Capital of twenty-first century?
The Manhattan Project is dedicated to the capital of the twentieth century. It doesn’t pretend to have a position on life in contemporary New York. But I can only imagine that if, a hundred years from now, someone were to take up the task of writing a similar book about New York in the twenty-first century, it would probably be titled The Brooklyn Project.
Brooklyn was designed as the first American suburb and it cannot escape its original telos.
For the past 15 years I’ve been living on the wrong side of the East River. Increasingly, Manhattan felt like a deserted island, at least as much as my milieu was concerned. I often joke that riding my bike over the bridge on the way to meet someone in Brooklyn feels like Whitman’s ferry ride in the opposite direction. As if both are trips to the truly pumping heart of the metropolitan matter.
But I never considered actually moving there. Here’s why: Brooklyn was designed as the first American suburb. Though it operates very differently from the iconic iterations of suburbia built after World War II, Brooklyn cannot escape its original telos. It has no way to become a genuine urban center. No matter how much it will be revitalized, how much capital will be pumped into its tree-lined streets, this borough can only offer its inhabitants a sub-urban experience.
Our ability to isolate, represent, and critique the aesthetics and values of suburban America of the 1950s is extremely well developed. Too many books and articles, films and TV shows have approached this subject from every possible angle. My belief is that gentrified Brooklyn is currently being disseminated as the new manifestation of the same social phenomenon.
The forces that fueled the rise of the 1950s suburb are not dissimilar to those that are pushing today’s Brooklyn into cultural domination. Girls is the ironic version of Revolutionary Road for the twenty-first century. Under the grey flannel suit and the Canada Goose jacket we will often find the same young, white, bourgeois, mobile bodies, filled with hopes and fears about a future that their social group will inevitably master.
So even though the creative sense and sensibility of typical twenty-first-century Brooklynites (and their compatriots in cities across the globe) may seem like an opposition or an alternative to the oppressively normative world of twentieth-century suburban life, there are significant continuities between the two. The redemptive promise that fueled the drive of midcentury, middle-class Americans to escape from the city is strikingly similar to the one currently filling the hearts of their turn-of-the-century children who are reclaiming the urban frontier.
And yet this urban landscape has changed almost beyond recognition in the past couple of decades. Things are over before they even start. As Jeremiah Moss chronicles on his blog, New York is vanishing at an exponential rate. If you’re looking for a vague semblance of twentieth-century Manhattan, your best bet right now is to move into one of the more densely populated neighborhoods deep in Queens. But do it quickly. Their Brooklynification is imminent.
My own strategy was to stick to the same tenement in the East Village since the beginning of this century. The neighborhood seemed like the kind of place Jane Jacobs taught us to love. I doubt that this and similar parts of town would thrive today the way they do if not for the line of argument she advanced in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But her urban logic also led to their transformation into exclusive spaces for luxury living. There is nothing philosophically significant about that. The rent, both commercial and residential, is simply too damn high.
Just as The Manhattan Project was published I moved to a godforsaken section of the Lower East Side, a mile away from my old apartment, which is the embodiment of everything Jane Jacobs taught us to loathe. There is actually a paragraph in Death and Life dedicated to a rather harsh criticism of my drab apartment complex, which was built in the mid-1950s. It wasn’t easy to fathom that I am living in a project for which Robert Moses, Jacobs’s arch-nemesis, was personally responsible.
Maybe the fight for the right to live in the city can no longer be won by keeping one’s moral integrity intact. Or maybe our urban friends and foes are no longer who we think they are. Either way, the desk on which I am writing these lines stands by a window through which the Brooklyn lights flicker across the river.
I guess that I much prefer my promised lands to remain unreached.
David Kishik is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. He has translated multiple works by Giorgio Agamben, is the author of The Power of Life, and most recently, The Manhattan Project.
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