Pigeon Keepers of Bushwick

If you’ve been following our Photos of the Week, you’ve probably seen the work of Chris Arnade, a New York-based photographer who creates particularly lovely images. Arnade has a particularly good eye for urban characters.

Last week, he emailed me about a series he has been working on about men who raise pigeons on the rooftops of Brooklyn. “A real urban sport that is dying out as gentrification pushes into the outer boroughs,” he explained. Arnade agreed to share his photos and commentary with us below.

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Catholic Shrines of Carroll Gardens

Jesus has risen again on Brooklyn’s Wyckoff Street. His hand outstretched toward passersby, Christ silently sermonizes from a lightbox that both protects him from the elements and casts a holy aura around his colorfully-painted, ceramic torso. He’s also a home improvement with which the Joneses can’t keep up — the small stone statue next door (it looks a little like popular images of St. Francis of Assisi) is literally outshined and overshadowed by the devotionally double-padlocked shrine that’s built around him.

Wyckoff Street is technically in Cobble Hill, a largely gentrified slice of brownstone Brooklyn bordering tony Brooklyn Heights. Further south is Carroll Gardens, where awnings grow more metallic, siding more aluminum, and residents are more consistently old timers, many of them Italian. Carroll Gardens has seen its share of wealthier newcomers, too, but not to the extent of Cobble Hill.

The density of its shrines is a testament. Spreading out in Carroll Gardens’ unusually spacious front lawns (which give the neighborhood the second half of its name), boldly occupying prime real estate even on Court Street, one of the area’s main drags, Catholic iconography stands guard against the aesthetic imperatives of newcomers whose taste for prosciutto is more affected than acculturated.

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Brooklyn’s Fractured Faces

Know which leafy block to turn down off the numbered avenues of Brooklyn’s Park Slope, squint past the bright spots of sun and deep shadows dappling the ground late into a summer day, and you can puzzle them together — a series of portraits, “ghostly apparitions” as the New York Times called them — spanning the steps of front stoops of the brownstones lining a short span of Bergen Street.

This is an improbable venue for a public protest against the wildly expensive and potentially transformational real estate development several blocks north, let alone a global art sensation, yet the photos on Bergen Street manage to be part, nevertheless, of both. They’re intended as a demonstration of solidarity with immigrant shop owners, the subjects of the portraits, whose businesses, local residents fear, are in danger of displacement in the wake of the Atlantic Yards project, an effort to develop several blocks wedged between Park Slope and the adjacent neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights into a basketball arena surrounded by skyscraping office buildings and condo towers.

But the portraits have drawn more attention as a prominent local iteration of “Inside Out,” a worldwide participatory street art project orchestrated by JR, a seminonymous French photographer who rocketed to Banksy-level fame for his work, which began as a guerilla effort to bring portraits of marginalized suburban youth to the affluent streets of central Paris and grew to include pasting “supercolossal” photo portraits covering the roofs and walls of largely impoverished urban neighborhoods from China to Kenya to Brazil.

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Photo of the Week: Eshete

This week’s photos were taken Chris Arnade in Brooklyn. He writes:

I have known Eshete, the “cat man” of Columbia St. for over three years, walking by almost daily, and look forward to our chats. Despite having some serious issues, he has always been super sweet and nice to me. He is obsessed with his cats, riding his bike from upper Manhattan every day to spend afternoons with them.

“The cats are like lions, very intelligent. Mysterious creatures, the Pharaohs buried them. Independent, but if they need you they come. Cats are beautiful intelligent comedians.”

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Photos of the Week: ATM

This week’s photos were taken along the Brighton Beach boardwalk in New York by Keith Goldstein.

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Voodoo Gentrification

You’ve probably heard the term “voodoo economics” before. Famously used by George H.W. Bush to denounce Ronald Reagan’s theory of trickle-down wealth when the two were vying head-to-head for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, they never again escaped the elder Bush’s lips after he became Reagan’s running mate in that year’s general election. The former’s subsequent silence and the latter’s historic victory ensured that voodoo economics would reign unchallenged throughout the 80s, fueling a period remembered for overall prosperity — but an alarmingly huge income gap.

It’s no coincidence that the 80s were also the period when the word “gentrification” began to play a major role in US public discourse. So did “yuppies”, who became the subject of routine social satire during the decade. Less well documented, though, are the earlier, murkier beginnings of postwar gentrification, well before the tipping point that brought the concept into mass consciousness. In the late 1960s and 1970s, as white flight continued hollowing out American city centers, the first gentrifiers were also taking their initial, cautious steps into what is now some of the most coveted real estate in the country.

Director Hal Ashby’s first film, a 1970 comedy called The Landlord, marks the period well. The protagonist is Elgar Enders, a dandy-suited suburban WASP who lives off his parents’ money — the original trust fund kid. His plan to buy a ghetto tenement, evict its tenants, and transform it into into his new mansion seems rebellious and eccentric, though it’s no less whimsical than the change of tastes that brought mass gentrification to similar Brooklyn neighborhoods (the movie was filmed in a now unrecognizably destitute Park Slope) in the 80s and 90s. In fact, Enders’ scheme might have been prophetic — in the last decade, the mansionization of New York apartment buildings has become a small trend.

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Van Brunt Street

For all the questionable writing that’s abused or insensitively applied the term “urban frontier”, Brooklyn’s sleepy, sometimes desolate Red Hook neighborhood actually feels like one — and nowhere is this more apparent than on somnambulant Van Brunt Street.

The neighborhood’s main commercial thoroughfare sets the pace for Red Hook’s streetlife with its lack thereof: as much a testament to the street’s sedateness as to the pioneering urban horticulturalists who tend them, giant sunflowers sprout from the sidewalk cracks, leaping to human height. The still life composition of Van Brunt’s Hopperesque facades brings to mind country hamlets closed up on Sunday. And on a streetscape that conjures the Great Plains, a prominent restaurant bears a coincidentally appropriate name — Fort Defiance.

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Bushwick Trailer Park

Having successively appropriated so much Middle American iconography — from trucker hats to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer — some north Brooklyn hipsters may have decided that their living space ought to reach the same heights of irony as their wardrobes. Enter the Nut Factory (video below), an exclusive trailer park for artists currently situated inside a warehouse in Bushwick, east of Williamsburg.

Like homesteaders following the route of the transcontinental railroad, hipsters began gentrifying parts of Bushwick along the L train when — depending on whom you ask — they were priced out of Williamsburg or began to find it too mainstream for their liking. So while the “frontier” of their settlement has technically pushed out as far as Ridgewood, in Queens, it’s concentrated mainly along the narrow corridor easily reached by the L, and vast swathes of industrial Bushwick still invite experiments in cheap housing.

Among them, the urban trailer park may be uniquely qualified to come of age.

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Hipster-Hasid Bike War in Brooklyn

The tensions had to bubble to the surface at some point. That’s the consensus that has emerged since underground cylcing activists literally took their fight to the streets, reclaiming a fourteen block stretch of bike lane that had been removed in Brooklyn earlier this year — at the possible behest of the area’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community.

The removal occurred on a stretch of Bedford Avenue, the main artery of Williamsburg. For the uninitiated, the neighborhood is roughly split between a gentrifying playground for youngish hipsters to the north and a tradition-bound, family-oriented Hasidic district to the south. The contrast between the two Williamsburgs can be stark, especially on Saturdays: whereas the northside is often packed with revelers, the storefronts of the southside are shut, and, save for families walking to and from synogogues, its sidewalks deserted.

Neither part of Williamsburg could remain contained within its own sphere for very long, and a culture clash was probably inevitable. The city cited safety concerns — including a prevalence of double parking and an increasing number of pedestrians being hit by bikes — as its reason for removing the lanes, but cycling advocates blamed Hasidic complaints that bikers’ skimpy attire was an affront to their moral sensibilities.

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Vertically Challenged

The Midtown West intersection was windswept and deserted, save for two fighting children. To their right, a weed-strewn lot, some freshly-painted tags, a shopping cart filled with someone’s belongings from some far-off store called “Buy Buy Baby”, a long-unnecessary construction cone. To their left: an empty, suburban-style Mercedes dealership, out-of-place, surreal — just a little beyond was the Empire State Building. In the near background, a panorama of half-finished new condo towers, half-gleaming in once-trendy sheaths of glass.

New York has not reverted to the destitution claimed by some of the shriller portraits painted by the European press, which cover the economic downturn’s grip on the U.S. with the same sensationalism they once reported on the country’s urban crime. The recession is marked by subtler symbols — the increasing emptiness of storefronts, on the one hand, and the skeletal remains of stunted skyscrapers, on the other. New York’s condo tower boom is over, leaving behind a forest of halted cranes, a frozen Dubai.

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End of the Line

At the southeastern corner of Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood — the cape that put the Hoek in the area’s original Dutch name, Roode Hoek — almost nothing is used according to its original purpose. A rail barge has been repurposed as a waterfront museum, a warehouse has become a massive Fairway supermarket, some streetcar tracks have become a waterfront promenade, and a solitary rowhouse has been refitted as a shrine to nauticalia that would not look out of place in a New England fishing village. Recently, one of its old docks was even restored to working condition — as Brooklyn’s first cruise terminal.

Creative reuse is almost the rule here — with one exception. A pair of mid-20th century streetcars sits, rusting and abandoned, between the repurposed warehouses and the reclaimed promenade, seeming like a fossilizing fragment of a network that once covered the entire borough.

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Dusk in DUMBO

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Some Weeds Grow in Brooklyn

I photographed this old (and perhaps abandoned) industrial building in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood just a few years ago. At the time, it was a captivating relic — almost entirely ensconced in graffiti, it was sprouting weeds that had either spilled onto the sidewalk, or had climbed up from the sidewalk onto it. The old orange car parked nearby added to the mystique; this was like a slice of 1970s New York.

That’s not entirely coincidental. Gowanus sometimes seems stuck in a time warp, a largely defunct swathe of industrial buildings dividing the homey brownstones of Carroll Gardens from the tony ones of Park Slope — neighborhoods that have been experiencing rapid change. Part of the reason the area is so moribund is its namesake Gowanus Canal, a brackish channel that has become the site of a raging local debate over whether it ought to be designated a Superfund site, allowing it to receive federal money for industrial cleanup.

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Crossing Williamsburg Bridge

The long, arching pathways that carry bicycles and pedestrians over the Williamsburg Bridge feel like New York’s version of the torii leading to Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari shrine: solemn, still, enclosed, and blaring with bold, repetitive red. While the Williamsburg Bridge is not populated by spirits, it speaks — whether in traces of graffiti or in anthropomorphic street art — to lonely passersby.

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