and Brooklyn for Esquire. A good read.
You can also see it on my block. Brooklyn is, of course, not just an
idea but a physical place, and that place has many neighborhoods with
quick subway access to Manhattan. In Williamsburg, that fact has
turned the streetscape into a schizophrenic jumble of Pennsylvania
mining town and Coral Gables, with tired aluminum-siding-clad frame
houses mingled higgledy-piggledy with tall chunks of whatever it is
they're teaching architects in condo school. Down the street from me,
Willie Sutton's old rooming house was torn down in 2008 to be replaced
by a high-rise by Robert Scarano, the architect who fucked up
Williamsburg. When the real estate bubble burst, they stopped work on
it. Its skeleton stands six stories tall and is uglier than anything
there in 1986. There's another somewhat better high-rise across the
street from me, and another on the way. Out my back window, I can see
two more construction sites. Compared with the hulking things they're
putting up, the old garage down the block, which techno-hipsters have
turned into a showroom for MakerBot (it sells 3-D printer kits), makes
me gaze on it with downright affection. Hipsters might be parasites,
but at least they leave the host alive, if only to feed off it. Given
a choice between a neutron bomb and a hydrogen bomb, I guess I'll take
the neutrons. At least they leave an illusion of life.
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