Maybe just coincidence and not some kind of mind-meld, but two days before I decided to start chronicling my experience as a gentrifier-slightly-uneasy-about-gentrifying, another Crown Heights blog appears covering similar ground. Keep your eye on Hipster Safari.
From the Blog
Crown Heights and Beyond made a smart observation that applies to my post the other day:
Sometimes I wonder if we were not talking about hipsters, how well these comments would fly.
I feel it’s deceptively hard to come up with a good definition for “hipster,” but somewhere in that definition gentrification would have to be mentioned. And in an attempt to understand what myself and others are doing to ethnic neighborhoods by moving into them, I’m trying to keep a record at the moment I feel it’s about to blow up.
I guess this is part of the problem with having an unclear relationship to hipsterdom. While I aver to be separate from and even dislike “hipsters,” I’m pretty sure I’d be classified as one. So really my posturing amounts to trying to belong to an area where I’m an outsider more than other outsiders with whom I share similar backgrounds, tastes, and means simply by virtue of being there slightly longer.
But as a for-all-practical-purposes-hipster, I’m allowed to be snide about them, right? Right?
When Jason and I moved into Crown Heights a year ago, it was always surprising to see another white person in the neighborhood. There’s a strong Jewish (Hassidic? I’m kind of embarrassed not to know) presence in Crown Heights, but not in our neighborhood (we’re north of Eastern Parkway – they tend to be south of it), so it’s rare to see even them. Now we’re seeing tight-pantsed, scruffy white kids all the time: on Nostrand, on the subway, in the markets. Just today Jason saw not one, but two separate bearded hipsters in the Keyfood rocking out on their iPods.
Crown Heights really is a hidden treat in Brooklyn—old beautiful buildings, cheap rent, an abundance of subway lines, and a surprising amount of culture shock—so it’s not surprising that it’s happening, and really, it’d be kind of dumb to pretend that we’re not a part of it. (Our pants are of a normal fit, is the big difference.) I’ve been wondering a lot the past year when and if a sea change would happen, and I’m not really sure that this is anything more than a blip. We’re still a pretty marginal group, and both Nostrand and Utica are so lively and thoroughly Caribbean, I don’t really see how that could change. But maybe I’m just telling myself that?