The Brooklyn tax

After two years in a fourth-floor, absolutely-no-frills walk-up in Brooklyn, I've moved on up to a lower Manhattan elevator building, to an apartment of the same size as the old one, but with laundry on the same floor, and with a dishwasher. A dishwasher. I haven't used it yet, on account of still needing to unpack my dishes, but soon, soon.

How did this happen? Did I sell out, abandoning grad school for something sensible? Ha! Did the recession benefit sad little renters like myself after all? Not so much - in none of the many, many neighborhoods in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn I looked into did it appear that rents had gone down - if anything did change, it was the creativity of scammers, which has skyrocketed. Astoria remains a dishwasher-free zone, and the Village is still a place where the proximity of bars is supposed to make $20,000 a month seem reasonable for a hovel too small to fit more than a twin bed and a vial of whatever drug makes people think such apartments are a good idea.

Yet I'm paying neither more nor less than I was in Brooklyn. I attribute this to the fact that with my old place, around the corner from the Food Co-op and across from the most precious cheese shop known to man (albeit one I went to all the time, because, cheese), the money that might have gone to quality-of-life concerns such as dishwasher-laundry-proximity to school instead went to the Brooklundian Mystique. I have to face facts that I was paying for the privilege of living in an outer borough whose ethos perfectly matches that of our moment, a privilege I never saw as such, and consequently that I'm glad to be rid of.

I used to think Brooklynites who claim they wouldn't trade for Manhattan if given the chance were just being defensive, claiming to enjoy the slow pace and small scale and women in practical shoes while secretly pining to get back where the action was. With some, no doubt that's the case, but Brooklyn, hip since I don't know, the late 1990s? earlier still?, is today above all so very now. Brooklyn is helicopter parenting. Brooklyn is Obamania. Brooklyn is local-sustainable. Brooklyn is ostentatiously rejecting modernity while benefiting from whichever aspects of it you see fit. Brooklyn is wealth posing as poverty. New Yorkers often stand accused of thinking themselves at the center of the universe, but today's Brooklynites can't be faulted for seeing their own experience as basically the dominant culture of 2009 America but more so.

But which Brooklynites? Surely not all. The 'new' Brooklyn, the one of - pardon the clichés - recent elite-college grads; moms who couldn't imagine feeding their kids non-organic milk; artsy drifters with family money (trust-funds or otherwise), is often said to be just a tiny, if well-publicized, corridor in a huge and diverse borough unexplored by Corcoran and Western European tourists. The 'new', according to this understanding, is highly visible to NYT-reading, NPR-listening, Michael Pollan-worshiping white folk, while the 'old' or 'real', however, remain the borough's essential truth.

But if you count up the number of neighborhoods that have fully or partially 'switched' (setting aside Brooklyn Heights, which was posh in prehistoric times, and neighborhoods like Gravesend where wealthy and arguably white people are nevertheless separate culturally from new-Brooklyn mores), you get: Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Windsor Terrace, parts of Bushwick... I might be forgetting something, but this gives some sense of just how substantial a force new-Brooklyn has become. Again, these areas are not uniformly canvas-tote-bagified, but in all of them, that influence is felt.

Perhaps we're looking at a full-on transformation of the borough, starting with neighborhoods a quick subway trip to Manhattan, but one that will eventually extend so far out as to make a contiguous upper-crust paradise all the way to the Hamptons. Bensonhurst, beware.