Demystifying Brooklyn: On Colson Whitehead's New York Times Essay
When I moved to New York City, after a lifetime of longing, I did not look for an apartment in Brooklyn. In my weekly Village Voice and New York Times red-penned trawl, I only circled flats in Manhattan. I had, of course, spent an earlier summer living the highlife on Goldman Sachs' bill in Murray Hill and my sister was living on the Upper West Side but I had mainly been discouraged from settling down in Brooklyn, rather irrationally, by a college friend. Months and months of searching for a clean habitable studio $1250 or less in Manhattan came up wilted roses, so I had to expand my search and, whaddya know, my first venture to Brooklyn-Park Slope to be exact-resulted in finding an absolutely lovely and relatively modern studio in a condo building with elevator and laundry room for just $1225 (to be hiked to $1410 in the second year of the lease). Still in those first few years here, I spent little to no time in my own 'hood. Life was, for me, in the city despite having closely followed the nineties Brooklyn cultural boom or what writer Colson Whitehead deems the "Black Renaissance" and attributes to African Americans Spike Lee and Branford Marsalis and strangely the staunchly Puerto Rican Rosie Perez-whose connection to the African diaspora is as tenuous as it is phenotypically obvious-in a recent New York Times essay. For Whitehead, a Harvard-educated and MacArthur "Genius" Fellow-garnering author who held the late Norman Mailer in his celly's top 5, if I interpreted the essay's name-drop correctly, is unwilling or unable to discern how Brooklyn's brownstone-lined streets could enhance or develop the creative capital of all the journos, bloggers, poets and novelists therein. I may have at onetime shared his cynicism or fear of becoming a cliché but mostly my Manhattan-centrism was practical: My friends lived there, school was there and so was nightlife, Veg-City Diner (RIP), House of Field (RIP) and Otto Tootsi Plohound. It was only after full-time employment, and freelance life that I really attempted to dig my heels into my new Brooklyn haunt, Fort Greene, and I wish I had been more attune to my environs earlier if not for blind-eyed pride or in Whitehead's case, a muted strain of elitism?
Check out Whitehead's essay yourself. Any thoughts?
Tags: Brooklyn, Colson Whitehead, Fort Greene, Writing
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