scotto, I wouldn't have had my customers who want good coffee." Another very successful business in the 53 varieties

neighborhood is the Italian restaurant The Red Rose. Also a family business, they recently opened a wine store next door. The restaurant is popular with older Italians but it also draws the younger crowd by offering lighter dishes, more specials, more cocktails and a "Manhattanish wine menu". Andy: "A lot has changed since we opened. Competition has increased dramatically but that's good, it keeps you on your toes. I'm very competitive, that's my Sicilian quality. You see, these new people, they are smarter, they're a lot more involved with food and want to be were things are. So when you have your trends come in, you better go with it. Sometimes I do miss the family atmosphere we used to have here, I have a little bit of it left, but many Italians have moved on, they got older and a lot of them wanted to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. But there are still enough old-timers

around to tell you a story, there's always that little piece. This neighborhood will always be home, it's the smell in the air."

George

I have met only one complaining Italian-American entrepreneur. He wasn't complaining about bad business, however, for

Esposito's pork store has also made a successful

adjustment to the changing demands of its clientele, but he complained about the increased complexity of his work. It

is one of the oldest stores in the neighborhood; Esposito senior opened it in 1929. Today, George Esposito sells a lot more than pork, his sandwiches are well known and it is always busy around lunchtime. George had just bought a yacht and was planning a sailing trip to the Florida Keys when I met him. When I asked George how he had kept the business going he sighed: "It isn't easy. People nowadays are spoiled, they don't want to work, they don't want to cook, they want fast foods, salads, stuff like that. I mean we got potato chips now! This neighborhood has changed, yes, but for the worst, I would say. The work is a lot more complicated now. We used to do just meats, well, foggedaboudit. The store down the street, Tony's, had to close, he did just meats and didn't make it. You just can't make it now with just meat and

chicken. We had to start doing sandwiches. At noon, we 're packed. Everybody wants our sandwiches, cause their good, we make them thick."

George knows what his customers want, he knows how to do it and he is well off, but he doesn't enjoy the extra work, although he does express pride in the popularity of his sandwiches.

In spite of these obvious economic successes, the lifetime residents Ann, Angela, and Rose whom I interviewed in the seniors citizens center told