Leonard between Ainslie and Devoe

I continue to be...overwhelmed? weirded out? by working in Williamsburg. I continue to be baffled by Williamsburg. Code switching is always fascinating--though I am never sure how much I do switch. I imagine I am seen either as slightly dorky young urban white teacher at my school, or, three blocks away, as slightly dorky aspiring/declining older hipster who now occasionally shops at the Gap (and blogs instead of making zines [?!?!]). Lots of tangents here. The age you are vs. the age you appear, & how the age you appear to be shifts depending on context. Anyway. This is not unrelated to how a grimy not very attractive nearly always working class neighborhood as long as it's been a neighborhood is now a grimy not very attractive somewhat working class and simultaneously grimy not very attractive extremely overpriced hipster neighborhood especially beloved by recent college graduates.

From a section of James Agee's 1939 essay "Brooklyn Is" (more on this fabulous essay to follow) that begins "All the neighborhoods that make up this city; those well known, and those which are indicated on no official map:

"Or Greenpoint and Williamsburg and Bushwick, the wood tenements, bare lots and broken vistas, the balanced weights and images of production and poverty . . . where from many mileages of the jungle of voided land, small factories, smokestacks, tenements, homes of irregular height and spacing, the foci are returned upon the eye, the blown dome and trebled crossage Greek church, and those massive gasoline reservoirs which seem to have more size than any building can: the hard trade avenues, intense with merchandisings of which none is above the taking of the working class: the bridal suites in modernistics veneers and hotcolored plushes, the dark little drugstores with smell like medicine spilled in a phone-booth mouth-piece: the ineffable baroques of gossamer in which little-girl-graduates and Brides of Heaven are clothed: Here and still strongly in Bushwick and persistent too in East New York and Brownsville, there is an enormous number of tall-windowed three- and four-floor wood houses of the fullblown nineteenth century, a style indigenous to Brooklyn, the facades as handsome as anything in the history of American architecture: of these, few have been painted within a decade or more, none are above the rooming house level, most are tenements, all are death-traps to fire: their face is of that half divine nobility which is absorptive of every humiliation, and is increased in each: many more of the tenements are those pallid or yellow bricks which are so much used all over Brooklyn as a mark of poverty: mixed among these many small houses of weathered wood, stucco, roofing: the stucco fronts are often Italian and usually uncolored, suggest nevertheless the rich Italianate washes; some are washed brick red, the joints drawn in white: or the golden oak doors of these neater homes, or the manifold and beautiful frontages of asphaltic shingles...."

He goes on and on. I love "intense with merchandisings"--I picture the dollar stores, the Korean fruit markets, the bodegas with all the candy in the windows that my kids bring in paper bags and eat for breakfast. Swedish fish, individually wrapped, mostly. There are also still plenty of cheap garish furniture stores, though there are fewer little drugstores, and hardly any with counters. But there will probably always be ineffable baroques of gossamer, for little-girl-graduates and Brides of Heaven (cherish and celebrate the graduations you will get to celebrate), also for Quinceañeras. A fabulous ineffable baroque of gossamer on the corner near my school, and a related one up on Grand--with the creepiest vintage mannequins in the window that I do not think have any intended irony to them.

I wonder what Agee would think of the garish plastic siding on so many of the two story buildings that must have replaced the death-traps to fire, with the ugly awnings often over their front door and sometimes over the windows too. But the ugly makes the pretty buildings look prettier, too, of course.

It's so weird to me that this hipster neighborhood is not even bordering but sort of mashed into the neighborhood where I teach, at a school surrounded by projects including the Williamsburg Houses, described by the WPA in 1939 as "the largest slum-clearance and low-rent housing project completed under the Federal Housing program (1939)."

But I started all of this to observe that this afternoon, as I walked up Leonard, from school to Fortunato's Bakery for biscotti, I passed some very small fake flowers carefully set in around a tree growing between sidewalk and street. It's spring. I am generally not a fan of fake flowers in general, but Brooklyn and Queens have brought me to a certain appreciation. I am nearly always opposed when they are enormous and out-of-season, or when it seems like there could be real ones for not a whole lot more work. But tiny fake flower buds in early March are sort of endearing, especially when you know they were probably "planted" by a little old Italian lady.




Footnote: Here's a link to a fascinating typo-ridden article I found when googling Williamsburg projects trying to figure out when they were built, about the "decades-long struggle between the Chasidim and the Hispanics of Williamsburg over access to low-cost public housing." No date on the article. Especially interesting after reading the Agee essay, though, which talks a lot about the huge Jewish population in Brooklyn (according to Agee, one sixteenth of the world's Jews lived in Brooklyn in 1939), but contains maybe just two references to black people (three if you count "the negroid breath of a molasses factory"--is there something to that metaphor that I don't get? A reference of some kind? Or is it just awful?), both concerning white concern over "'the infiltration of Negroes.'"