Growing Up Gawdy

The ClassicModern: On 5th Ave between 15th and 16th in South Slope, sandwiched by Domino’s and a bistro – the perfect representation of the neighborhood’s manic character. At the height of the housing boom, neighborhoods in Brooklyn saw unprecedented increases in property values and demand for new upscale buildings. “South Slope,” an off-shoot of Park Slope from 9th Street to 16th Street between 5th Avenue and Prospect Park, is one of these neighborhoods. In fact, the name “Slope” has become such an attractive feature for prospective buyers and renters that brokers and uninformed gentrifiers alike have become characterizing areas outside of the greater Park Slope area as, in fact, Park Slope. The neighborhood is bounded by Prospect Avenue to the South, which is a fitting border because of its high traffic levels and its connection with the BQE. Once you get to 17th Street, you are in a neighborhood once considered Greenwood Heights, but as far as boom sellers and movers are concerned, it is still “South Slope.”

Over the past two years, mini condo developments have popped up like weeds in the otherwise brick and brownstone-dominated micro-neighborhood. The marketing strategy for these buildings emphasizes the proximity to Prospect Park the “convenient” train rides to Manhattan, and overlooks the large Latino immigrant population who live, work, and play in the buildings and streets surrounding them. In fact, they would do justice to the neighborhood to characterize it as more ethnic, because these families have a vested interest in the apartments, buildings, and streets in which they are learning and growing. However, because the chi-chi 7th Avenue has extended its yuppie empire past 9th Street, with overpriced bars serving exotic beers, organic markets, and cheese shops, advertisers for new developments in the neighborhood can easily draw prospective buyers’ attention away from the “unsightly” aspects of South Slope. At its height, the neighborhood’s development received some attention from AMNY. New buildings such as the VUE on 16th Street, the ClassicModern on 5th Avenue between 15th and 16th Streets, and a rising Karl Fischer building a block away have attracted a lot of attention in the real estate industry. During my time in the neighborhood at the height of the boom and the beginning of the decline, I noticed something distinctly different from what I read online or on paper. A stark, modern development on 5th Avenue and 13th Street, located across the street from a very attractive new 7-11, had a large swath of ground-level retail that has lain empty since the building’s completion, before August 2007.

On hot late-summer days, when I passed the building on the way to get a Slurpee, I would ask myself, “When will someone move into that space?” Later, on unseasonably warm spring days in 2008, and later on sweltering mid-summer days, I found myself on the same mission asking the same question, while the space remained empty, the floor-to-ceiling windows exposing nothing but bare concrete within. For me, this space will always represent the beginning of the end of the economic boom, where retail and real estate converged and failed. South Slope provides an example of growth that was out of touch with its place. The buildings constructed during the boom made little sense contextually, both architecturally and socially. They could be marketed well due to their laundry list of amenities, but they rose like fortresses out of the landscape, with little interest in connecting with the place where the plot of land happened to be. The place became a victim of the growth machine. The concept of the growth machine, as studied by Harvey Molotch, insists that “land, the basic stuff of place, is a market commodity providing wealth and power,” and examines “the urban settlement as a political economy” (309).

In essence, the entire network of urban growth can be broken down and pinned to certain institutions that comprise a “land elite.” This competition for maximizing land-use potential creates social tensions between the elite at large and the members of the community who live in the place day-to-day. Molotch, however, attempts to define “the actual, day-to-day activities of those at the top of local power structure whose priorities set the limits within which decisions affecting land use, the public budget, and urban social life come to be made” (309). He astutely recognizes that, no matter what occurs on street level, the decisions that come to shape the character of that lifestyle are made by an elite network of institutions and individuals. The growth machine includes any industry whose basic concern is growth. For Molotch, that includes newspapers, popularly characterized as “the reformist influence, the ‘voice of the community’” (316). However, Molotch argues that because newspapers as a business are primarily concerned with circulation totals and sales, they have a vested interest in growth (316). Universities are also stakeholders in the growth machine, as they “may require an increase in the local urban population pool to sustain [their] own expansion plans” (317). A university can then network with other stakeholders “upon whom it depends for the favorable financial and public-opinion environment necessary for institutional enhancement” (317). Unchecked and unrestrained growth shapes both the political economy and the built environment.

Kunstler clearly articulates his apocalyptic view of the growth machine in The Geography of Nowhere. In relation to the previous downturn of similar magnitude, the Great Depression, he explains, "the boom of the 1920s was based not simply on the steady sales of cars and other consumer products, but on a continual expansion of sales" (95). Worse still was the hubris of the growth machine: "political denial, aggressive professional boosterism, and a climate of mendacity in the securities industry combined to float the illusion that the American economy was still expanding" (96). The ultimate tragedy of the overproduction and consumption cycles that have followed, unfortunately, is that "two generations have grown up and matured in America without experiencing what it is like to live in a human habitat of quality" (245). Kunstler, like Molotch, addresses the issues of capitalist accumulation head-on, but much more aggressively. The problems of South Slope's development relate directly to inflated property values and the delusion that there are plenty of excessively wealthy people around who want to live in that area. In reality, there are more low and middle-income families who want to live there but cannot.

In Holy Land, D.J. Waldie reacts to unchecked growth in a strikingly different manner. He directly acknowledges the orchestrations of the growth machine in his description of government policies in the 1950’s that encouraged both building and loans for home purchases (33-34). He also acknowledges that developers exploited loop holes in loan legislation to build subdivisions (65-67). He treats the rampant development of Southern California ambivalently: "To the workmen, suspended on the scaffold, these finished houses must have seemed out of place and very still" (10). Nonetheless, there exists a certain element of excitement in this growth. The eager buyers, some of whom "came back to the construction site on the next weekend to see their house," would have to sort their way through the chaotic landscape of construction - the very material of growth - and identify what part of that place was theirs (36). His reaction to the powerful social, economic and political forces of growth is to ignore them entirely. His commitment to Lakewood as a place and, more importantly, a home, runs counter to the growth machine’s ideology that places are exploitable resources that are capable of infinite expansion.

In fact, his lifestyle resonates more with the Latino population of South Slope, where the women and children spend all their time, and the young men work, and some families operate their own dollar stores or bodegas on 5th Avenue. While they have come to New York in pursuit of financial and social mobility, they are emotionally bound to the places they have created for themselves in Brooklyn. In this respect, they and Waldie are both torn between the desire to move and the desire to stay put. For those who sympathize with the plight of the real estate collapse, fear not. Most of the new constructions on 16th Street have filled with residents, the lights from their floor-to-ceiling windows casting much-needed light on the sidewalks. I am not averse to growth in the residential housing market. I appreciate sensible growth that reflects the character of the place as well as the interests of the people who live there. Attracting and importing tenants from other communities has become part of the American dream of mobility, and as long as people have the will and the means to uproot themselves and move to new buildings in older neighborhoods, they will. As a society, we ought to pursue growth that is in tune with our collective way of life.

On my way home from the Prospect Ave R train station one evening, I walked up 5th Avenue by the recently completed ClassicModern building. Much like my favorite building across from 7-11, the condominium building features ground-level retail space that still lies unoccupied. In another blatant disregard of South Slope as a living, breathing place, the developer set the building, located in front of a bus stop, back from the street and placed feeble planters in the sidewalk. Upon closer evaluation, a better use of the space would include benches and seating areas. Instead, people anxiously awaiting the southbound bus sat on the meager edge of the planters. All too often, new buildings are imposed on places rather than being incorporated into the landscape. Growth is forced rather than allowed to occur naturally. Unless we speak up and demand benches, we will be forced to sit and wait on planters until the growth machine adapts.

Work Cited: Molotch, Harvey, "The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place," The American Journal of Sociology, 82:2, September 1976, p. 309-332. link

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