Monday, September 1, 2014

This is It, Make No Mistake Where You Are

Grilled salsa chicken with corn on the cob.


Labor Day Weekend, well, Monday actually. Of course I worked the weekend
My neighborhood of Fort Greene in Brooklyn has most of the elements I love about this particular burrough. The stately brownstones, lots of old tall trees, brick houses and elegant but not extravagant apartment buildings, historic architecture, cracked slate sidewalks, diversity-diversity-diversity, small businesses, the best food, amazing food markets, and just enough seediness to allow us to afford one little rathole in it's midst.




But I blinked and within a year, the neighboring downtown area is changing dramatically.
They're building freakin' Noah's Ark over here near Atlantic Center.

There are cranes in the distance almost each direction you look.

Signs with pictures of ghostly giants that may soon block the sun and fill with people that can afford ridiculous rents and have extra income for maintaining that lifestyle, including I imagine loads of dry cleaning, free range chickens, organic locally grown vegetables and drunken cab rides home from the city, up the lavish elevators to to their fabulous views.

And even though downtown Brooklyn has SO much opportunity to grow and was never cute, it's still a little sad seeing all of this new construction happening at once.  Most of these new dwellings are going into empty parking lots.



I guess we do need residential space and people need to be close to the city, so this is practical. It was only a matter of time.  I'm surprised how long downtown Brooklyn stayed so small towny really.

Brooklyn is huge and there is plenty of untapped 'vintage looking' neighborhoods for future non-wealthy imports like us but they'll be in store for a much longer commute.  Crown Heights for example has amazing buildings with incredible detail and wood features, however its still a higher crime area and it's never fun to be the pioneer renter geeks into these areas where maybe rightfully so, they're a bit territorial about keeping the neighborhood as-is because it is true, that's how everyone gets moved out and along. First the landlords see poor schmucks like me will pay a bit higher rents and after they get a whole building of schmucks paying more rent, then pretty soon that building gets sold to some other schmuck that will buy it and put in some renovations to get even more money from newer schmucks and so on and so on.  We've been shoved out of lots of areas this same way.  I'm glad we'll be here to see change here in downtown because it will make leaving that much sweeter someday to finally have been somewhere when it was cool and not 30 years later.

 Veggie egg white scramble.

1 comment:

  1. Well said Food monkey!!! Beautiful pictures

    ReplyDelete

Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone at home?