 |
| Beau Bridges in "The Landlord" (1970) |
The roots of New Brooklyn run deeper than they might appear. In the 1970s, a lot of people wanted out of Brooklyn and very few wanted in. The postwar era had been very kind to the suburbs and the country at large, but not kind at all to the nation’s inner cities. Brooklyn was a particularly dramatic case in point. In the age of the GI Bill, the ranch house, and the automobile, those with the means left crumbling urban infrastructure behind to own a patch of grass in the burbs, and they took their tax dollars with them. They were just living the American dream, but in effect they each kicked a new hole in the floorboards as they escaped a sinking ship.
The Hal Ashby film The Landlord, the L. J. Davis novel A Meaningful Life, and the Paula Fox novel Desperate Characters, all dating from 1970 through ’71, paint a strikingly consistent portrait of Brooklyn at a low ebb. Though widely divergent in tone, they all depict the bleak conditions that held sway at the time, despite being set in what are now high-rent districts. Cars are stripped to the axles in minutes, rocks get hurled through windows, and bums heckle passersby from the shadows.
The protagonists in Ashby, Davis, and Fox, who dive into this mess, are the forerunners of contemporary Brooklyn’s bourgeois and bohemian crowd. They’re the shock troops of gentrification, a word that barely existed at the time. They are well-educated newcomers bucking the larger trend of an ongoing middle-class exodus. They are also, notably, all white. Their neighbors, as a rule, are not. It’s odd to reflect on the fact that the writers behind these works had no idea how this social experiment would turn out. About the prospects of the would-be gentrifier, in fact, they seemed decidedly pessimistic.
(h/t The Dish)
