Unexpected in Brooklyn

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The Traveling Writer Explores the Unexpected in Brooklyn

By Norma Jaeger Hopcraft

I mentioned in my last post that I had seen baseball caps all over France and Barcelona that had "Brooklyn" emblazoned across them. Seeing "Brooklyn" proudly worn in Europe influenced my expectations.

So, what did I expect?

I expected a world-class city. I expected pride amongst its citizens that they were living in a world-renowned city. I expected Brooklyn to be fun, picturesque, engaging, artsy.

Not in my immediate neighborhood. It's called Prospect Park South. If you zoom in on the southern edge of the park closely enough, that name will appear. If you zoom out, it disappears and the area gets covered by a much less classy-sounding name, Flatbush.

I did not expect to see a home reminiscent of a southern plantation in Brooklyn. But it's there! Looks as though someone went in search of the American Dream and found it.

Church Avenue is the main artery through Prospect Park South. It's one-lane each way, so it's not as divisive as a four-lane road would be. In my neighborhood, Church Avenue is lined on both sides with small shops: liquor store (of course), many small grocery/deli stores, most of which specialize in Caribbean products like swords of aloe vera, cans of coconut milk, piles of jack fruit, mangoes, avocados, jars of guava jelly. 

There are shoe stores, watch repair shops like my friend Abida's (from Pakistan), beauty supplies, wigs, barbershops, hair braiding shops galore. There's a Duane Reade pharmacy, several branches of big-name banks, a cut-rate department store, and a natural foods market trying to ride the wave as the area gentrifies.

I'm a gentrifier, though I don't want to be. I'm in Brooklyn because I work for a non-profit and the rent is cheap -- at least it was two years ago, not anymore -- and I snapped up the apartment within an hour of it hitting the listings. There isn't a studio apartment anywhere in Manhattan, where I'd rather live, that rents for less than $2,000 a month. Rents in my neighborhood are surging toward that level, and the black folks who've been there decades are being forced out as white young people realize the rents aren't too bad.

The blacks who've lived here for decades, relegated to broom jobs and Starbucks jobs and $10 per hour health aide jobs, can't keep up. I'm not sure where they go. Down South? Farther out in Brooklyn, in the vast swaths of it that have no park, no subway? Where the commute must be done by bus, which takes far longer, is more stop-and-go in street traffic, is far more stressful.

Before I moved there, I pictured a Brooklyn that felt artsy, happy, more relaxed than Manhattan. Instead, the atmosphere in my neighborhood is pungent with fear of not making rent that month. I haven't found any fellow writers, even though I advertised a new writers group at the local library for six months. Maybe people don't have time to write when they work 10 hours a day in 12-day stretches, as home health aides have to. The black women of my neighborhood are keeping the elderly rich in Manhattan alive. And soon these women will have to commute far longer to keep their jobs with their already impossibly-long days and weeks.

So the atmosphere isn't creative and artsy and full of possibility in my neighborhood. Instead, it's full of anxiety and, yes, a touch of resentment. Doors have been closed to these folks because they've been judged on the color of their skin. They see a little white woman powering off to her 7.5-hour-a-day, 5-days-a-week job, and the atmosphere gets a little bitter. 

And I see such a waste of human potential. Black young men stand and talk in groups on the sidewalk. They are clever enough to run a company, run a country. But the education system failed them, and racism thwarts them, and they grew up knowing there was no money for college and not much chance of ever being anything but poor.

I want to say to the people I pass, people looking down at the sidewalk, sad expressions on their faces, or faces shut down from any feeling: Don't give up. Keep trying. You can overcome -- just look at how the Internet can't tell the color of your skin. You can do things to change the trajectory of your life. 

But I truly don't know how many times they've been knocked down, denied, doors slammed. So I just keep doing my best at my writing and working and praying for racist attitudes to change, for the education system to improve, for doors to open to more people of color.

So I didn't get the artsy atmosphere that I expected. I didn't get the more relaxed atmosphere than Manhattan I expected. 

I do get to live in a "pre-war building." Mine was built in 1920 and probably was a very elegant, high-end place back then. I have parquet floors, high ceilings, big windows -- though my windows face the courtyard and just look out on other windows and gray brick.

To see sky from my apartment, I have to look out the window, up, and to the left. I think I had expected to gaze at a tree from my window. No such thing.

There's a neighborhood near me I'd like to show you next. It's called Ditmas Park, and it too is part of Flatbush.

I did not expect to see anything like it in Brooklyn. 

It's full of beautifully built houses. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder, tight together on plots barely bigger than the houses themselves. But they are so elegant, so beautiful. I walk by them on my way to my favorite café, for a lavender latte, and feel so happy that such beautiful houses exist, and exist in Brooklyn, and exist near my home. And I feel so happy that I'm not responsible for taking care of one, paying for heat, electricity, roofing, repairs. But these houses are eye candy for me. How about you?

If money were no object and I could afford to own and keep up a home like this, my writing room would be on the third floor in the little round room.

Tara, anyone?

Maybe my writing room would be on the second floor, behind the bay window. On nice days I'd sit outside on the upstairs porch.

The details in these homes are beautiful! See the dentated, curved molding above the curved bay windows? See the scaffolding holding up the left corner? We're talking big dollars...

How gorgeous! I envy them the porch to sit on. 

How about you? Do this kind of house appeal to you? Comment below! And Retweet this post if you enjoyed it!